"There are far more radical forms of digital art than the cultural dead end of NFTs"
With a focus entirely on commercialism, NFTs are the most boring form of digital art being developed, writes Phineas Harper.
Last month, a collaborative online art project created on Reddit took the internet by storm. The vast interactive artwork, called Place allowed anyone to lay coloured tiles on its enormous canvas one pixel at a time with each user was only able to add a single tile once every five minutes.
Working alone it was impossible to design anything substantial so Place users collaborated in enormous decentralised teams, coordinating their tile placement through self-organised online communities. The result was a million-pixel battleground in which rival factions jostled for their preferred artworks to prevail.
Place is a highpoint in the history of internet art
National flags, cultural icons, memes and even Herzog & de Meuron's Hamburg Elbphilharmonie were drawn and then overwritten by competing online factions.
Place is a highpoint in the history of internet art. Its technicolour vitality flows from the thousands of people who contributed. Free and open, the project perfectly expresses the possibilities of art in the age of the World Wide Web.
Yet in recent months a very different kind of online art has taken up headlines – one that derives its value not from sharing, but from owning: Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs). An NFT is simply a unique chunk of data like a digital certificate whose ownership can be sold and verified using an online public ledger called a blockchain.
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By connecting a media file like a jpeg, gif or video with its own certificate, it becomes possible to trade them. The media itself is not sold but the digital certificate linked to it can switch hands for as much as buyers are willing to pay.
If you can convince enough people that a certificate linked to a piece of digital art you made is valuable then it becomes possible to make thousands of dollars flogging it in one of the numerous NFT marketplaces. Many celebrities, designers and artists have launched NFTs linked to their work including Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. Even beleaguered British chancellor Rishi Sunak has got in on the action by asking the UK treasury to create an NFT.
Ownership is merely a clerical add-on to the practice of art making
Big names and big sums, combined with global lockdowns that pushed many to adopt a more digital existence, have fueled international hype around NFTs propelling the burgeoning market to a value of $41 billion in 2021. This has prompted many to ask if NFTs are the future of art, but there are far more radical forms of digital art than the cultural dead end of NFTs.
Whether NFTs are here to stay or not, they are the most boring form of art ever created, centring value in nothing more than ownership.
Owning art is the least interesting aspect of art. A great artwork might be pioneering in its use of media, arresting in its formal composition or rich with symbolism. It might ask profound questions of its audience or simply elicit a feeling among those who experience it.
Ownership, however, does none of these things. Ownership is merely a clerical add-on to the practice of art making – the dull transaction necessitated by an economic system based on property owners harvesting value from the work of others.
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The relative merit between NFTs worth millions and pennies is nothing but the promise of how much others might pay to own them.
In this sense, NFTs are the epitome of an industry lost to speculative investment – hallow avatars for late capitalism's broken relationship with the art and design worlds. They are the contemporary art market meeting its logical endpoint at which hype and hustle triumph over any other consideration.
Of course, the gallerists of Frieze and Basel have long used PR and spectacle to puff up the value of their collections, but the sheer banality of the NFT craze has reached a new level of tedium.
For all the designers who have successfully cashed in, many more will lose out
Digital art itself is not at fault. The aesthetic of many profitable NFT collections (gurning cartoon monkeys feature heavily) are certainly flat and derivative but those qualities are not intrinsic to digital art. Digital art can, like Place, allow new forms of interactivity or, like remarkable computer games, immerse audiences in worlds as compelling as the best literature.
NFTs, however, explore none of this potential, retreating into the cultural cul-de-sac of mere ownership. Shills will say that NFTs are a new means for struggling artists to make money, but this narrow justification misses many key points.
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First, those best able to profit from the NFT bubble are those already in command of substantial followings like the famous musicians Grimes, Eminem and Snoop Dogg who all recently released lucrative NFT collections. If there is cash to be made from issuing tokens, it will mostly flow to the already wealthy few rather than the struggling many.
Second, minting an NFT is not free, requiring makers to buy into cryptocurrency exchanges at their own risk like a pyramid scheme. For all the designers who have successfully cashed in on the hype machine, many more will lose out, predominantly those least able to do so.
Above all, NFTs erode the most radical and adventurous aspect of the internet: sharing. Sharing is a nourishing act of solidarity, fundamentally more enjoyable and resource-efficient than the kind of private, solitary ownership that consumerism promotes.
But every time something that could have been sold is shared, an opportunity to extract profit has been lost, and it is for this reason big tech and finance are cynically pouring resources into cryptocurrency innovations like NFTs.
As art, NFTs are boring beyond words, but as tools to commodify what was previously a digital commons they may be far more insidious – turning the internet from a place of sharing to a place of owning.
Phineas Harper is director of Open City and formerly deputy director of the Architecture Foundation. He is author of the Architecture Sketchbook (2015) and People's History of Woodcraft Folk (2016).
The post "There are far more radical forms of digital art than the cultural dead end of NFTs" appeared first on Dezeen.
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"RIBA upgrading Portland Place is an expensive solution to the wrong problem"
Rather than spending £20 million to refurbish its headquarters, RIBA should make its spaces freely available for others to host engaging architectural programmes, says Phineas Harper.
Barely a week goes by without hearing an architect complaining about the RIBA. Griping over the 184-year-old Royal Institute of British Architects has become the background noise of life in the profession – the inevitable exasperated segway of every pub debate and predictable punchline of all industry jokes.
The frustrations of its detractors are understandable. RIBA enjoys an income of £21 million, employs over 300 staff, and owns combined assets worth north of a quarter of a billion quid.
