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2021 — The Year of the NFT
A year has gone by since NFTs entered mainstream culture. But many still wonder – What is an NFT? An NFT, or stands for non-fungible token, is a unique unit of data employing technology that allows digital content — from videos to songs to images — to become logged and authenticated on cryptocurrency blockchains, primarily Ethereum. After content is logged onto the blockchain, every transaction from transfers to sales is recorded on-chain. This creates an easily accessible ledger of provenance and price history. Generally speaking, NFTs is making it easy to own and sell digital content. Previously, for example, digital artists could build up large followings on social media, attract freelance commercial work, and sell prints and other merch with their designs. However, artist faced the challenge of monetizing digital art directly, since consumers could simply take a screenshot of the artist’s work.
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While the technology behind NFTs made it easy to trade and sell images online, it is really the NFT community that has to be credited with creating a market for these digital assets, because technically, as many detractors point out, digital images that have been turned into NFTs can still be saved or screenshot without cost.
Artists typically will mint (create an NFT) their work on an NFT marketplace, and create a smart contract that will be stored on the blockchain. The smart contract lists the creator of the work and ensures that the creator, or other parties, receive royalties each time the NFT is sold.
The ability for artists to collect returns on resale value automatically is part of NFTs’ draw for artists (all platforms make their money by receiving a small percentage of royalties through the smart contract). But the process isn’t perfect: technological glitches can make it so that parties don’t always receive royalties. And a smart contract does not have the legal weight of copyright — it will take a relevant court case to see how the law regards smart contracts.
Smart contracts are stored on
blockchain, but the artwork itself is most often not stored on-chain because storing that much data is too laborious and expensive; accordingly, most smart contracts contain a link to the work they represent. This means that many NFTs comprise two parts, the smart contract and the asset itself. This can cause some confusion about where the value actually resides. However, there are works that are not only stored on-chain but are also created using blockchain tech (more on this below).
While artists are constantly encouraged by their peers to make big bucks making NFTs of their work, there are obstacles. Perhaps the most prohibitive is that minting an NFT is not free, and its cost increases the more congested the Ethereum network becomes, and the more computational effort is needed to do the job. The financial cost of that necessary computational effort is the “gas fee,” which is constantly fluctuating. Currently, it costs some $70 to mint an NFT on Ethereum. The NFT creator doesn’t always do the minting; certain platforms will offload that process and the subsequent cost to the consumer.
While NFTs have had a positive impact on many artists, there isn’t enough data available yet to see if NFTs are benefiting the many or just a select few. Detractors call NFTs a Ponzi scheme. The only comprehensive study of NFTs published so far collected prices from
A popular NFT work in New York.
2017 to April 2021, and reported that $15 was the average sale price of 75 percent of NFTs, with only 1 percent of NFTs reaching prices higher than $1,500. This data, however, should be taken with a grain of salt. It is heavily skewed because the majority of its data points hail from a time before NFTs were adopted at the current scale.
Preventing theft is an ongoing challenge: artists who have held back on creating NFTs have often seen their work minted by unknown parties, and only a few NFT marketplaces verify a piece’s creator before allowing it to sell. Artists who have complained about this issue online have been told to create NFTs of their work just to stop theft, an imperfect solution that has artists feeling as if they’re being forced to create NFTs. Additionally, many artists have refused to create NFTs on moral grounds.
One reason some artists have held back on making NFTs is because they don’t want to profit from the polluting infrastructure of Ethereum. Basically, cryptocurrencies like Ethereum consume immense quantities of power to operate. Currently, a single transaction on Ethereum consumes as much electricity as does a house in a workweek, according to Forbes. While there are alternative cryptocurrencies with a much lower environmental footprint, like Tezos, they have not yet been adopted widely (and the NFT platform built on Tezos recently dissolved). Some NFT platforms buy carbon offsets to mitigate their impact but the actual efficacy of carbon offsets is debatable. The majority of the NFT community has looked past the environmental impacts because Ethereum 2.0 is coming, which will utilize a significantly less polluting infrastructure. It is said to be arriving in early 2022, though its deployment has been “imminent” for years.
Digital art, new media art, software, and blockchain art all represent genres that take advantage of varying specific digital mediums. Work created through any digital medium, or even traditional mediums, can become an NFT. However, there are cases when an artist will use blockchain and smart contracts to create the artwork itself, and it is in these cases only that NFTs represent a medium. Notably, it is only under these circumstances that the rift between smart contract and artwork are healed, because they are one and the same. Regardless of questions of tech versus medium, it’s also clear that the NFT market has uplifted certain kinds of aesthetics and processes.
