For a while I circled around the Non-fungible tokens with a certain detachment, then I started to take more and more interest in it. Let's start with sense and non-sense.
What's the point of offering $70 million in a Christie's online crypto auction to acquire the certificate of authenticity (the NFT) of a .jpg created by American digital artist Beeple? Beeple is the pseudonym of Mike Winkelman, a jovial and staid forty-year-old artist from Wisconsin, incredulous of what was happening to him.
And I believe it! I've read that the average auction value of a Picasso is $10 million (although six works went for more than $100).
For Beeple's successful bidder, the Singaporean cryptocurrency entrepreneur known as Meta Kovan, instead, makes sense – and a lot. For him, and not only for him, NFTs will change everything in the worlds of art, entertainment, sports and publishing when these liberal activities, and it will happen soon, move into cyberspace.
Now even the “New York Times” seems to be convinced of this. His technology columnistAgain in a crypto auction, Kevin Roose awarded his article on NFTs for half a million dollars, astounding the editorial staff of the New York newspaper which began to publish one piece a day on this new technology.
Kevin, after associating an NFT with the . Png of his article, he goaded collectors of mayfly and eccentric things who responded in a big way. In fact, the world of collecting is starting to look at cyber documents with a growing interest linked precisely to the role played by NFTs.
Collectors indeed, but the white elephants of the art market are still holding on at a safe distance from this type of auction which is, yes, promising, but still too risky for them.
As the art critic rightly claims Sophie Haigney buying an NTF does not equate to buying ownership of the “object” associated with the NFT, rather it means “buying the concept of owning an object”. Buying a concept is truly something unusual and also unprecedented in the history of world trade and exchange. We should ask the WTO for clarification. But is there still any wonder about the cryptospace?
The cryptospace
Cryptospace is an arid and dangerous region of cyberspace. And what is found in cyberspace has said it well Thomas Friedman, multi-awarded winner of the Pulitzer and also known in Italy for his books published by Mondadori, including The earth is flat – not in Grillo's sense. Friedman has written in the NYT, commenting on Trump's election (from which he never recovered):
“It was the moment [Trump's election] where we realized that a critical mass of our lives and work has slipped away from the terraqueous world into the realm of cyberspace. Or rather, a critical mass of our relationships have moved into a territory where everyone is connected but no one is in charge.
There are no spotlights in cyberspace, there are no policemen patrolling the streets, there are no judges, there is no God to punish the wicked and reward the good, and certainly no hotline to call if someone harasses you or pollute your country's elections.
And cyberspace is the territory in which we now spend hours and hours of our day, where we do most of our shopping, most of our meetings, where we cultivate our friendships, where we learn, where we do most of our business, where we teach , where we get information and where we try to sell our goods, our services and our ideas”.
Difficult to say better, even if cyberspace is a planet yet to be explored, which, like the sidereal space governed by similar logics, can offer great resources, as are NFTs and the blockchain, their underlying technology. These technologies take us quite a bit forward in our exploration.
The blockchain
I Non-Fungible Tokens, like all things devised by Cartesian minds, they are complicated in concept, but quite simple in their practical application. An NFT is nothing more than a record (that is, a clearly unique writing) of an immense database distributed on millions of computers located all over the world. This public electronic register is the blockchain, a technology with enormous potential and equally great environmental risks given its enormous voracity for energy.
Writing the blockchain, embedded in a digital document, guarantees its authenticity, just like a notarized document.
So far, nothing in particular and we also understand the economic value that this technology can confer on a digital object that can be reproduced infinitely and therefore already by its very nature exchangeable. If someone has a recognized certificate of authenticity, he can assert rights to the use, exchange and value of that digital "commodity".
The discussion, however, does not only concern technology and the economy, which are the structures of our existence. It also concerns the superstructure, that is, it touches the very concept of art as well as a knot of questions related to aesthetic theory, without which, of course, one can easily survive and love art. Because today we have new things like cyberart, cryptoart, cyberartists, cybermerchants and cybercollectors.
