NFTs: Art in the Age of Digitization.

Hi, and welcome to Studious! I’m your host, Stuart Byers. Each week on Studious, we try and parse out life’s greatest riddles. We’ll talk about topics of particular interest to me, and hopefully to you the listener as well, if not consider this one of those great podcasts to fall asleep to.

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This week on Studious, we’re gonna get a little artsy, and perhaps a little techy, but I promise to try and keep this shit as palatable as possible. With the rise of NFTs in the marketplace, I’ve found myself reexamining the work of Walter Benjamin, in particular, his essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. His essay was written in 1935 in Nazi Germany. This particular translation can be found in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. If that name sounds familiar, Ms. Arendt was the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem, a novel we covered in our examination of Existential Evil here on the podcast.

You might wonder what this dusty old tome has to do with NFTs, considering it is quickly approaching its 100th birthday in a few years. While I can appreciate the curious direction your mind is taking, clearly you haven’t been paying attention to this podcast. We always are looking back to the giants of the past here on Studious and using them as an alley-oop and a shoulder boost. If I could find a hieroglyph of useful info, you can bet your sweet ass I’d use it here.

What’s interesting about this essay is its reflection upon the change brought to art through the advancement of mechanization, but it also is wildly prescient about the same implications posed in a digital context. Moreso, it not only describes our relation to art as a biproduct of mechanization, but also our relation to reality, and the mechanization of art’s overarching effect on our culture and way of life.

Benjamin begins the essay with a quote from Paul Valéry in 1934, and I’d like to launch this episode with an excerpt of that quote:

In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.

We are told from the onset that duplication was always found in the work of art. Quite often, pupils would be tasked with reproducing their masters’ greatest works to learn technique, and ultimately these replicas were made by third parties in pursuit of commerce. However, in terms of mechanical reproduction of art, the early Greeks were limited by the processes of founding and stamping. Woodcuts became the next revolution in mass production and predated printing the written word by about 11 centuries. Lithography became the next wave of reproductive art, the lithograph itself being the original and the prints were the subsequent copies. In only a few short decades, the world would be exposed to photography.

Benjamin goes on to say, ”Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where

it happens to be.” He’s building to an argument here on what photography and later the moving picture and radio would subsequently do to art. Not only would it be able to reproduce our greatest works, but in essence result in new mediums capable of their own intrinsic art forms. This was now a democratization of mankind’s greatest works. One would no longer need to travel to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, or Giza to see the pyramids.

However, these would not result in authentic experiences, because the observer would remain distanced from the artistic beauty being observed. Looking at a photo of the Sistine Chapel (or the 15 that came before it) pales in comparison to witnessing the authentic work in person. Remember back when we discussed Plato’s Allegory of the Cave? The authentic work of art is akin to his world of perfect forms. Plato would probably bristle against that assessment saying that these creations of man are still only conceptual approximations to the ideal of beauty, but essentially the original is like the perfect form, and all other copies are like the shadows on the wall, only approximating the true reality.

To describe this, Benjamin speaks about the aura of art. Aura can best be described as all the intrinsic qualities of the original, and even the qualities it picks up through its own history, be it degradation or damage, even its ownership. This particularly introduces the notion of “magical contagion.” Simply put, without an actual microbial contagion, the energy or juju of an individual can be transferred to the object in question. And even if we aren’t literally getting super metaphysical about it, we all can appreciate how something can either gain or lose value based on association.

There once was an experiment where they took several college professors, you know, learned individuals, and presented them with two different objects. The first was this old timey fountain pen. As they passed it around, they gave it a few cursory glances and passed it along. Halfway through, they shared that the pen had once belonged to Albert Einstein. The remaining people studied it with greater curiosity, marveling at this pen once owned by such a magnificent genius.

The next object to be passed was an unremarkable cardigan sweater. The professors now kinda primed by the first interaction were more curious and looked at the sweater with greater intention. Again, halfway through passing the garment, the experimenters revealed the previous ownership of the cardigan: a Mr. Jeffrey Dahmer. The professors now held the cardigan at a distance, with marked disgust, some individuals even passing on touching the cardigan altogether.

Of course, neither object was ever possessed by an individual with historical relevance, it was merely to show the human response to this idea of magical contagion. This isn’t relegated to some backwards tribal superstition; these were supposedly well-educated instructors.

