Walter Benjamin doesn’t care about your NFT, here’s why

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Near­ly a cen­tu­ry apart, the short-lived boom and cur­rent bust of the non-fun­gi­ble token (NFT) mar­ket­place – basi­cal­ly con­tained from Q4 2021 to the first-half 2022 – and the writ­ings of Ger­man-Jew­ish cul­ture crit­ic Wal­ter Ben­jamin (1892–1940) are con­nect­ed by a fix­a­tion on orig­i­nal­i­ty. We place a val­ue on the unique­ness of a work of art, being the only one of its kind.

What makes a work of art “orig­i­nal”? What makes any JPEG of “Dis­as­ter Girl” more “authen­tic” or “orig­i­nal” than the one Farzin Fardin Fard bought for six fig­ures from its “author”? More salient­ly, how do the mech­a­nisms of cap­i­tal­ism exploit the feel­ing of authen­tic­i­ty and orig­i­nal­i­ty to make art valu­able? What sep­a­rates artists and art from their licens­ing deals and IP rights?

I’ve found myself won­der­ing, at times, what would Ben­jamin have made of NFTs, had he lived to see the mot­ley inter­net cul­ture of today (and, indeed, the rise of a new fas­cism like the regime which he had to flee in Berlin)? As an art the­o­rist whose notion of artis­tic orig­i­nal­i­ty wres­tled with the chal­lenges of tech­no­log­i­cal repro­duc­tion, what would he have had to say on this issue?

Let’s local­ize an exam­ple: at the Beaver­brook Art Gallery in Fred­er­ic­ton, there’s a giant Sal­vador Dali paint­ing of a Christ fig­ure on a rear­ing horse. It’s the height of like … a two-sto­ry build­ing? You may – or at least I remem­ber this – be invit­ed by the art gallery’s staff to lie down with your feet against the wall to observe the paint­ing from the ground, for a dif­fer­ent perspective.

San­ti­a­go El Grande (Saint James the Great) by Sal­vador Dalí.

Now, the expe­ri­ence of this paint­ing is the intan­gi­ble vibe of being in a room with it. You can’t have that expe­ri­ence any­where else. You can’t pho­to­graph or video­tape the expe­ri­ence exact­ly as you felt it. If you go back to see the paint­ing again, you won’t feel quite the same way as you did the first time. That’s the aura of a work of art: it’s the feel­ing of being with it. Its uniqueness.

In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Tech­no­log­i­cal Repro­ducibil­i­ty,” Ben­jamin argues for an “aura” to the work of art anchored to things like its medi­um (how it was made) and its time and place (where is it, how can one “be” with the work). For his exam­ple, he uses the notion of a paint­ing in a gallery: that’s why I just remind­ed you about the vibe of that Dali painting.

The main gist of what I want you to take away right now is this: a work of art has an essen­tial mate­r­i­al qual­i­ty you can’t copy. If I take a pho­to of the Dali in Fred­er­ic­ton, it los­es some­thing. If the gallery puts a high-res image of the Dali on the inter­net: that’s a copy. If you want the real deal and all the feel­ings (what­ev­er they are) that come with it, you got­ta go to see the orig­i­nal.

Wal­ter Ben­jamin in the Nation­al Library in Paris (in 1937). Image tak­en by Gisèle Freund.

Now, the issue of what makes a work of art feel unique is com­pli­cat­ed, as Ben­jamin cogent­ly raised about film­mak­ing, when you can’t see the parts which make the fin­ished work whole. When a film is assem­bled, what we get doesn’t show the excess of film left on the edit­ing room floor, nor the per­for­mances of the actors on the sound stage. What we get appears on the screen.

Ben­jamin could not have envis­aged the chal­lenges of dig­i­tal stream­ing ser­vices for film, either. With the advent of Net­flix and the pro­lif­er­a­tion of ser­vices com­pet­ing for your atten­tion and bid­ding their high­est dol­lar for con­tent, what is the mate­r­i­al exis­tence of a dig­i­tal, streamed film? Does it have any? When I can’t even pos­sess the fac­sim­i­le of that film in DVD / Blu-ray form!?

Take as an exam­ple: the pub­lic screen­ing debut of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Film in Cana­da hap­pened as part of the Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val in Novem­ber. Makes sense to debut it there, but its rights are con­trolled by Net­flix, in an increas­ing­ly com­mon mod­el of hav­ing the­atri­cal films skip the the­aters straight to stream­ing. Glass Onion arrived on stream­ing Dec. 23.

Glass Onion (pro­mo­tion­al image). Dir. Rian John­son. Pub­lished by Netflix.

What’s the aura of a film like Knives Out (which I saw in the­aters and watched dozens of times since at home) as opposed to the one of Glass Onion, which I only saw on Net­flix – will it even get a phys­i­cal release on Blu-ray disc? This is how the issue of medi­um, cap­i­tal fund­ing of film projects and the “orig­i­nal­i­ty” of liv­ing the expe­ri­ence of a work of art gets com­pli­cat­ed, fast.

Let’s say, tak­ing into account of the mys­tery of whether non-mate­r­i­al art prod­ucts like Glass Onion even have an “aura,” that the the long-dead Ben­jamin were some­how tran­sub­stan­ti­at­ed into a young-ish man around the Cal­i­for­nia tech scene – con­ver­sant with the Inter­net, dig­i­tal goods and the mod­ern finan­cial chal­lenges post-2008 reces­sion. What would he think?

