NFTs Are Already a Part of Art History

It’s sometimes easy to overlook exactly how far NFTs have penetrated into the art world, given how thoroughly the general public has rejected the speculation and hype that has come to define the asset class.

Madeleine Pierpont will speak at Consensus 2024 this May in Austin, Texas. Grab your pass here.

But it’s true. Just look at these data points: The world’s biggest auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s still routinely run NFT sales. Legendary arthouse imprint TASCHEN recently published a deep history of the crypto art scene. Art market mainstains like Artnet News and Art Review cover the industry beat. There are NFTs hanging in museums around the world. And every week there’s news of some painter, band or what-have-you decides to experiment with tokenization.

There are those who still say “NFTs aren’t art,” but the art world generally disagrees with them.

Perhaps no one is as familiar with this dynamic than Madeleine Pierpont, the Web3 associate for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), tasked with the equally enviable and unenviable job of trying to bring in potentially skeptical museum goers into the fold via blockchain programming. While art institutions often have the (deserved) reputation of being elitist, exclusive and outdated, Pierpont argues that NFTs are bringing a renewed verve to the industry and piquing interest in digital art.

“We’re collectively defining this art historical moment as it evolves. It’s a challenge because the ecosystem, the NFT space, is so young. There are so many artists that I would hope can be in the museum’s collection and be exhibited at some point, but it is such a young ecosystem. Only time will tell,” Pierpont, who will be speaking at the Consensus 2024 conference held May 29 – 31, 2024 in Austin, Texas, told CoinDesk in an interview.

To some extent, NFTs and art are a natural pairing — and not just because a general purpose technology is essentially a blank canvas. But as a medium of exchange, they also help to better connect patrons to creators, and boost transparency in a market known for obscure dealings.

CoinDesk caught up with Pierpont to discuss her crypto projects at MoMA (including “Postcards”), what defines the crypto art scene today, and what it was like working with Yoko Ono.

Does “crypto art” as a term make sense?

Yeah. Is it a cohesive movement?

I have a really very specific opinion on this. I think that, as an ecosystem, we think about the Web3 space, we’re far ahead of the general public in terms of comprehension of fundamental blockchain concepts, in terms of understanding how to even interact with or buy an NFT or interact with a wallet. Taking a step back for a second: a lot of people I know have very strong opinions about the fact that NFT is kind of seen as a dirty word, and sometimes argue for abandoning it in favor of crypto art.

I think that if we continue to change terminology and continue to change language, it will only become more confusing. I really do feel like we’re almost a decade ahead of what the general public’s comprehension will be. And so continuing to change the terms just makes it more confusing when people are trying to enter the space. So I feel strongly that we should stick to the term NFT, considering that as a term NFT has just seen more light. There’s more visibility around that term.

To some extent, you’re saying to just stay the course because that’s the term that initially caught on. But like, comparing like NFTs to inscriptions, which seems to me like a much more descriptive word — analogous to calling a painting a painting because it’s about the method of creation. Whereas, what is a non-fungible token?

Yeah, that’s interesting. It raises the question: how do we really define NFTs? Like, what is the defining factor of crypto art or NFTs? But inscriptions, I haven’t heard that term before.

It’s relatively new. They started off on Bitcoin but you can inscribe data on a lot of blockchains. They’re sometimes called ordinals, after the protocol that was created that enabled the actual process of “inscribing” data. But then what results is the inscription.

That’s interesting, but then I think there’s issues around the art historical context of the term inscription, because to inscribe something physically is different than to inscribe something in code.

Fair point. Guess it’s more of a metaphor.

For me, though, I think it’s less about terminology and more about finding more accessible ways to actually just communicate the fundamentals around the technology.

It seems like the art community was willing to accept and embrace NFTs quickly, while the general public almost immediately rejected them due to concerns over energy costs, rampant financialization and speculation. Do you think that given the way they were presented to the world initially that there is now some insurmountable gap that these things have to cross to actually be embraced by the public?

It’s tricky. That’s a really big and difficult question to answer. And I think it’s hard to know what we’ll see in the next year, let alone in the next five years. It’s definitely impossible to predict what might happen in a decade. What’s funny is how opaque art is, in ways that hide the same dynamics in the quote unquote traditional art market. There’s this strong division between the art itself and the dollars associated with it, in terms of what’s publicly communicated.

Yes, there has been a hyper-financialization in the NFT space, but money is not a dirty word in art. Money and art are interlinked. NFTs, being so transparently connected to the content that’s being produced, is not a negative thing. That being said, in the last two years, because of the bear market, there hasn’t been as much turnover. People have had time to really focus on their projects, spend more time building and to understand what they want to communicate. There’s fewer people throwing something out there trying to make a bunch of money and then pulling away from the ecosystem.

I’m not familiar with that.