And magical contagion plays into this concept of aura. A perfectly ordinary antique tea set gains a whole perspective when you find out that it once belonged to Adolf Hitler. It changes the aura, and aura must be tied to perception.

Benjamin makes another description of aura to help further illuminate the concept:

If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the

increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.

So, this is a rather bold claim Benjamin makes towards these copies that don’t offer what unique experiences have to offer. Mind you, he’s writing this the same year Kodachrome was invented, whose predecessor was the first color film, Autochrome, invented by the Lumiere brothers in 1903. Try and picture it this way, aura is you sitting in the audience witnessing one of the last performances by Sir Elton John. The person next to you is watching the performance through their phone, as they try and capture a video of which they probably will never see again, and only to share with others who probably won’t care to sit through more than 5 seconds before they’re scrolling to the next inauthentic experience. That guy filming it is one more step removed from the aura than you are. The folks watching the final performance at Dodger stadium on Disney Plus are one further step removed from that guy watching the entire concert through his phone.

Benjamin follows that thought with this:

Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former.

Ok, so what is he saying here exactly? He’s telling us that magazines and newsreels are reproduceable and transitory. What we witness with our “unarmed eye” is unique and has a permanence. This relates to being present and living in the now. Experientially, our moments of now are fast and fleeting, which is why they are so valuable and important to us. That magazine will always be sitting there, waiting for us to read it again at our leisure.

This notion can also extend to how we consume media, even that is removed from the original aura. I remember the days before home recording systems for video. They would play something like the Wizard of Oz on CBS, and it would be special, because it was linked to a time and place. There wasn’t a pause button. You had to experience it in the moment. Furthermore, even if you were watching it alone, you knew that simultaneously other households were watching this same thing with you, even if you weren’t geographically located together. That’s a zeitgeist moment.

Every year around Christmas, CBS would also play all those Rankin and Bass Claymation movies like Santa Clause is Comin’ to Town and The Year Without a Santa Clause. At age 5, I had gotten into a little mischief, and my mother had to punish me. She didn’t want to have to spank me, so she made me an offer: you can either get a spankin’, or you don’t get to watch Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer this year. Through tear-soaked eyes, I looked up at her and quivered, “I’ll take the spankin’.”

This wasn’t because I was hip to Benjamin or being all Zen and living in the now; I knew that I had one chance to watch this. There were no do-overs. It increased the film’s value in my five-year-old mind exponentially.

From here, Benjamin goes on to describe the impetus of art, its historical ties to cult, tradition, and ritual. These initial uses for art probably further gave it aura, gave it soul, tied the art to this significant religious experience. I went to the Louvre recently and I made a passing comment to my wife, “man, if this Jesus guy never existed, what would be left for these fuckers to paint?” Obviously this was in response to the sheer volume of religious subjects painted. But if it wasn’t the Christians, the Greeks and Romans were chiseling their Gods; the same goes for the Muslim and Egyptian art.

Benjamin follows with the assertion that the ritualistic creation of art was on a decline from the moment it delved into the secular cult of beauty. With the advent of photography and simultaneous rise of socialism, art saw the approaching crisis, and responded with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake.” This was a weak attempt to make a theology out of art, removing any ties it had to social function or commentary. “True art” according to this secular doctrine was completely independent of social value, be it didactic, (which is akin to instructional or informative) moral, or political.

So, this modernist view of art was, for some, opening the art to the morally ambiguous or the subversive. For others, it was a means of politicizing art for socialist perspectives. The secularization of art further removed it from the ritual. Much as man removed God from the center of the universe and placed himself in His stead, secular art too sought make itself the center with inventing the new doctrine Art for Art’s sake. Benjamin was not alone in his criticisms, for Nietzsche too objected to this T-shirt slogan. Just as Nietzsche had seen man replace God, he too saw this attempt made by contemporary bohemians of making aesthetics an independent philosophy. He contended that art will never be independent of social value for art’s sake. It is by its very nature attached and emotional, for why would the artist create if it didn’t mean something, if it wasn’t for some greater import?

Art began in our human history as an expression with two polar values: one designed with an accent on cult value, the other based on an exhibitive value of the work. Early magical renderings were made for the spirits. Many works of higher cult value were for only for select clergy. If we think back to our cult knowledge based on Raiders of the Lost Ark, only the high priests were allowed in the tabernacle which contained the Ark of the Covenant, back in the holiest of holies. Benjamin contends as this shift between these polar values occurred, from the cult and ritual to exhibition value, so too did the qualitative value shift. Or in the common vernacular, the art got shittier as it became more available to the masses. Art’s first intent was to be magical, when that intent was lost, it became no wonder that it began to lose its magic.

