Digressions on the NFT Agony
After some time scrolling the pages at Foundation and OpenSea and MakersPlace and the other warehouses of numbing NFT profusion, I was put in mind of an old essay of Hollis Frampton’s on photography from 1972.1
In “Digressions on the Photographic Agony,” Frampton offers a parable of photography, unrelated to its status as art (well, perhaps a little), but very much related to its status as archive. He tells the story of a mysterious sphere, an “artifact,” “1000 feet in diameter,” that is discovered when a tanker hits it “in a fog at night.” The sphere is dragged back to England and “up the Thames,” where it is discovered that it is adorned with the word “ATLANTIS;” the lost continent has finally been discovered. When the sphere is opened, its intrepid explorers find that it contains “only photographs” (a contents Frampton condemns as “less than nothing”), actually a vast profusions of photographs of different kinds and status and in various different states of care.
After an interregnum (this is still Frampton’s parable), researchers find that the photographs from Atlantis reproduce a world that “bears an uncanny resemblance” to our own from the years 1835 to 1917. What is more, this world was seemingly made “only to be photographed,” a vast setting and scene that was meant only for the lens. The photographic record of this lost civilization is accompanied by a “critical tradition,” writings and other essays on the material that is gathered into the “Atlantic Codex,” which is described as “sparse, vague, and defensive.”
The final paragraph of Frampton’s parable deserves reproduction in full:
What is the meaning of the Artifact? And why did the people of Atlantis go to such lengths in making it? Hope seems to be waning that the riddle will be solved. The answer rests, finally, upon the decipherment of two words, both hopelessly ambiguous, that appear on nearly every page of the Codex. Baring the chance discovery of a Rosetta Stone, we may never understand them, since they defy contextual analysis. The first of these is: “science.” And the second is: “art.”
“Art” and “science,” the latter via its derivative “technology,” would seem to be the “two words” that define the riddle of NFTs today. If the status of “science” and “technology” are not at issue, however, “art” certainly is.
I cannot remember a time when I have heard and read so many people pronouncing the “end” of art as we know it, with the lowly NFT heralding this coming eclipse. This end comes as much from the boosters as the critics (“The physical art world is over,” was how one particularly animated crypto bro put it to me). With characteristic intelligence, Frampton included as an epigraph to his essay a statement J. M. W. Turner made in 1839, shortly after the first proliferations of the new photographic techniques around Europe: “This is the end of art. I am glad I have had my day.” I can imagine many established artists over the age of, say, 45, voicing much the same thing today.
It’s worth noting that the occasions for Frampton’s essay were two exhibitions mounted in 1971-72 by the Arts Council of Great Britain: “‘From today painting is dead,’ The Beginnings of Photography,” and “Masterpieces: Treasures from the Collection of the Royal Photographic Society.” It wasn’t until the 1960s that scholarship on photography began in earnest, as it was the period from 1920 to 1960 that saw the first photographic “artists” — Abbot, Weston, et al — enter the fray; it also saw the first exhibitions and histories to establish the artistic bona fides of the medium as a medium.
So Frampton was writing after a fifty year period in which photography had been disciplined, as it were, into an Art as much as a practice or craft technique. That the Royal Society could publish a book on photography titled “Masterpieces” is a testament to this, but not only this. Frampton justly points out, even though he is loath to do so, that “An official of the Royal Photographic Society has contributed a catalogue preface in which she points out that rare, old photographs… are now worth MONEY.” He then adds a line or two later: “The vexing old question of archival permanence is deftly tied to money (right where it belongs).”
It was circa 1971 that Harry Lunn Jr., a CIA cold-warrior and occasional dealer in prints and lithographs, launched the market for contemporary photography with a show of Ansel Adams and the invention of the “vintage” print, which established the chain of custody and creation back to the hand of the “artist,” and thus made archival permanence something more than an intellectual or cultural imperative; now there was an investment to be protected.
It goes without saying that the apparent point of NFTs, what distinguishes them from mere digital files, are the dual propositions that 1. they can be traced back to a creator (even if that creator is a machine, or an accident); and 2. They can’t be copied. These are only propositions, not truths. The chain of creation can be corrupted, and everything can be copied. But now the distributed infrastructure of the blockchain and its computations — the new and necessary inefficiency of “work” — offer the market’s players and the industry’s devotees a confidence that they lacked before.
Digital art is “now worth MONEY” as Frampton might have written, and the history of digital art stretches back to the 1960s. We’re working on a 70 year period, one almost equivalent to the period of Frampton’s Atlantis, the early history of photography’s proliferation.
