Variant Partners: Art in the Age of Crypto-Copying
Original author: Li Jin
Original translation: TechFlow
In March 2024, Christie’s announced the launch of SOURCE (for NFT), the auction house’s first on-chain generated art collection. The sale happened to be held after digital artist Beeple sold a digital artwork for $69 million through the same auction house three years ago.
This development would likely have caught the attention of the 20th-century philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, who was deeply interested in the interplay between technology and culture and how they shape each other. In Benjamin’s time, the technologies in question were photography and film. Today, they are the internet and artificial intelligence.
Benjamin’s work, especially as reflected in his 1935 essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” raises important questions about the intersection of art, technology, and culture. What is the value of art in an age of mass reproduction? What is the relationship between an original work of art and its reproduction? How does mass-reproduced art intersect with and impact culture, especially politics?
21st century technology both extends and complicates Benjamin’s argument. Now, the very act of creation can be digitized, eroding the entire notion of the “original.” With the advent of generative AI technologies, the lines between original and copy, author and copier, and reality and fiction are becoming even more blurred.
Blockchain brings new dimensions to discussions about the value, authenticity, and relevance of art, giving new meaning to the work of Walter Benjamin. Through blockchain-tracked ownership, cryptocurrencies reclaim notions of provenance and originality for digital artworks, reinvigorating Benjamin’s notion of “aura.” At the same time, cryptocurrencies renew what Benjamin called art’s “cult value” through the rituals and traditions generated by community ownership. In an age of growing cultural and political divisions, tokens offer new ways to foster community cohesion and collective action, both echoing and challenging Benjamin’s ideas about the relationship between art and politics. The result is a redefinition of the relationship between art, technology, and culture in the 21st century.
Halo
An enduring question is: What makes a piece of art special? Why do enthusiasts flock to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, or spend millions of dollars on an original work of art, rather than seeing or owning a replica that looks identical?
The answer seems to stem from the very existence of a work of art—its specific presence, the thing that makes it different from other works. Benjamin named this quality “aura,” which he defined as a work of art’s “unique presence in time and space, in the place where it happens to be.” For Benjamin, aura was closely tied to the work’s authority and authenticity, both of which he believed were threatened in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction eroded the concept of aura. Digital (re)production complicates the concept of aura even further. In his 1995 response to Benjamin, art critic Douglas Davis noted that with digital reproduction "the fictions of 'master' and 'copy' are now so intertwined that it is impossible to say where one begins and the other ends".
Cryptocurrency has the power to restore the concept of aura to art because it makes “originality” possible again. By tracking artworks on a distributed ledger, crypto can trace the provenance and ownership of digital assets. This ensures that each digital artwork is uniquely owned and authenticated, and can be traced back to the cryptographic signature of its creator, thus giving the digital work an aura.
value
Many people think of the value of art in economic terms. But Benjamin was equally concerned with the cultural value of art, which he divided into two different dimensions: cult value and exhibition value.
The concept of exhibition value is relatively straightforward. It is the value that a work of art has due to its ability to be displayed and viewed in public spaces, museums, galleries and exhibitions.
Benjamin defines cult value (what he calls art’s “original use value”) as something more concrete and interesting.
For most of human history, art has been closely associated with religion and ritual. There is something mystical about engaging with a work of art in a sacred space. He argues that "art in prehistory was first and foremost a magical tool". Even in a more secular sense, art is a medium for expressing and embodying deeply rooted beliefs, values and narratives in a community, whether religious, ideological or philosophical.
Benjamin suggests that, like a halo, art’s “cult value” diminishes over time, giving way to the modern capitalist concept of “exhibition value”—the value of art as being in and for its own sake. The digital age has accelerated this process. Artworks are often evaluated and appreciated solely for their ability to be seen: the more likes or views a work receives, the more valuable it is. At the same time, the consumption of art has become increasingly individualized, with consumers engaging with art alone rather than experiencing it collectively.