Benjamin notices this critical shift in art with concern to the medium of film. He makes certain observations about the art of performance when it concerns the screen actor versus the stage actor, how the aura is lost when the screen actor performs for a camera, how his reactions are contrived and don’t relate spatially to his audience. He’s building to an argument about how once art lost its ritualistic intent, it opened up its use for politicism. Here Benjamin argues:

While facing the camera he knows that ultimately, he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach… The film responds to the shriveling of the aura (of the actor) with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. So long as the moviemakers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art.

So, through this socialist lens, Benjamin views capitalism’s greedy little paws shaping perception. Does this viewpoint sound familiar? It’s parroted all around Hollywood any time someone says how they aren’t making artistic films anymore, that all studios want to make is that next big Marvel tentpole for the summer or Christmas season. What is the audience telling us? It says that our relation to the medium has changed. And maybe it’s because of everything we’ve talked about thus far with art losing its aura, its particular moment in time. Going to the movies has lost its cultural significance. We also have become a microwave culture. Those same films will hit our homes in weeks if they aren’t already streaming. And this is what Benjamin warned: that the reproduceable art would lose its aura, its uniqueness, its intrinsic value. I saw Return of the Jedi three times in the theater, not just because I loved it, but because I knew it would be forever until I could see it again.

Then again, it could just be that we now only value the theatrical experience for films that bedazzle us. When art goes and tickles a childhood sense of wonder and fantasy, isn’t that its own bit of magic? Isn’t that we sought out originally with art? Maybe since all this reproduced art has messed with my ties to reality, that I’m seeking this transcendental experience with no ties to reality. Some would argue that an abstract concept can be more palatable through these mythical tales. I made that argument in my episode We Could be Heroes, if you haven’t heard it.

Look, if I tell you that comics are the modern mythos, and your rebuttal is that this is what Benjamin argued when he says that art lost its aura with reproducibility. Marvel isn’t art, it’s just trying to fill that God-sized hole left from the absence of authentic art.  Maybe all of art’s purpose is to fill that God-sized hole in our hearts. If nothing, aren’t we just yearning for those transcendental moments? We’ll get our fix however we can come by it. Maybe it’s because our relationship to medium has transformed our authentic living experiences. Maybe it’s a sickness on our perception or ability to perceive. Maybe our views are forever tainted. Or maybe you can take any argument too far and call it alarmist. Only time will tell.

The critics of the Hollywood machine are always complaining that we aren’t getting enough content of substance. I’m sure Benjamin would blame capitalism. Look, making movies is a business, and the business model has shown that primarily these action-packed sequels are what makes the easiest dollar. Movies of “substance” are not only niche, but seldom can gain enough momentum to stay in theaters long. So either we all collectively agree to go see them all upon release, or we learn to get over it. We’ve never lived in a more democratized age of filmmaking. One could shoot an entire indie film on their phone. Perhaps the mediums have changed the number of people wanting to create that long-form content. Our shift in consumption of media has shortened our attention spans, and the market has also shown the independent film maker that it’s easier to produce higher volume shorter content.

As I speak about the democratization of film, Benjamin speaks about the democratization of writing in his time. He was worried that a sea of meaningless voices would flood the market. This of course has happened to the production of most art forms. One does not need formally trained in ballet, when they could join a street crew of dancers. Visual art can be created endlessly on a pad.

In the 1980 movie Fame, which follows a group of students at a performing arts school, a gifted genius learns that with the advent of home recording, he can simply play all of the instruments in a song and compose and perform by himself. This astounds his music teacher. “You’re going to play by yourself!?!” He asks. “Of course, you don’t need anybody else!” To which his teacher replies, “that’s not music, that’s masturbation.”