What we are missing today (or rather what we may be witnessing) is the attempt to discipline digital art into an Art, but without something equivalent to the 50 years this took photography during the middle portion of the last century. Of course there has been scholarship and exhibitions. Institutions have their able and intelligent curators and critics. A new discourse is being forged, even if the current one remains “vague” and “defensive” (though not sparse; like the NFT, the discourse proliferates on Discord).
Frampton had a very specific, Platonic ideal in mind when he thought of the ontology of photography: “The photographic act is a complex “cut” in space and time, dimensionless, in itself, as the intersections and figures in Euclid’s Elements…and, in the mind, precisely as real.” Like the butcher makes cuts of meat, the photographer makes cuts of the world, viewed.
This ideal no longer holds, even in photography. Digital art is at its best, probably — we just don’t know yet — when it is generative (of itself, of other art), when it occupies and activates the full spectrum filter between Frampton’s “art” and “science.” NFTs ensure now that we will have some kind of “archival permanence.”
The question I keep thinking of, though, is what does the new Atlantis look like?
The worst images I can think of are the server “farm,” the crypto “mine,” the data “center” — all suspect sites of labor.2 This Atlantis has been discovered, over and over again, and threatens to undo the ecosystems it currently inhabits (Frampton was prescient: that “tanker” bumping into the “artifact” could be taken as an allegory of our present moment). “Web3” is redolent of the total lack of imagination that pervades this conversation — the third installment of a trilogy that no one really wanted. That image and metaphor doubles and triples down on the distributed, node-to-node, person-to-person enthusiasms that seem to capture the neoliberal imagination in just the way the tech rentiers, what McKenzie Wark calls the “vectoralist class,” intended.3
David Joselit’s “epistemology of search” could be useful to thinking through this new conjuncture, though the image of the search engine couldn’t be less inspiring. Certainly we are dealing here not with individual works of art, individual NFTs that may or may not prove valuable (archival), but with “populations” of images that demand new means of access and parsing – an aesthetics and politics of the pull request.4
The market-validating sale of Mike Winkelmann’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days on March 11 of last year was exactly that, a population of images, no single one of which, standing alone, would have attracted the same attention. Today the platforms for NFTs, themselves a profusion, remain more interesting on the whole than the tokens themselves. We’re dealing here with differentiations of kinds. What kinds of works are aggregating on which platforms? What do the algorithms choose to put on their front pages? Who has the means to game those algorithms? What will the algo of algos choose? Can the machines discern talent or does this remain a uniquely human pursuit? Is there something like a machine talent? I find these questions more interesting than what gets to be called “Art” in the new dispensation.5
The question then is not whether there can be something like a lost continent of the digital image. That much seems certain. In 2020, the VP of Google Photos wrote that “more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded” to the site. This is just one platform. Other platforms and more files proliferate. And this doesn’t even consider the vast world of knowledge that is being removed every day. When considering government classification of images and documents, Peter Galison could write (in 2004) that “five times as many pages are being added to the classified universe than are being brought to the storehouses of human learning, including all the books and journals on any subject in any language collected in the largest repositories on the planet.”6 Then there is the stuff that is simply erased.
Since no geometry or architecture can contain the NFT and its ilk (no artifactual sphere discovered floating on the seas), perhaps the simile of Frampton’s butcher is more suggestive than first thought. Like the photograph, the NFT (in the context of the visual, in the context of the image) is a similarly dimensionless cut, not one through “space and time” but a slice through the carcass of human imagination. But this is a human imagination caught and domesticated by the technologies it once thought up; it is an imagination circumscribed and profiled, subject to industrial reproduction and profusions — there are a lot of minds to feed. Which is why we don’t have to do here with the butcher, but with the factory farm, and all of the degradations and agonies that attend the same.
Hollis Frampton, “Digressions on the Photographic Agony,” Artforum (November 1972).
One of the more interesting projects to take this Atlantis as a “site” is Tyler Coburn’s I’m that Angel (2011-).
McKenzie Wark, Capitalism is Dead. Is this Something Worse? (Verso, 2020).
David Joselit, After Art (Princeton, 2013).
The curatoriat should be taking note. If art fairs were one solution to the problem of art in the age of overproduction; OpenSea, Foundation, SuperRare and the rest are forging new solutions in the real time of market discovery and mapping. (Note too how the names of these platforms point, unknowingly and so ironically, to what they are presumed to lack.)
Peter Gallison, “Removing Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry, (Autumn 2004), 230.