I think it was the 70s, avant-garde artist Robert Rauschenberg punched one of his biggest collectors, because he was angry that he wasn’t profiting if his work was being sold on the secondary market. It’s sort of this infamous moment in art history that symbolized how financialized everything had become by the mid-20th century, because at the end of the altercation Scull pulled Rauschenberg in and said something like “When I make money, you make money” and they ended up hugging.

That’s interesting. Something that’s different about the way that the NFT space currently functions versus the way that the trad art market functions is that typically institutions are always the last to really accept an art movement or to validate an artist. Artists are always looking towards that institutional validation, but it sometimes can take a really long time. It’s more of a machine. It can take decades to work up the food chain.

What’s interesting about the NFT space is that collectors are so connected to the artists themselves. Sometimes artists are collectors and vice versa. That individual level of patronage is really exciting because it knocks validation down to on a one-to-one basis, allowing the community to grow in concentric circles. It’s more complicated and dynamic than in the traditional art market.

To some extent you are serving the role of validating some artists, picking some artists over others at MoMA. Does it stress you out if you’re making the right choices, writing art history in time?

Oh my gosh, I never thought about it in that context. We’re collectively defining this art historical moment as it evolves. What I will say is it’s a challenge because the ecosystem, the NFT space, is so young. There are so many artists that I would hope can be in the museum’s collection and be exhibited at some point, but it is such a young ecosystem. Only time will tell.

I continue building relationships to try to understand how we really want to contextualize NFT art and the NFT community in relation to the museum. It’s a very diplomatic way of not answering your question because I don’t necessarily think I can speak to validating one artist over another.

Could you talk about the inspiration behind Postcards?

To take a step back, I came to the NFT space from the context of art and technology. So my background is in art history and art and business, but I started interning for The Lumen Prize. Their whole mission is just to celebrate and support artists working with technology across any media. That’s how I found blockchain. What was really exciting to me about it was the power that it had to build community in such a global and democratic way. It connects people through their passions, rather than, you know, geographical locations.

With Postcard, we had a number of different goals, but one was to highlight how blockchain can bring people together. We asked people to work on Postcards together, and wanted to create an accessible experience that would hopefully onboard people to engage with blockchain. It was an entirely Web3 experience without a custodial wallet. The aim was to inspire dialogue and richer conversation about what blockchain can do for the general public that’s probably more familiar with Web2.

It was really a great learning experience for our team as well because I think we better understood the barriers that we face in trying to get people to use technology in general. We learned a lot about what we could be doing to better facilitate those conversations. One of my focuses this year is trying to create IRL conversations because as much as we are in the digital space, it feels like the most meaningful connections that happen are when people are able to come into a room and converse.

Do you display NFTs at home?

I actually don’t own that many, surprisingly. But I actually love Infinite Objects — it’s a beautiful way to display NFTs. I know people also use Samsung frames. I actually don’t think there’s really a perfect solution out there that’s seamless and easy to use. It’s a bit of a market gap.

Some NFTs work really well just on your phone or on your laptop and don’t need to necessarily live in a displayed environment and others look really beautiful displayed on a digital screen. A lot of artists print out their work and will sell digital and physical versions. I’ve always generally been against that because I think that something that is natively digital should retain its natively digital value. But I might be shifting my opinion after a few conversations I had at NFT NYC.

I don’t think that there is a great NFT artist yet — like a Picasso level. My concern is that the artists aren’t weird enough. Is the NFT scene genuinely radical enough?

That’s a really interesting question. Thinking back a few years to 2020, it was really cool to watch this space grow so quickly. It was really cool to see artists make a name for themselves by producing things that people were excited about and posting about it on Twitter/X and building an organic community. It seemed like there was a lot more experimentation at that time. This is a crass way to put it, but people were going balls to the wall saying “this is me, this is my art, this is what I want to do.” That evolved with the hyper-financialization of some NFT projects, when people became more modest in what they produced because they wanted to make sure that they were still assuaging their collector base and producing things that their community was excited about. I think there was an element of like, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it in terms of production.

I can’t speak for every single artist. But a few years ago, it was a little wilder. Things feel a little bit more subdued right now, but that might just be the moment in time. I’m not sure that there will be new people that come in and get funky and weird and crazy. But there’s still time for more people to enter the space. Like I said before, it’s a young ecosystem. To me, the art that’s most exciting is actually using blockchain in some way in the creation of the art itself — that marries blockchain and conceptual art.

Anything you want to add?

Can I just do a quick plug?

So the sound machines exhibition, which you had mentioned in your email, has now closed but Yoko Ono’s public Sound Piece V is still open and will be in perpetuity. So anyone who wants to participate in that can. I would encourage anyone reading the article to go check the Feral Files site and record their laugh and upload it to the laughter archive.