Every day, about 60,000 new songs are uploaded onto Spotify. That’s a whole lot of masturbation. But we are probably going to get that knee jerk reaction whenever there is a rise in new technology, as we’ve discussed previously in other episodes. It was the same for Benjamin and his reaction to the Dadaists. This was a new form of absurdist art that came as a reflex to the horror of violence waged in the first World War. In many ways, this was art created for shock value, purposefully irrational or humorous.  For Benjamin and other critics, gone was the aura of art, the ability to contemplate a work. They felt assailed.  Duhamel in his critique of the moving picture claimed, “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”

This reflexive stance on a new technology probably seems absurd to you and I. However, this is what theoretics of media contemplate. They study the power of film and television. The harshest critics of television talk about the alpha state which happens while one is consuming television, how our neural state becomes hypnoidal and highly suggestable. This is why Benjamin talks about the politicization of art, because you can bet your ass that if he sees Capitalism as the devil, then advertising would be the music that the lord of light is playing.

Media has a profound ability to shape the consciousness of the public. This is why corporations spend billions of dollars in advertising for the Super Bowl, or FIFA, or whatever grand spectacle is being televised. It’s also why Marvel was targeted to become politicized as well. Not all of it is nefarious, it’s mostly pandering. But also, what sometimes looks like harmless pandering can also be well placed controversy to insight division.

In 1930 Georges Duhamel called the movies “a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries . . . , a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence . . . , which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.”

First off, what a statement. What a smug, cocky bastard he’s being. But let’s not examine his thoughts with our modern lens, let’s give him the benefit of historical perspective. We all could surely argue that though a picture is worth a thousand words, the written word presents a more challenging medium. There’s a reason we are always saying, “the book was better than the movie.” Books can give us insight inside the character’s mind. But even aside from that aspect, books give us the time to digest and reflect. Film is the chain restaurant of media, whereas television is the fast food of media.

Then again, this doesn’t mean that film cannot achieve high art. It can even accomplish this absurdly like the Dadaists. Take John Carpenter’s They Live for instance. Here you have this incredibly meaningful picture masquerading as a low-rate action film. When Duhamel was making his critiques, they were just starting to make “talkies.”

But what did Duhamel get right? That we’d get these ridiculous hopes of one day becoming stars of Hollywood. And that is our modern culture now, right? Reality stars and moms of TicToc, social media influencers and content creators. We all are seeking attention and notoriety. Does this mean we are attempting to create art? How subjective is that term?

With historical relevance, we see that Benjamin is writing in context between the rise of socialism and fascism. His assertion is that the mechanization of art created a biproduct, and that subsequently art will be repurposed as a means of political argument. Was he wrong in that assessment? The propaganda machines would begin to swirl all around him, from the communists in Russia to the fascists in Germany. Edward Bernays has already written his book, Propaganda in the US in 1928. He will later pen The Engineering of Consent in 1955. For those of you who love to champion your own free will, this guy Bernays is one of your adversaries.

While there will always be artists with admirable intentions, the political machine will always be whirling away, sometimes behind the scenes, other times bold-faced and in the open, to illustrate its power and dominion. When we observe the sheer behemoth that is the political machine, it crushes the hope that any one man has to guide or change it. Any pandered notions of hope or change are empty rhetoric. They’re t-shirt slogans and bumper stickers. Benjamin would argue that the political machine has the greatest means of production and will be the clear victor in the battle of ideals. However, if the public is starved for authenticity, then the artists still may stand a chance at swaying public opinion. As the English say, “the truth will out.”

So up until this point, we’ve been having a very analogue conversation with Benjamin. What does all this mean for us here in the digital age? What about those NFTs that everyone keeps talking about?

For those of you with a search engine, an NFT is a non-fungible token. Well, what the fuck is that exactly? To not bore you with the specifics, an NFT can take an image and embed that with a blockchain of coding which will help verify its authenticity. Every time that NFT is sold, that transaction will also be reported within the blockchain. This is our 21st century problem solving attempt for Benjamin’s degradation of aura. In a virtual world, we are attempting to give the art a virtual time and place, as well as creating a history that will follow the work as well.

So, what was Benjamin talking about initially with art? He talked about cult value in respect to its production; has that changed versus the era of mechanization, this new era of digitization? Not really. Unless that cult value is to be shared in private on the dark web. I’m gonna guess if that’s occurring, it is probably in direct opposition of this notion of being for the holiest of holies.

Benjamin really was concerned with the loss of aura in art. Does this new digitized form retain that aura? It seeks to put a uniqueness on art with the NFT, but the work is no less reproduceable as the mechanized world made them. In fact, the digital work only made these reproductions of higher aesthetic quality. Sure, some would still argue for analogue in the way our ears are tickled by the warmth of vinyl, but is that a strong scientific argument or one made from nostalgia? Feel free to make a case in the comment section if you feel strongly about it.

