Kenny Schachter, artist, writer, and lecturer.
Kenny Schachter. Courtesy Kenny Schachter.
The Baer Faxt: Are NFTs making a comeback to the art world?
Kenny Schachter: Paintings are dead. NFTs are dead. We are dead. Or, we will be before we witness the demise of any of the aforementioned phenomena. Art, by the way, happens to be among the few traits that differentiate humans from every other species on Earth. Since paintings came off the walls of caves they’ve been coveted. By equal measure, since the inception of the Ethereum decentralized blockchain introducing smart contract functionality in 2013—along with its native cryptocurrency, ETH—NFTs are an inevitability in the history of art and innovation.
I would compare the art market to Lloyd’s of London, the UK insurance company founded in 1688; in fact, there has been more modernization in the business of indemnification than in art since then. Think of two rich white guys sitting around a table shaking hands on a high-priced deal, sealed by a stiff drink. NFTs, smart contracts and the notion of decentralization have turned the status quo upside down. Yes, the market got whacked, but don’t count it out! The pulse is beating strong—even before Jeff Koons became the first sanctioned artist to land on the moon, literally, with the launch of his hybrid, multi-part sculpture and digital art project.
It took the NFT space a mere matter of years to turn south from what I coined as NFTism: a forum for making and marketing digital output characterized by a strength of community, communication and collaboration unseen in the art world since the deep, dark downturn of the early 1990s—which for those too young to remember, was far worse than the Great Recession of 2008. The backlash was fast and furious to the unbridled greed and rampant speculation, and it helped bring down a digital art market that aped the worst attributes of the contemporary art world we know so well now.
The NFT market became scorned by those far and wide, especially in the art world, as a flash in the pan and trend akin to Beanie Babies (which are still avidly bought and sold, by the way). That is mainly because NFTs posed a concrete threat to the turf of the fine art world, a universe gated and guarded with the fierceness and ferocity of state secrets. Economics and other spheres, however, do not entirely operate by a zero sum mentality where one person or entity advances solely at the expense of another.
The short term buying and selling of NFTs for stupid, unrealistic returns has drastically constricted, but blockchain and NFT art and trading are robust and with us to stay. They make too much sense not to be. TO THE MOON!