Artistic values in the NFT community have shifted, expanded, contracted, and evolved again over the past year as collectors, mainly outside the art world, develop their tastes in tandem with the changing market. Collectors are not just building private collections for their own enjoyment. The majority of collectors are more analogous to stock traders, betting on particular collections to rise in value, thus making them perfect for flipping, or as stable stores of value of their cryptocurrency.
Though we have been discussing NFTs through the lens of art, the majority of content being minted is categorized as gaming and collectibles, though there are large swaths of NFTs where the line between collectibles and artworks are blurred—as in the contemporary, traditional art world. There is a higher profit margin to be found in works sold as art rather than as collectibles, and so long as auction houses, collectors, and other institutions know that, it may be difficult to clarify the boundary between those two categories. But 2021 left little space for wider debate as the baffling and novel market evolved at lightning speed; 2022 might see the art world and the public coming to their own conclusions.
Phillips Reports $1.2 B. in 2021 Sales, Plots New Asia Headquarters for Hong Kong Arts District
Phillips will establish a new Asia headquarters in Hong Kong’s storied West Kowloon Cultural District in the fall of 2022, putting it close to the newly opened M+ museum. The news came shortly after Phillips reported that it had made $1.2 billion in sales during the last year. That annual figure was a record for the house, and it marked a 32 percent increase over 2019’s number.
In 2021, the house’s auctions generated $993.3 million, an increase of 35 percent over 2019. Likewise, its private sales channel also managed to thrive, even as people returned to live sales. That area of business brought in the remaining $208.2 million.
The new Hong Kong headquarters will put the boutique house, which is owned by Russian retailer Mercury Group, at the center of one of Asia’s bustling cultural hubs. The auction house will rent out 48,000 square feet in the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority Tower, taking over five and a half floors floors of the 16-story building that overlooks the region’s Victoria Harbour. The top two floors will be used as an exhibition space for auction previews, while the remaining three will serve as retail and office space.’
West Kowloon’s chief executive officer, Betty Fung Ching Suk-yee, said in a statement that the addition of Phillips to the area will begin a “long-term collaboration” that will see Phillips contribute to “local, regional and international arts and cultural development.” The auction house, which already has headquarters in New York and London, has seen its intake from its sales in Hong Kong almost double in the last year, as it continues to reap profits from an ongoing collaboration with China’s Poly Auction. In Asia, the house sold more than HKD $2.1 billion ($270 million) in art, nearly doubling 2020’s figure.
Asian buyers accounted for 36 percent of spending across auction channels at Phillips globally. Phillips reported that half of the top ten lots sold in 2021, went to buyers in Asia. Among those lots were works by Francis Bacon and Georgia O’Keeffe, two juggernauts on the auction block.
The record year signifies that Stephen Brooks, who took over as CEO for Ed Dolman this year, has so far led the house to success. In a statement, Brooks said he believes the house is poised for even larger sums in 2022. He called bolstering Phillips’s presence in Asia a “critical component of our growth strategy.” In September, the CEO sad in an interview in April that part of his long-term plan for the house was to expand the size of evening sales, which have remained the same size for five years, in order to accommodate hunger among buyers.
Rendering of Phillips’ new Asia headquarters in the WKCDA Tower in West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong
The Bronx Museum of the Arts Is Celebrating 50 Years by Announcing a $21 Million Capital Campaign and Major Renovation
The Bronx Museum of the Arts is marking its 50th anniversary with an ambitious $21 million capital campaign that will support a new entrance and lobby prominently placed at the corner of Grand Concourse and 165th Street.
The development marks an exciting new phase for the beloved institution, which has endured a few tumultuous years, including the untimely death of revered leader Holly Block in 2017 and some pandemic-related stops and starts with construction and renovation. It is one of only a handful of New York City institutions that offers entirely free admission.
“As I came on board, it was one thing I was really interested in, the transformation of the museum,” executive director Klaudio Rodriguez said in an interview. He was appointed executive director in November 2020 after serving as deputy director since 2017. One of his first priorities, he said, was to “fast-track” the plan.
After reviewing proposals from 50 architectural firms, the board selected Marvel, whose founding principal is architect and urban designer Jonathan Marvel. “The pitch was really about the community as much as it was about trying to position the building for its next phase,” Marvel stated. “The critical thing at this point was to make sense of the new entrance, putting the front door in the obvious place where it should always have been, and where it was originally, when the building was a synagogue.”
Rodriguez noted that the seed for the entrance relocation was originally planted by Block during her tenure, and that everyone had long agreed that there were under-utilized spaces. He praised Marvel for their “holistic” approach to the project and extensive history of working with cultural institutions— including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Battery Maritime Building downtown, and St. Ann’s
Warehouse in Brooklyn—as well as more than three decades of experience. “We are partners in this process,” he adds.
