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| Magritte's "The Treachery of Images" |
By now, you've probably heard the buzz around NFTs. If you haven't, you probably will soon. The art world seems to have caught NFT fever.
NFT is an acryonym for “Non-Fungible Token.” It's something for sale that exists only in the digital world. But unlike a streaming movie you and a thousand other people might buy tonight from Netflix, an NFT is a unique, one-of-a-kind item. If I buy it, you won't be able to.
How's that possible? you may ask. Can't digital items be copied endlessly, ad infinitum? Well, yes, but there are mechanisms in place that keep the NFT unique so that only one person at a time can possess it. (It all has to do with cryptocurrency and blockchains, something beyond the scope of this article.) A work of art that is an NFT can be sold or put up for auction, just like an original painting, and the buyer is guaranteed that he possesses the only one.
But in the “real” world, this work of digital art exists only as a chunk of binary code. Sure, if the code can be executed by your computer and displayed as an image, you can print it out and hang it on your wall and enjoy it as a work of art, but that's not the NFT. The NFT actually IS that chunk of binary code – and not the printed representation of it. You can print out many of these “copies” of the NFT and sell them, but they aren't the NFT that you may have paid millions for at auction. (Yes, millions. Someone recently paid $6.6 million for a video – well, actually the NFT, not the video – by an artist named Beeple.)
Does this all sound weird? To me, it sounds like something Jonathan Swift would have dreamed up for his satirical Gulliver's Travels. Or something Magritte would have painted, such as “The Treachery of Images,” which features a pipe with the legend, “Ceci n'est pas une pipe.” Or something John Cage might have composed, like his piece that contains four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. In other words, a joke with a point.
So, as an artist, do you need to worry about NFTs? I'm not going to worry. After all, I have enough trouble handling the technical aspects of my web site without trying to learn how to handle cryptocurrency and NFTs, too.