RIBA should be an irrepressible force for positive change
It is in a completely different league to every other architecture charity in the country, able to deploy resources and take risks most organisations can only dream of. With these considerable advantages, many feel RIBA should be an irrepressible force for positive change, and it's the gap between that vast potential and the sometimes lacklustre reality which seeds rancour among its members.
However, in a recent speech at 66 Portland Place marking 100 days of his tenure as the new RIBA president, Simon Allford, kingpin of AHMM for three decades and among the best-connected designers in London, outlined a plan to mend the rift between architects and their institute.
Declaring it "must change", Allford called for the RIBA to "become a generous host" – a shrewd manifesto which, if taken to heart by the institute's top brass, could remake the organisation's ethos and reputation.
Cultural production in architecture has been starved of cash for over a decade by government austerity and is poorly understood by the big British arts funders. Generosity should, as Allford insists, therefore be at the core of the well-heeled RIBA's strategy. A new spirit of generous hosting would quickly pay dividends in the tidal wave of warmth and appreciation that would follow such a shift.
Britain is bustling with independent organisations creating memorable and impactful events
Pivoting from producing their own cultural programmes, to becoming "generous hosts" of others' could transform the reach and efficacy of RIBA. Britain is bustling with independent organisations creating memorable and impactful events celebrating and interrogating architecture in adventurous ways often on miniscule budgets.
Rather than using its resources to compete with this community of buccaneering culture creators, what if the RIBA instead supported them with grants, space and promotion?
Why not make architecture.com, RIBA's enviable flagship URL, a home for championing all events engaging audiences with architecture rather than just those run by RIBA staff?
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Why not direct RIBA's 350,000 Twitter and Instagram followers to the daily array of architectural exhibitions, talks and festivals staged by others, rather than only RIBA's own?
Why not make the vast collection of photography and drawings in the institute's archives freely available for non-profit publishing rather than charging hefty licence fees? By foregrounding and enabling the work of others, and generously opening up access to its assets, RIBA could contribute so much more to the world than by guardedly acting in isolation.
Imagine what all the small charities working on connecting ordinary people with big conversations about the urban landscape could achieve if, instead of burning half their energy hustling for scraps of funding from the Arts Council and sponsors, they could draw on core support from the RIBA coffers.
RIBA HQ isn't perfect but its weakness is not its architecture
Yet instead of investing outwards, the RIBA is instead poised to pump £20 million into a "comprehensive refurbishment" of its own 1934 central London headquarters. The upgrade will certainly give 66 Portland Place shiny new facilities, but to what end? The George Grey Wornum-designed HQ isn't perfect but its weakness is not its architecture, but rather who is (and who isn't) able to use it.
The single biggest barrier to anyone instigating cultural programmes in Britain, especially London, is the cost of access to space. Attempt to book a theatre, gallery or crumbling warehouse for a simple talk, and you'll likely be looking at a bill for thousands of pounds.
The RIBA itself currently charges around £10,000 including a minimum bar and canapes spend to host a 200 person lecture in its Florence Hall (and that's with a charity discount!). This high cost of access stifles innovation, driving ticket prices up and creative culture makers far away from Marylebone.
66 Portland Place should be the village hall of the profession – a space for everyone with something to say about architecture to speak freely. Instead, posh wedding parties and corporate conference organisers are the only clients with pockets deep enough to get past the lobby.
RIBA should simply open the doors and let people in
If a more generous RIBA were to make decent spaces freely available to anyone working on architectural public programmes, they could catalyse a rapid renaissance in the vivacity and impact of the sector's cultural life. Instead of investing £20 million in itself, building bigger, better, more competitive facilities to draw audiences away from programmes elsewhere, RIBA should simply open the doors and let people in.
Hosting the programmes of others needn't mean RIBA producing less itself. Some of the institute's most valuable work is its least visible – template policies and contracts, the stages of work, a pension scheme. These are the unsexy professional tools that help architects navigate the terrain of their trade every day.
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Allford's call for expanded generosity could include RIBA launching useful new services such as insurance. British practises currently endure exorbitant professional indemnity premiums from an insurance sector that doesn't understand the industry and has no incentive to rein in prices.
Russell Curtis, a director at RCKa says insurance bills for many small practises are spiralling to as much as £100,000 a year meaning many firms are struggling to make ends meet.
Marco Goldschmied, a former RIBA president, has called on the institute to act by launching its own insurance scheme. Using its clout and contacts, RIBA could run an underwriting arm dedicated to supporting architects with better cover than the bad deals high street insurers offer.
Discount the premiums in line with annual RIBA fees and no one would question the value of chartered membership ever again. Alternatively, RIBA could, as Goldschmied argues, simply lead the process of signing up the 300 or so practises required to launch an architects' mutual – using its unique position to instigate genuinely useful change without carrying the risk.
For me, the endless RIBA-bashing is cathartic pub banter but will ultimately not lead to real change. Allford is right to centre his presidency on making the institute more generous, but RIBA spending £20 million to upgrade Portland Place – an already remarkable building – feels like an expensive solution to the wrong problem.
The real solution to transforming RIBA's cultural impact and winning over the hearts of sceptics is not owning an amazing space, but entrusting others with meaningful ownership of space.
Phineas Harper is director of Open City and formerly deputy director of the Architecture Foundation. He is author of the Architecture Sketchbook (2015) and People's History of Woodcraft Folk (2016).
The post "RIBA upgrading Portland Place is an expensive solution to the wrong problem" appeared first on Dezeen.
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