Divide and Conquer

Expanding on the art world’s latest scam, a former Christie’s executive has jumped on the NFT bandwagon and created PARTICLE, an online marketplace for “fine art masterpiece” NFTs.

The first item for sale is 10,000 shares of Banksy’s Love Is In The Air. The original Love Is In The Air (also known as The Flower Thrower ) adorns a wall in Bethlehem, Palestine.

But what exactly is being sold here? Is it Banksy’s 2005 painting of the same name?

No - what’s being sold is a digital certificate that bestows ownership of a randomly selected virtual cell from a 100 x 100 grid overlaid on an digital image of the painting.

Bansky, Love Is In The Air, 2003

PARTICLE purchased this piece for $12.9m at auction and is now trying to turn a profit on this by selling shares in the ownership. So much for the quaint idea of holding a portfolio of art assets and patiently waiting for them to appreciate. No time for that - gotta make bank NOW!

Judging by the amount of white background, odds are at least 8 to 1 that a buyer of a random 1/10,000the share will get virtual “ownership” of blank space.

PARTICLE claims that the work itself will not be destroyed (even though it will be particalized), and that PARTICLE will retain 9% ownership to prevent anyone from claiming “possession of the physical piece”. Except for PARTICLE, of course, which will maintain possession and hold the work in trust. Likely in the PARTICLE Museum, where admission fees will be charged for entry.

So act now and you can own a digital certificate that says you own some tiny portion of a painting that you will never actually own or likely to ever see in person.

WTF is NFT?

Would you pay $999,000 for this? Image: Cryptokitties.co

The Newest Financial Twist in art is the promotion of financial products, in this case the crypto-currency known as Ethereum. The art is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is money.

Beeple is an ideal vehicle for investors (those with No Fucking Taste). His endless regurgitation of lowbrow images in digital collages recalls critic Robert Hughes, who pointed out that “What strip-mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.” The self-named Beeple-Crap (https://www.beeple-crap.com/) “art shit for yer facehole”, is undoubtedly the most honest part of the whole affair.

In the final minutes of the Christie’s auction, bidding suddenly accelerated in increments of $10 million. Bid manipulation is an old game in the auction world, where artists and dealers buy their own work to boost prices. The secrecy surrounding the identity of buyers lends an additional air of illegitimacy to an already cloudy activity.

Damien Hirst was reportedly among the “consortium of businessmen” that bought his £50 million skull “as an investment”. Among the many things we will never know is whether there really was a consortium and what the actual price was, as the appearance of huge sales benefits both the artist and the auction house.

Art at the high end has always been an investment vehicle. In the good old days dealers guided collectors in building diversified investment portfolios of art. Collectors were expected to support the dealer with regular purchases, and if they didn’t they were out. Now most galleries are busy slugging it out for sales at art fairs and online platforms, and investors (formerly known as “collectors’) are only interested in the best (lowest) possible price.

Enter the NFT, short for Non Fungible Token. One cannot help buy enjoy the obvious contradiction of the name.

fungible adj. law: of such nature or kind as to be freely exchangeable or replaceable, in whole or in part, for another of like nature or kind

What’s really for sale here is not the art but the crypto-currency. Nobody is talking about what a magnificent piece of work this is, or the artist’s purpose in creating it, or the cultural relevance of the work (see Robert Hughes’ quote above). It’s all about the astounding amount of money - the third-highest auction price for a living artist - and the crypto. Which, unfortunately, is for some the very definition of cultural relevance.

This is simply a promotional event publicizing the new currency. NFT trading volume in Ethereum increased 2,850% between December 2020 and February 2021. What better way to boost it than with a controversial, record-setting, and highly publicized transaction?