Written by Chris Michaels, published on April 1, 2024 on theartnewspaper.com.
The 10-year anniversary of a once-controversial new form of digital art, and disruptor of the art market, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), falls on 2 May.
In the lead-up to that anniversary, two important new publications combine to provide the first comprehensive history of a form that the art historian and critic A. V. Marraccini calls “a commodity, a provocation, a para-medium, a shibboleth, an inscribed artefact of capital at speed”. On NFTs, edited by the artist and writer Robert Alice and published by Taschen, and a collected volume of essays drawn from the website Right Click Save, come with two complementary kinds of authority.
On NFTs is substantial in size and price—£750 for its cheapest first release (a general trade edition will follow later)—and has the feel and rigour of a catalogue raisonné. Its editorial aspiration, marked by that “On” in the title and each of its component essays, comes rooted in the grand tradition. “The title On NFTs is inspired by the art-historical and cryptographic tradition of the treatise,” Alice writes, “exemplified best by the Renaissance artist, art historian, and cryptographer Leon Battista Alberti’s … two treatises De Pictura/On Painting (1450) and De Cifris/On Ciphers (1466). Before the advent of blockchain, there exists no one individual in history who has furthered the dual fields of art and cryptography in equal measure.” Alice tells The Art Newspaper that he sees On NFTs as “a slow look at a fast art”.