A major plus is that the renovation will not interfere with the museum’s galleries or programming and it will remain open during the process, which is estimated to wrap up in 2025.
The Bronx museum’s last expansion, in 2006, was a $19 million north wing addition designed by Miami-based Arquitectonica. Marvel’s renovation will integrate the south wing into the existing extension and reimagine the lobby with a multi-level entrance that will have seating, a gathering space, and large street-facing walls for artwork. The relocation of the main entrance to Grand Concourse will open up the facade and serve as an extension of the sidewalk, offering multiple opportunities for art and public programming to be visible from the street. Rodriguez hopes the transformation will bolster public engagement. “It will create much better flow throughout the museum and reintegrate the two halves,” he said. “I really want to make it a central part of the community, where people can gather and feel like they’re in their living room.”
The museum has been admission-free since 2012, and over the past decade, annual attendance increased from 25,000 to more than 100,000.
The renovation will be supported by city funds, with additional support from the state, and will be overseen by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) on behalf of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) and the museum itself. The museum was founded in 1971 by community leaders and activists at a time when the borough was in crisis, and over the past five decades, has carved an identity as a museum dedicated to social justice. More than half of Bronx residents are of Hispanic or Latino origin.
Marvel, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico, says that working on behalf of the Latino community is “one of the great pleasures in my career.” He recounts being somewhat taken aback, albeit happily, upon learning the firm was selected: “During the interview, we did most of the talking and there were very few questions at the end. It turned out we were saying all the right things and there were few questions because they liked everything we said.” Of the stiff competition for the project, he said: “Everyone wants to work on the Bronx Museum. This
is a community-based organization, this is grassroots; it doesn’t get better than this. It’s a beautiful project and a great client.”
bell hooks, Essential Writer on Black Art and Feminism, Dies at 69
bell hooks, a writer and thinker whose texts about Black art, feminism, and identity that inspired legions within academia and far beyond, has died. The Washington Post reported that the cause of death was end-stage renal failure.
Since the ’70s, hooks had been writing essential essays and poetry on an array of topics, many of them pertaining to the inner lives of Black women and to her own experiences. These essays were influential not only because of their groundbreaking subject matter — which, when she began writing, was largely kept out of white-led academic spaces — but also because of their style. In lush, elegant prose, hooks combined theory and poetry, the personal and the political, and academic and vernacular language. A prolific writer with over 40 books published, the writings that made hooks famous carved out a space for Black women at a time when many white feminists did not believe race was related to their cause. Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, whose title refers to a famed Sojourner Truth speech, had been written while hooks was an undergraduate during the ’70s, but it did not make it to press until 1981. It advocated for an understanding that race, gender, and class could not be viewed apart from one another, and that “the struggle to end racism and the struggle to end sexism were intertwined,” as she wrote.
“We, black women who advocate feminist ideology, are pioneers,” she wrote at the book’s end. “We are clearing a path for ourselves and our sisters. We hope that they see us reach our goal — no longer victimized, no longer unrecognized, no longer afraid — they will take courage to follow.”
She applied that clear-eyed prose to the art she saw as well. Her 1995 book Art on My Mind: Visual Politics features interviews with artists like
Carrie Mae Weems, Emma Amos, and Alison Saar, as well as hooks’s own musings on the role art played in her own life. She implied that art could have revolutionary potential, even for the Black community, whose members, she believed, often saw the field as something disconnected from their own lives.
“Taking our cues from mainstream white culture, black folks have tended to see art as completely unimportant in the struggle for survival,” she wrote in the book’s first chapter. “Art as propaganda was and is acceptable, but not art that was concerned with any old subject, content, or form. And black folks who thought there could be some art for art’s sake for black people, well, they were seen as being out of the loop, apolitical. Hence, black leaders have rarely included in their visions of black liberation the necessity to affirm in a sustained manner creative expression and freedom in the visual arts. Much of our political focus on the visual has been related to the issue of good and bad images. Indeed, many folks think the problem of black identification with art is simply the problem of underrepresentation, not enough images, not enough visible black artists, not enough prestigious galleries showing their work.”
While the focus in Art on My Mind was largely Black women, as it had been in other works by hooks, she also periodically turned her attention to men, in particular Jean-Michel Basquiat. Of him, in an essay originally published by Art in America in 1993, she wrote, “To bear witness in his work, Basquiat struggled to utter the unspeakable.” Quickly, her prose turned conversational. She wrote of how a Whitney Museum retrospective characterized him as “the stereotypical black stud randomly fucking white women,” and then concluded that Basquiat taught her something important: “we are more than our pain.”
Whipping between writerly modes like these was—and remains— unconventional within art essays. hooks described it as a necessary strategy, saying that it could bring theory beyond academia. “Part of the challenge for insurgent intellectuals, particularly those of us who are artists in this society, is to pull back from academe, actually, and academic settings,” she told Lawrence Chua in 1994 Bomb interview.
