The emperor's new art: cryptomania, art and property

Abstract

The latest wave of cryptomania has brought us yet another acronym after ICOs (initial coin offerings) – NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Touted as a means to render readily replicable digital art (and possibly other objects) rare and scarce, NFT-mania reached its apogee when the artist Beeple sold a collage titled Everydays: the First 5,000 Days through Christie’s on 11 March 2021 for US$69m, making it the third most expensive piece of art sold by a living artist. But did the buyer actually acquire, through the NFT, any art? What is art abstracted from the medium upon which it is embedded and dissociated from its copyright? Can such a dissociated abstraction be meaningfully owned? What does the concept of fungibility entail and can a token be permanently conferred fungibility or non-fungibility at the point of its mining or minting? Once the technical process of minting an NFT is properly understood, it will be seen that NFTs are no more and no less than the Emperor’s New Art.