The term “net.art” is less a coinage than an accident, the result of a software glitch that occurred in December 1995, when Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic opened an anonymous e-mail only to find it had been mangled in transmission. Amid a morass of alphanumeric gibberish, Cosic could make out just one legible term “net.art” which he began using to talk about online art and communications. Spreading like a virus among certain interconnected Internet communities, the term was quickly enlisted to describe a variety of everyday activities. Net.art stood for communications and graphics, e-mail, texts
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
Art Is Lost in This Town (1989). Photo courtesy of Postmasters Gallery.
The emphasis on business is poisonous. Everybody needs to survive, but one hopes there would be some other levels of operating that are not just 100 percent determined by economic success.
I have this idea of running a night school for collectors: re-education classes on curiosity replacing speculation. I could teach that for minimal compensation because, you know, “everybody needs to survive.” Magda Sawon, owner and director, Postmasters Gallery
School children enter the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images.
Perhaps museums and galleries could be opened for special school visits. This might be extended to elderly people. There is a strong sense of being isolated and forgotten in the air.