Here, cryptocurrencies offer a balance. Cryptocurrencies have the potential to restore the concept of cult value. Just as traditional art was once closely tied to shared rituals and beliefs, crypto projects create a sense of belonging and shared identity among holders. NFT projects like Bored Ape and Botto (a community-managed AI artist), and even memes that might be considered a form of crypto art, have their own rituals, languages, and shared online spaces. This series of rituals may have economic value, which is a dimension of shared interest among their communities. Crypto art is deeply participatory in nature, allowing individuals to directly participate in, contribute to, and shape the cultural significance of these projects, reinforcing their cult value.
politics
It is easy to read Benjamin in a purely pessimistic light, lamenting the loss of aura and the ritual value of art in the face of mechanical reproduction. But beneath this overt lament lies a more subtle exploration of the transformative political potential inherent in the democratization of art.
Benjamin saw mechanical reproduction as a profoundly democratizing force. He spoke of the “tremendous upheavals of tradition” and the “crisis and renewal of contemporary humanity” as being “closely connected to the mass movements of our time.” In a world where the aura of art was fading and exhibition value replaced cult value, Benjamin saw the meaning of art as rooted in something else: specifically, politics. Using the example of a photographer taking street scenes in Paris “like crime scenes,” he noted that photographs “became standard evidence of historical events and acquired an implicit political meaning.” Iconic images can have political meaning, inspiring people to action.
Benjamin, a committed socialist, pointed out that photography was "a truly revolutionary means of reproduction" that "emerged simultaneously with the rise of socialism," thus directly linking the democratized art of photography with the democratized politics of socialism. For example, photography during the Great Depression drew attention to the plight of workers, thereby building momentum for pro-worker projects. The politicization of art can also be extremely dangerous—as a Jew living in fascist Germany, Benjamin was deeply concerned about how art could be used by totalitarian movements to hijack and manipulate attention and perception in the service of their own agendas.
The age of digital reproduction has brought us some extreme examples of art’s political impact. For example, the proliferation of memes surrounding Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency (some of which were posted directly by him). At the same time, the advent of artificial intelligence and the rise of disinformation and deepfakes have undermined our shared sense of reality.
There are several aspects to explore about how crypto can intersect with art in the political sphere. Cryptocurrency can be profoundly liberating in an economic sense, as it allows more participants to have more accessible ownership and to gain economic benefits from that ownership. As I recently wrote about the attention economy in crypto: What distinguishes crypto from Web2 is that everyone in the value chain can benefit from being the owner of an “attention asset.”
The censorship-resistant nature of blockchain also protects artistic expression from repression. During the global COVID-19 lockdown, some netizens uploaded videos and messages that were removed from social media platforms by censors to the chain, using NFTs as a tool of political resistance. As I mentioned, cryptocurrencies are highly participatory, can incentivize people to create communities around shared values, and enable novel forms of capital formation to achieve political ends. For example, in January 2023, Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and artist Shepard Fairy encouraged supporters to express their “proof of protest” through an open-source NFT collection called Putin’s Ashes, the proceeds of which were donated to Ukrainian soldiers.
Ultimately, crypto art and cryptocurrencies as a whole are tools for community coordination and capital formation, and have political implications. Just as the Web2 Internet balanced information access and creation, mobilizing millions of people, cryptocurrencies and crypto art provide a tool for economic coordination and community formation. Unlike the audiences of Benjamin's time who were mostly passive consumers, they now have the opportunity to own and actively participate in these assets.
in conclusion
The story of the intersection of art and culture is one of evolution and adaptation. It encompasses the many ways in which artistic expression reflects, shapes, and responds to cultural values, social norms, and technological advances. As for how cryptocurrency will impact this story, that is a chapter that is still being written.
Benjamin pointed out that the superstructure (artistic, cultural, political and social spheres) needs time to adapt to changes in the means of production (technology). Painting is an artistic tradition that has lasted for thousands of years, while the history of the means of production of digital art can be measured in decades, and cryptocurrency is even younger. The cultural and political impact of cryptocurrency will take time to fully emerge.
For Benjamin, art represents a site of resistance and transformation, capable of challenging dominant power structures and sparking social change. The integration of blockchain technology into the art world offers new ways for artists, collectors, and communities to engage. As these technologies continue to develop, they have the potential to revolutionize not only the art market, but the broader cultural and political landscape in ways we can only imagine now.
