Were NFTs Just Another Fad?
For a brief shining moment, NFTs stood the art world on its ear.
Book: Token Supremacy: The Art Of Finance, The Finance Of Art, And The Great Crypto Crash Of 2022
Author: Zachary Small
Pub Date: May 21, 2024
Who It’s For: art aficionados, the cryptocurious
Quotable: “The arrival of crypto in the art world also coincided with the industry's reluctant migration to online sales during the pandemic, and an important shift in customer demographics.”
Were NFTs a fad? If there were a simple yes or no answer to this question, then Zachary Small wouldn’t have a whole book to write. Small’s book, Token Supremacy, isn’t just about non-fungible tokens, it’s about the entire ecosystem that allowed the NFT boom to happen, a heady mix of a generation frustrated with traditional finance, a flush market looking for new opportunities, and the allure of a new technology with seemingly limitless applications.
It’s tempting to make the Dutch tulip bulb analogy and Small does but the book is about far more than just a mania of speculation and its aftermath. It’s about the centuries-old dance between art and finance and how value is assigned, inflated, and just as quickly deflated. One of my favorite motifs in the book is the tension between the traditional art world, the rarified land of top-tier auction houses, and white-walled galleries, and the young, rogueish upstarts who don’t play by the old rules, turning a staid gallery opening into a bit of a rave.
Small wrote this book as the cryptoeconomy imploded, shredding trillions of dollars in value in its wake and turning the NFT craze into an embarrassing “what-were-we-thinking” moment. But that’s not really all there is to the story. Underneath the antics of Beeple and the downfall of the crypto bros is blockchain, a real chance to create unassailable chains of ownership and potentially create value for artists once their work hits secondary markets. Decentralized finance is in a way, abstracted finance. We are a culture comfortable paying for things with a tap on an app. Is it any surprise that the idea of art that primarily served to augment a life lived at least partially online would have allure?
The post-crash world of NFTs and cryptocurrency is a more sober and regulated one, at least for now. NFTs aren’t gone, although they have mostly lost their value and a lot of their sheen. This book is a little snapshot of a time that was, and likely, will be again, just in some other form.