Seeing a lot of NFT folks building a straw man version of the traditional art world that describes it as solely a provider of financial investments for rich collectors. This is profoundly wrong and feels defensive and self-justifying. A thread.

Since at least the 60s a lot of artists have explored various approaches to making work that resist or question the commodity value of art objects. Conceptual art, land art, installation art, and performance art all produced work that had no obvious way of being sold at the time.

More recent generations have taken these ideas even further with social practice, relational aesthetics, net art, and various threads of contemporary feminist art amongst other movements that exist in parallel to the exploding art market.

These types of artists tend to have a complex and evolving relationship to the art market — sometimes explicitly resisting it, sometimes adapting to it and manipulating it to their own ends, sometimes being exploited by it or selling out to it.

And while there has definitely been a huge influx of investment cash into the art market in the last few decades a number of other institutions that are less completely commercial have also arisen: contemporary museums, the biennial system, residencies, artist collectives, etc

Ironically this type of art gets attacked and dismissed as “elitist” by the general public much more than the work that is actually being sold for millions and treated as investments by financial elites, which is primarily traditional painting and sculpture.

Like a lot of “anti-elitist” rhetoric, many NFT proponents’ attacks on the art world are not truly populist but instead fighting against one elite (the art world) on behalf of another elite (the tech world).

So far NFTs don’t provide anything other than new tools for treating art as commodities. They don’t do anything for improving access or creating context for critical or reflective work — though I’m hopeful we’ll see more moves in these directions in the future.

But, until then, I think the whole NFT scene would benefit from a big dose of humility in relationship to the traditional art world. There are deep cultural traditions and knowledge there. Dismissing that is reactionary and culturally destructive not creative and forward looking.