Our “Ben” knows full well who Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs are. He’s seen Knives Out and Glass Onion and liked them well enough. Maybe he’s a grad school dropout from UCLA. Ben is the kind of per­son who will go to the trou­ble of find­ing orig­i­nal press­ings of vinyl albums from the 1970s, which he plays on orig­i­nal hard­ware – but he still has Spo­ti­fy on his phone.

Supertramp’s “Cri­sis? What Cri­sis?” on vinyl. Image cour­tesy of thehikingsongwriter.

So, Ben, being a clever sort, sub­scribed to Axios newslet­ters and plugged into long-form YouTube essay cul­ture (see Bread­Tube), sees the NFT craze arrive and blunt­ly declares: “this is an absolute noth­ing­burg­er, there’s noth­ing to see here.” This sur­pris­es his friends, some of whom hold a lit­tle Bit­coin as a nov­el­ty. Ben, what do you mean there’s noth­ing to see about NFTs? 

“Look, the dis­missal of NFTs as a way for dig­i­tal artists to make mon­ey has been han­dled by peo­ple like Dan Olson” – Line Goes Up – The Prob­lem with NFTs – “so I’m just going to par­rot some ver­sion of what they’ve said. I keep hear­ing incred­u­lous defens­es of dig­i­tal artists need­ing some way to mon­e­tize their art. You can pay artists for their work. You don’t need an NFT.

“But, like, let’s cut right to the chase where you don’t need to watch ten hours of YouTube essays and decon­struc­tion­ist the­o­ry. The TL;DR of Dan’s video is that NFTs are a mul­ti-lev­el-mar­ket­ing (MLM) scheme to get peo­ple to buy cryp­tocur­ren­cy. It’s a scam. If you want to under­stand why NFTs have no redeemable val­ue what­so­ev­er, you got­ta cut right to the essence of what they are.

Thumb­nail image for “Line Goes Up: The Prob­lem with NFTs” YouTube film by Dan Olson.

“There’s this oth­er video by Stephen (Cof­feezil­la) Find­eisen called Right Click­ing All the NFTs where he’s talk­ing to a guy who basi­cal­ly cre­at­ed a Pirate Bay tor­rent to trick peo­ple into ‘get­ting free NFTs’ and the entire point of his trick is to show peo­ple, just like Cof­feezil­la, why NFTs are noth­ing more than hyper­links to files that don’t exist and you can’t own. It’s not about art at all.

“In real time, you watch Cof­feezil­la real­ize how NFTs are hyper­links to orig­i­nals which aren’t real­ly there. If you buy an NFT, what are you buy­ing? A pic­ture made by an artist, right? No, not real­ly. Like the guy in the video explains, you’re buy­ing direc­tions to a trea­sure which the sell­er promis­es you exists, on the blockchain. Because the NFT wasn’t about art, it’s about currency.

“Every­thing about the NFT trans­ac­tion process com­mod­i­fies the expe­ri­ence of art. It’s about turn­ing an NFT into actu­al mon­ey you can spend, not make-believe mon­ey you can’t. To buy that NFT, you had to buy Ethereum with real mon­ey. The per­son who gave your cryp­to to for that bill of sale can cash out because along the way you got got. It was nev­er about the image.”

Thumb­nail image for “Right-Click­ing all the NFTs” (YouTube video) by Coffeezilla.

The “art assets” put into NFTs aren’t the pur­pose of the tool them­selves, in the same way the art we put on actu­al cur­ren­cy isn’t about mak­ing some­thing beau­ti­ful. It’s pure­ly trans­ac­tion­al. Sure, in the mak­ing of art in our soci­ety, some trans­ac­tion­al behav­ior is required, but the end goal is to make an expe­ri­ence for some­one. To make art for oth­er peo­ple. To cre­ate expe­ri­ences for people.

The expe­ri­ence of the work of art is that thing which the aura pre­serves. It’s what some­one felt as they expe­ri­enced the work. All of the trans­ac­tions along the way to that expe­ri­ence are acci­dents and com­pro­mis­es imposed by the com­pli­ca­tions and inad­e­qua­cies of our cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem. What sur­vives my view­ing of Glass Onion isn’t the receipt from my Net­flix bill: it’s the experience.

The NFT art mar­ket is a grift designed to help wealthy peo­ple laun­der their mon­ey (to hide wealth from tax­a­tion) and a means to print cur­ren­cy out­side the con­trol of cen­tral bank­ing. The art involved is an acci­dent of the process, in the same way the art on real mon­ey is as a means to dis­tin­guish a quar­ter from a dime. Do you reflect on your expe­ri­ences spend­ing a quarter?

Think of NFTs in the same way and with the same detach­ment as you do mon­ey – or rather, Monop­oly mon­ey – and you’ll under­stand the intend­ed use case of them and for cryp­to as well.

Dani God­bout is a mem­ber of the NB Media Co-op edi­to­r­i­al board. They wrote their doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion on the writ­ings of Wal­ter Ben­jamin and the rela­tion­ship between depres­sion and art.

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