For its blockbuster sale of Beeple’s
Everydays: The First 5000 Days, an artwork in the form of an NFT and a digital file comprising thousands of images, Christie’s auction house published an essay including the following dubious claim:
Digital art has an established history dating back to the 1960s. But the ease of duplication traditionally made it near-impossible to assign provenance and value to the medium.
There are quite interesting reasons for artists to explore the use of NFTs, and, clearly, they currently offer a new form of support. But, among other issues, the argument that NFTs have “solved” a long-standing problem of uniqueness and provenance in digital art ignores the fact that they rely on forms of trust and negotiation and authentication that aren’t starkly different from a longer history of digital art markets. Even with NFTs, questions arise, such as: who actually authorized the minting of a work? What license is attached to it? How can this license be accessed? What happens if it needs to be changed? These questions point to the some of the challenges that have always faced digital art markets, and are not fully solved by standalone blockchain solutions, all of which points to the need for ongoing care and stewardship with or without the NFT.