Paris, NFTs, And The Digital Avant-Garde

A new exhibit at Centre Pompidou highlights how Paris has once again become ground zero for a movement that makes us question the nature and value of art.

In real life, I am a tech journalist. Which means I go to tech events and meet tech people and talk about tech stuff.

Most of this is interesting. Some of it is not. Most people in this tech world think they are going to change the world. Most will not. Every technology is promoted as a revolutionary game-changer disruptive machine thingy. Almost none are.

Almost. But of course, some technology and some entrepreneurs do change the world. It’s hard to know which ones fall into this category in the early days, no matter what anyone tells you. That’s what has kept it intriguing for me as a journalist.

I thought about all of this again while attending an event called Paris Blockchain Week. This isn’t a tech newsletter, so I’m not going to bore you with a blockchain explainer. But what I found interesting is that large sections of the exhibit space were dedicated to digital works of art.

Again, blockchain and its best-known application, cryptocurrency (Bitcoin!), have generated waves of optimism and skepticism. It’s all facing a pretty hefty backlash at the moment about whether there is really a there there, or whether it’s all just speculative nonsense.

But, there is a related element that brings us back to the subject of art. Another application for blockchain technology is something called a “non-fungible token,” or NFT. Basically, according to Wikipedia, “it’s a unique digital identifier that cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided, that is recorded in a blockchain, and that is used to certify ownership and authenticity.”

What that means practically is this: Someone can now create a digital piece of content (an image, a film, music, anything), put it online, and the NFT that is attached will confirm that this single version is the “genuine” version as well as the identity of the person who made it or who “owns” it.

That, in turn, has unleashed a new wave of creativity around digital arts, in part out of sheer inspiration, but also because there is now a method for these artists/creators to protect their work from endless copying and to be compensated for it. People who know they are buying the single, “genuine” version of a work, are, of course, willing to pay more.

It was this explosion of digital creation that was being celebrated at the Blockchain conference. These digitally-generated images, some still, some moving, were shown on large screens that looked otherwise like frames hanging on the wall in a gallery.

As I viewed some of these works, I also found that they presented a fundamental and timeless challenge: Did I see these works as “art”? What does that mean? And does it even matter? Is it still art if it’s on a screen rather than a canvas? If it’s pixels rather than oil?

Indeed, what does “genuine” even mean? Or “own”, for that matter. I bought a poster of Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” to hang in my first-year dorm room. (Yeah, I was that guy.) When I saw the original in a museum several years later, was it that much more affecting because it was “genuine”?

How Much Is That NFT In The Window?

Fred Forest, NFT- Archeology, 2021 © Adagp, Paris 2023 © Fred Forest

These questions are at the very heart of a new exhibit that opened today at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, called: “NFT: The Poetics of the Immaterial
from Certification to Blockchain.” The exhibit runs through January 2024.

Of course, it seems appropriate that Paris would be at the center of a movement that challenges everything we think about art. In the first half of the 20th century, Paris was the mecca of avant-garde movements such as Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Abstraction. Before that, in the 19th century, it was the Impressionists.

Different forms, but they shared the idea of breaking the norms, or rules such as they existed, and being heavily criticized at the time for not being real art. Only to be recognized eventually as revolutionary and today being celebrated as masterpieces.

So to the degree that digital art has its skeptics, that’s part of the game.

The museum says it is the “very first institution dedicated to modern and contemporary art to acquire a group of works dealing with the relations between blockchain and artistic creation, including its first NFTs.”

In a discussion published between Marcella Lista and Philippe Bettinelli, the museum’s curators of the video, audio, and new media collection, the pair try to get to the meaning of this brave new art world.

“Part of the success of NFTs can be explained by the fact that digital artists can now dispense with the traditional intermediaries of the art world, such as galleries and contemporary art fairs. They're in direct contact with their communities,” Bettinelli says.

“This community currently embodies some of the most stimulating artistic debates of the contemporary world,” Lista says. “The idea was not to be the first but to bring together a meaningful collection that could testify to the critical and creative appropriation of a new technology by artists, and how that disrupts and shifts the art ecosystem.