Speaking of crypto art, one may wonder to what extent this certificate of authenticity, i.e. the NFT, can influence the perceived aesthetic dimension of an immaterial work of art and allow that I don't know what — which Benjamin calls aura — to reverse itself.
Here the matter is beyond my possibilities, but I would like to make some considerations anyway.
The technical reproducibility of the work of art
I recently reread The work of art in the era of its technical reproducibility (ed. it. Einaudi), a work itself wrapped in its own aura and undoubtedly seminal and fascinating like all the thought of Walter Benjamin, in turn much more willing than his colleagues from the Frankfurt school to look benevolently on technique and culture in the time of advanced capitalism.
Benjamin (Berlin, 1892 – Portbou/Spain, 1940) lived in his time and on the level of the technology of reproducibility and display of a work, he had to deal with cinema, photography and the press, but not also with a phenomenon as intrinsically endowed with technical reproducibility as the net. Therefore his reflections can be for us only a trace, a very important trace on a theoretical and methodological level.
However, I think that still today everything revolves around the matter of the aura if we speak of the aesthetic-perceptive dimension of the work of art itself, detached from other contexts such as the socio-economic or cultural ones.
The matter of the aura
I searched, also with the Kindle, in these writings of Benjamin for some definition of aura. I haven't found a definitive one. It is more likely, however, that he failed to catch her. I didn't even catch it in Massimo Cacciari's learned and auratic introduction, which surpasses Benjamin's writing in terms of scope. Maybe I missed it here too.
I just have to self-publish my idea of what the aura is.
For me it is that poignant languor that an original work of art conveys when you are face to face with "it". It is a sort of shock: Benjamin himself associated it with the dimension of aura.
It will have happened to many in front of the Virgin of the Rocks of the National Gallery in London, thanks to that unrepeatable shaded landscape behind the figures in the foreground. Or in front of the Dead Christ by Andrea Mantegna (Pinacoteca di Brera) which leaves an emotional aftermath that lasts for days and days, like a slight circle on the head. Even Pasolini, who poured so much art into his films, was so touched by the Christ of Mantegna to build the capital scene of Mom Rome, a wonderful film, even if spoiled by Anna Magnani's too physical and overflowing interpretation.
The same auratic phenomenon happens to me with some pages of The Charterhouse of Parma (especially in the passages concerning the Duchess of Sanseverina) or some poems by Ungaretti Latvian by the author (perhaps because he personifies the archetype of the Great Father).
It is as if the original work of art in its universal uniqueness had a sort of vital spirit, a certain animistic force capable of igniting a transference in whoever is in front of it. Naturally, as in piscoanalysis, one must be "pre-disposed". However, I think that the emotional dimension of the aura is in some way, which I don't know, linked to the phenomenon of transference.
Benjamin also looked closely at Freud and did not disdain to refer to his theories, but he preferred philosophy more and, for the auratic dimension, he used the term of sacredness, which he calls "cult value" and which he defines as "aura saturated with historical content". Historical content, in fact (as there is in the mur des Fédérés in Paris or in Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin - but they don't have too much to do with the aura).
Current dilemmas
Can an alphanumeric string and a visual composition appearing on a smartphone screen make the aura real? However, the technique does not necessarily suffocate the aura. As Cacciari says, in parentheses, in the aforementioned introduction: “(Benjamin speaks of a residue of aura for the first photographic portraits)” (of Baudelaire, I might add, for whom Benjamin had a thing).
With a little training, and with the evolution of taste, this "some residue" could be preserved in crypto art. What is certain is that no aura can be assigned to the economic value, whatever it may be, that these "objects" generate (again Cacciari). Without, with this premise, "de-valorizing" the economic dimension of art.
But, given that the date of May 5 has just passed, we just have to leave "To posterity the arduous sentence" about this dilemma. And these posterity will live in cyberspace and will always be emotional people.
Waiting for this moment, you can go and read the Italian translation of thearticle by Kevin Roose who tells how he built the online auction that allowed him to sell one of his articles for 500 dollars.
