NFTs: A Retrospective

In 2022, deadmau5 earned four million dollars from non-fungible tokens (NFTs) by selling a bunch of pixels that anyone could copy and paste and share. As the DJ’s lawyer said:

When he decided to do digital collectibles, I was like, ‘Well, who’s gonna buy that?’ But look at what he did.

Here’s what they looked like.

In 2022, I found myself at Brooklyn Mirage (RIP) at a private party funded by one of the biggest cryptocurrency companies in the world. Deadmau5 headlined as an attempt to sell these horrifying visages. At the club, the humid hysteria of Web3 soaked the air.

Skree, skree, boom, reee, deadmau5 played to the open air stadium of the new gold rush.

Scanning the audience, I felt myself wanting to believe what everyone else believed:

1. This music could be good, not the sound of an espresso machine with no water, with the right perspective.

2. Cryptocurrency wasn’t a vehicle for speculation but a new reality of how we value things.

3. NFTs weren’t a dumb dead-end for delusional money.

I left the concert early, but I heard, later, deadmau5 put on his mouse mask.

This was a big deal.

Buzz zat zat zat, deadmau5 said as I left Brooklyn Mirage. Still not knowing if his official name starts with a capital D or a lowercase d.

The next day, I got invited to an NFT art auction in Soho.

“Scan the pieces you might want to bid on,” a host told me as a crimson eel-like shape glided under me.

I chugged four plastic cups of wine, watching NFTs bloom and fade on the holographic walls as flowers unfurling in a search for financial fertilization. Maybe it was the wine, but I felt the prickle of promise. If I bought the beautiful rendering under my feet, wouldn’t I be buying the experience of this moment? Wouldn’t I be able to archive the NFT that I now owned and open it any time to revisit the experience? Wasn’t that cool, the fact that I could buy this moment in high definition and download it on my computer and load it on my screen?

Or was it dumb?

Today, NFTs are mentioned even less often than COVID. It’s a chapter that modern society seems at peace in forgetting. A few years later, the idea that we ever saw a value in digitally owning some kind of artwork, exclusively but only in spirits, is almost embarrassing and most assuredly quaint. Especially as AI companies so cleanly pick the flesh of creativity without even looking back before flapping their wings to the next creative carrion.

Back at that art gallery in Soho, I still sometimes remember people trying to scan the artwork that they experienced. I still remember that shivering hope that artists might find a new path to sustaining themselves. But the NFT market has flatlined. And it leaves us all with the question: why did art, through that small hole in history, seem suddenly like something everyone wanted all at once? And would pay anything for? Where did the popularity and exclusivity and price all end? And why did that place look so different than where it all began?

And how can the creative industries find a way back to that time where the moment, for once, was the meaning?