In 2006, hooks discussed this topic further in a series of conversations with artist and scholar Amalia Mesa-Bains, titled Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism, which also touched on the role of art and activism, feminist iconography, and much more. In the book’s preface, hooks says, “This conversation should nurture others. … And by actions like these, which are forms of activism, we repudiate the notion that as cultural workers and intellectuals, we are at odds with the world that we come from. And I agree with you–in this project, we’re thinking about solidarity and the links between Black culture and Latino culture.”
hooks was born under the name Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1952. Raised by a working-class family that she said gave her a different voice on the subjects she would later address, she went on to attend Stanford University for a B.A. and the University of Wisconsin–Madison for an M.A. In 1978, for a book of poetry called And Then We Wept, she took on the alias bell hooks in reference to her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. The unusual lowercase stylization also marked an attempt to “emphasize the importance of the substance of her writing as opposed to who she is,” she once wrote.
As hooks’s writing rose in popularity, it was read widely by artists and more. But not everyone was seduced by it. In a famed article published by the Village Voice in 1995, critic Michele Wallace wrote, “Everybody knows that p.c. rhetoric has become a problem, and Hooks has made herself queen of
bell hooks.
p.c. rhetoric. Without the unlovely p.c. code phrases, ‘white supremacy,’ ‘patriarchal domination’ and ‘self-recovery,’ Hooks couldn’t write a sentence.”
At its core, hooks’s writing remains so widely read because of its openness. “When I find myself raging at the lack of thought behind so many of the images produced by our dominant film and television culture, I turn to the appealing complexity of bell’s writing — a challenge equivalent to the difficulty that should go into creating images,” artist Isaac Julien once wrote in Artforum. Countless other artists have been inspired by hooks over the years since.
Richard Rogers, Architect Behind Paris’s Centre Pompidou, Dies at 88
Richard Rogers, who, with Renzo Piano, designed one of the most famous modern art museums in the world, has died at 88. His firm, the London-based Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, announced Roger’s passing on Sunday. It did not state a cause of death. “A man of immense drive and charisma, he was equally a man of civility and integrity, dedicated to the art and science of architecture, of urbanism, the life of the city, of political commitment and positive social change,” the firm wrote.
Rogers has been considered one of the finest architects of his era, and went on to collect accolades such as the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the world’s top architecture award, and to join France’s Chevaliers de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur, a title bestowed upon few in his field. But his most famous buildings were often greeted with a mix of confusion and anger upon their unveiling. His most important building, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, is now considered an iconic structure, though it did not always hold that distinction. Designed with Piano, Rogers’s former partner, the Centre Pompidou is essentially an inverted museum. Its air conditioning, electrical, and plumbing systems are each given a specific color and displayed on the building’s exterior. With these systems placed outside the structure, the inside is more easily open and easily rearrangeable. “You can do anything you want on those floors,” Rogers told Dezeen in 2013.
Inaugurated in 1977, the building was initially considered an eyesore by Parisians. The French newspaper Le Monde, for example, dispar-
agingly labeled it “an architectural King Kong.” Today, however, it is beloved it by many. In 2021, T: The New York Times Style Magazine put the Centre Pompidou at #16 on its list of the top 25 most significant works of postwar architecture.
Born in Florence in 1933, Rogers once labeled himself the “last of the late modernists” when speaking to the New Yorker in 1988. He founded his firm in 1977, and departed it in 2020. During that time, he undertook an array of projects now considered major, including the Lloyd’s building in London, an imposing structure that, like the Centre Pompidou, has its architectural innards on its exterior. At 14 stories tall, this building is one of the most instantly recognizable ones in the British capital. Another Rogers design in London is the Millennium Dome, which is among the largest structures of its kind in the world. Intended to celebrate the beginning of the third millennium when it was unveiled in 2000, it was viewed as a flop, having failed to draw the crowds many had hoped for.
Periodically, Rogers oversaw projects that had an explicitly sociopolitical context. In 1998, he was invited by the British government to lead an urban task force focused on a housing crisis impacting the nation. Between 2001 and 2008, he acted as London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s chief advisor on architecture and urbanism. Boris Johnson later asked him to return in 2008, and Rogers agreed. Then Rogers departed the post amid an explosive standoff with Prince Charles over a plan to redevelop the Chelsea Barracks.
“I have always believed that there is more to architecture than architecture,” Rogers wrote in his 2017 book A Place for All People: Life, Architecture, and Fair Society. “The first line of my practice’s constitution states: ‘Architecture is inseparable from the social and economic values of the individuals who practise it and the society which sustains it.’” .
