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