NFT Buyers Could Be The Modern Medicis

In modern times, many depictions of what it means to be an artist in a society driven by profit revolve around the image of an individual set apart from financial concerns, producing art for art’s sake in the form of works whose revolutionary nature is not fully recognised or explored during their lifetime, but that come to be seen as the work of a genius after their demise. This idea, exemplified by the lives of artists like Vincent Van Gogh and El Greco, gives rise to the impression that for art to be truly revolutionary it cannot be incentivised by financial concerns. 

However, the relationship between art and commerce is far more complex than that. The foundations of early modern art were laid by commerce, as during the Renaissance in Italy, it was common practice for artists to only produce art when they had been guaranteed payment by an aristocratic patron, with the tacit understanding that the scope and subject matter of such art would be restricted by the patron’s tastes, and political and social alliances. While the creators of such art were often anonymous artisans, later on certain artists began to sign their work, leading to cults of celebrity around the most famous artists. This system led to the creation of works like the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Statue of David and the Mona Lisa. There were also similar contracts between rulers and artisans in other parts of the world. 

Even Vincent Van Gogh, the archetype of the impoverished painter whose works were ignored during his lifetime, was not as financially naive as he is often made out to be. He was more than aware that his works would someday appreciate in value, and himself saw art as an investment. For example, he urged his brother Theo to invest in Japanese woodblock prints, which he himself tried to sell, as he thought they would someday see an increase in demand and hence market value. 

Other artists were even more savvy when it came to selling their paintings. For example, John Berger described in his book The Success and Failure of Picasso, how the artist had turned his works into a currency of their own, paying for a house in the South of France with a still life, and creating artificial scarcities and more demand by releasing paintings as and when he saw that people were willing to buy them. In effect, he was playing the same economic game as art dealers and buyers were, and was also helped by legal changes encouraging the purchase or donation of art, which in turn generated more demand and higher prices for artworks.

In fact, the idea inherent in the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’ and the archetype of the bohemian, impoverished artist, is inherently elitist in its insistence that the artist should focus on their creative aspirations while remaining unconcerned with the financial gains that they receive. The individual artist does still need to eat and survive in order to produce more art. A strict insistence that art be separated from commercial motives would restrict the profession to people who already have enough money to support themselves. Moreover, given the subjective nature of aesthetics, and changes in taste, it is hard to tell in any case whether an eye to profit necessarily leads to a decline in the quality of art. 

For example, Andy Warhol began as a commercial artist, and even at the height of his fame, he produced a lot of commercial work for profit, such as record covers for the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones, Christmas cards for Tiffany’s and even an advertisement for Absolut Vodka. All of this was concurrent with his Pop Art explorations, and may well have been an impetus for this work, which focused on closely related themes like consumerism and the nature of fame. 

The self-identified commercial artist Tom Purvis wrote in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts in 1929 that the idea of art for art’s sake had become “a delightful luxury in this very practical age.” He went on to say that the commodification of artworks had not necessarily diluted their underlying aesthetic principles, only making them more accessible to more people.

However, doubts about the commercialisation of art cannot be ignored, especially in today’s scenario, with artworks being sold for massive sums. This often means that they fall into the hands of private collectors rather than being displayed in museums where they might, as Purvis had said, be accessible to the general public. 

In fact, to take just one example, the Tate Modern Museum in London had a purchase budget of £18,427,000 for collection acquisitions in the fiscal year 2018-19. On the contrary, the Leonardo da Vinci painting Salvator Mundi was sold for $450.3 million (£339 million) in 2017 to Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, who now has it in storage. 

Thus the commodification and perception of art as an investment has obvious implications for its accessibility and use, as more often than not the high prices mean that public institutions cannot afford to acquire these artworks. Moreover, with the big money in the art world largely focused on the works of established artists, newer art is often marginalised. The Internet could change that.

It has so far had an opposite and equally interesting impact on the art world and access to art, to that of the mainstream art industry. Various artworks can now be viewed and copied on the Internet for free, meaning that to see an artwork like Picasso’s Guernica, one need not travel to Madrid, but could view a digital reproduction of reasonably high quality. Concurrently, media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok have made it easier for new artists to get recognition and fame, and the largely attention-based economy of the Internet has also seen increased demand from enterprises and advertisers for visual art.

However, the easy access to Internet art and the availability of mechanisms to copy and disseminate it, mean that the art market ignored net art for a very long time; not only does constant exposure to visual media on the Internet make it hard to tell what is meant to be art and what isn’t, but collectors were also daunted by the inherent capacity of digital art to be accessed for free, downloaded, copied, modified and shared, thereby reducing the marginal value of each copy. 

The art critic Julian Stallabrass wrote that the speculative bubble in the art market of the early 2000s had not affected art on the Internet because “there was a fundamental divide in the ethos of these worlds: between the production of rare or unique, expensively made objects, protected by copyright and curatorial scruple, appearing in exclusive and controlled environments, and purchased by the mega-rich; and the dissemination of digital works, of which no one copy is better than any other, which may appear in many places at once, which may run out of the control of artists and curators, and which are given as gifts.” 

However, the recent rise of NFTs or non-fungible tokens as a method of selling digital art, for sums as high as $69 million, may be the key to establishing a market for Internet art and ensuring that these artists are compensated for their work. In fact, tokens like these, which cannot be exchanged and act as certificates of ownership, had been predicted by Stallabrass as a way of bringing Internet art into the mainstream art market, though he did also argue that it was absurd, in that people would pay huge sums of money for these tokens when the same artworks would be freely available on the Internet.

Certainly, the rise of NFTs for digital art could be seen as the pinnacle of the commodification of art as a luxury item, in which the buyer of an NFT does not gain exclusive use of the artwork, but merely spends money for the cachet of owning the NFT. At the same time, it may also be the key to the development of an art market in which online and digital artists can derive profit from their work. NFTs have also entered the realm of physical artwork - Russia’s Hermitage Museum has announced that it is selling digital copies of paintings by artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Claude Monet as NFTs. 

By allowing artists to run their own auctions, and even in some cases to get a cut from subsequent sales of the token, the use of NFTs and their associated block chain technology changes their role in the art market from that of a producer of art to a more active role as a seller in their own right. While this may of course be restricted by concerns about the environmental impact of the blockchain technology that backs NFTs, as well as the inherent contradiction of owning something that exists in innumerable copies on the Internet, it still has the potential to change the art industry. 

Image credit: Everydays: The First 5000 Days by Beeple