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Nft

In her essay “My Collectible Ass,” theorist McKenzie Wark shares an anecdote from her stint as an interpreter in a Tino Sehgal work, which involved standing in Marian Goodman Gallery and engaging visitors in conversation. Among the visitors she spoke to at the gallery were critics Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith, and when she later ran into them at another venue, she told them a fantastic lie: Sehgal had tattooed her buttocks, as well as those of other interpreters. She offered to show them, but they didn’t take her up on it, maybe because they didn’t buy the bluff. “I mention this because it is not just the information about the artwork circulating in the world that makes it collectible,” Wark writes. “It is also the noise. As with any other financial instrument in a portfolio, the artwork in a collection gains and loses value at the volatile edge between information and noise.” Wark’s false rumor—her broadcast of noise—was a minor intervention in the conceptual apparatus that Sehgal devised for selling his performances. Sehgal prohibits documentation, so his works are known through word of mouth. “What is collectible is not the artwork, or even the documentation,” Wark says of Sehgal’s output. “What is collectible is the simulation of the work in the artworld and beyond.” Her argument seems applicable to NFTs, as a way of thinking through the exchange of digital art on the newly booming crypto market. It’s not always clear what a collector is actually buying—some say owning the certificate of authenticity coded in the NFT is not the same as owning the artwork, and the contracts written by various platforms differ in terms of the rights they accord to the artist, the collector, and the platform itself. Wark ends her essay by speculating that it would be “uninteresting for the digital art object merely to mimic the forms of collectability of previous classes of art object.” The unresolved complications of NFT ownership make it an interesting topic, even if the hype for NFTs obscures these problems. Some artists are highlighting the question by minting adaptations or versions of older works in other mediums. They’re creating digital collectibles based on videos and sculptures—keepsakes that concentrate the tension between the information and noise that defines the value of ephemeral art.

Sculpture as Proto-NFT

Nate Boyce often makes digital models of his sculptures before they’re fabricated, and the solid works seem to retain the gooey malleability of virtual forms. With Excess/Harvest (2018/2021), an NFT minted on Foundation, Boyce returned one of his sculptures to its digital origins. The digital model was carved in polyurethane foam with a CNC milling machine and coated with yellow resin. This seven-foot sculpture was suspended over audiences at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, as part of Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Myriad” concert in 2018. (Boyce shares attribution for the NFT with Daniel Lopatin, the composer who makes music under the OPN pseudonym.) Thick in the middle and tapered at either end, Excess/Harvest looks a bit like a carcass strung up at a butcher shop, an impression reinforced by the upside-down pig’s head that emerges from the top. Other shapes protruding from the body include a crushed water bottle, fruits and vegetables, and a façade of a wooden crate. But there are more abstract extrusions and dents, making the appearance of recognizable images feel uncanny. The sculpture rotates, like so many 3D objects do in NFTs, though in this case it’s a re-creation of the OPN concert experience rather than an acquiescence to crypto fads. A beam casts light and shadows on the sculpture through a light fog—another simulation of the show. The memorialization of the concert environment in Excess/Harvest is a new kink in Boyce’s negotiation of the boundaries of digital and physical experience.

NFT as Personality Trait

Neïl Beloufa’s exhibition “Digital Mourning”—currently installed at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, though closed to the public—includes three “hosts,” figures that give viewers tips on how to navigate the show. They’re modeled from wood, but video projection-mapped to their surfaces makes them look like glowing, transparent vessels, with objects arranged on interior shelves. “Digital Mourning” is about hope, paranoia, and other feelings amplified by networked communications—the ongoing theme of Beloufa’s work. He conceived the hosts as NFTs long before minting them as such, intrigued by the value that status confers on digital media. B, trying to reach out to its audience (2021) is the first of the three actually to be realized as an NFT. It was released on SuperRare through a partnership with Verisart, a company that offers blockchain-based certification for fine art. In the NFT, B is no longer a projection on wood but a 3D being. The camera angles toward it, following the crooked, halting path of a tentative viewer, revealing views of its Pikachu-like shape. Through B’s transparent golden skin you can see a Coke bottle and a smoking cigarette in one leg, a classical bust on a pedestal in the other. A feather boa stretches across the central shelf, over a staticky monitor lodged in the crotch. Behind a barred door, a chandelier illuminates everything from within. B stands on a balcony, the lights of a dense city skyline glittering on the horizon—a departure from the physical B’s position in the art hangar. B is both inviting and imposing, transparent and mysterious, more solid and dimensional than it is in the gallery but more ephemeral, too.