And are we examining this concept of aura merely from an observer’s standpoint, or a collector’s standpoint?

When I was younger, I used to collect comic books and baseball cards. In the early 90’s, the collectibles market was really building up steam. First editions of comics and rare rookie cards were selling for a mint. The market took advantage of this craze and began flooding the market with cards and comics. As you can guess, this sheer volume also made the collectibles worth less. After all, basic economics is a study of supply and demand.

It was at this young age, my early teens that I made my first insight on demand. Comics guides and card guides could estimate any collectible and ballpark a figure of the collectible’s accepted worth. You could look up any card, by any manufacturer, be it Fleer or Tops any others that began minting cards in those days and see what the going rate would be on said card given its condition. As kids we would pour over this information and consume it like biblical scholars. We all wanted to know historically what cards were most valuable, but also which new ones were the ones to keep a watch out for. Mind you, this was in the days before athletes were destroying their careers and collectible value with scandal, like homicide, rape, gambling, and drug abuse.

Now of course, these prices in the guides were always the sales prices for the consumer. Much like automobiles, it was never their trade in value; after all, the collectible store needs to turn a profit. It took me awhile to appreciate that notion. However, it all got me thinking. What intrinsic value does any collectible hold? At the end of the day, a collectible is only worth what the highest bidder is willing to pay for it. This makes artistic value extremely subjective. Throw an apocalypse on top of it, and your Rembrandt could be worth 2 cans of creamed corn.

Benjamin would argue that I’m merely looking at aura through a capitalist lens. Fuck it, I’m a capitalist. All value is subjective, so if we choose a monetary metric by which to judge value, that’s the conversation we are having, plus, it’s harder to assign value to the ephemeral quality of emotion.

This poem really means a lot to me.

How much?

I don’t know, but like a whole lot. Like, it gives me the feels.

So, aura through the capitalist lens and the NFT: We can agree a la Benjamin that the aura is somewhat diminished just because it only exists in this virtual sphere. Granted, we are making no comments on the talent it took to produce this art in question. Have you seen the storyboard art during the Mandalorian end credits? It’s visually stunning, wildly creative, and captivating. Do we compare it to a Michelangelo? No, it’s apples and oranges really. But one must concede the insane amount of talent going into the work, the critical value from there is subjective, the arguments reserved for the experts.

What is this intrinsic value of the NFT, at least monetarily? Well, it has none. It can be minted and assigned some uniqueness; it can facsimilate a certain kind of magical contagion with inherently documenting its previous ownership, much like a Mr. Jon Voight and his Chrysler LeBaron, but without the unique impermanence the physical world has to offer, it becomes like my old comic books. Its monetary value is now assigned by what the highest bidder is willing to pay for it.

And like monetary systems, this will all have to do with investor confidence. Will NFTs have staying power, or will they become a fad? The market is already oversaturated with bullshit monkey drawings. Then again, just because I think it is bullshit, doesn’t mean some chump out there won’t pay high dollar for it, thinking it may be some sort of grand investment.

So, what is our takeaway here? Well, I think we started a conversation about how we think, and how that can be shaped by the media we consume. That of course is a larger conversation involving media and linguistics, which we will save for a later date. With mechanization, art will lose some of its aura, and our relation to art will change. Art will always be this subjective experience, and generally art made for the masses will be subjectively lower in quality, at the expense of quantity. The art that seeks to strike at us to capture our attention, may not be the art that feeds our souls. Remember, all that glitters is not gold.

If one goes about making art to capture a large audience, they’re probably going about it the wrong way. Maybe its intellectualism gone awry, but higher art will always probably be niche, and perhaps not understood by the masses until a far future date. This is the nature of things.

For you artists out there, create what speaks to you. It might be niche, but we are now in a time period where there are enough people out there consuming to support a niche market. With time, you may find your audience; so, hang in there and keep putting in the work.

Well, that’s all the time we have here today on Studious. If you get a chance, try and read Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanization. It’s not an easy read. He’s gonna make you work a bit, and perhaps you’ll take something different away than what I’m offering you. Thanks again for listening to Studious, I’ll see you next week.

If you get a chance at the end of this episode, please like, comment, rate, and review. I’d love to hear any comments you have about the episode or any topics you’d like to hear me cover in the future. Again, thank you for your support, and if you know anyone who might also appreciate this podcast, please pass it along.`