Crypto art - is it all just smoke and mirrors and technology?

The idea of crypto art just seems like smoke and mirrors to me. But it's definitely an idea whose time has come: a digital work of art, incorporating 5,000 different images produced by the hitherto largely unknown digital artist known as Beeple (real name Mike Winkelmann), has just sold for US$69 million at Christie's, making it the third most expensive work of art by a living artist, after works by David Hockney and Jeff Koons.

It is crypto art in the same way that Bitcoin is a crypto currency. Although it is just a common garden jpeg, basically just a file on a computer, the way it has become art, and the way that it has become so valuable, is that access to it is protected by a "non-fungible token", an unhackable digital code protected by a blockchain in much the same way as cryptocurrencies are ("fungible" essentially means interchangeable; a bank note, for example is a fungible token, as one bank note is the same as another and can be exchanged for other currencies or other denomination bank notes). 

This electronic protection, then, is the way that a prospective buyer can ensure that the work is unique and individual (at least until the artist decides to issue another copy in the same way, although that is unlikely in this case at least).

Ah, "but is it art?"  you might ask. Well, yes, but is it worth $69 million? Probably not, it's value coming from a combination of the actual artwork itself and the novelty value of a major work using this relatively new technological method of protection (although this is by no means the first instance of crypto art, the idea dating back to the mid-2010s).

Not all crypto artworks are one-off high-value pieces like Beeple's. The idea has been used by less well-known artists to issue limited edition sets, and thereby to actually make some money from an artform that has always been at risk from unauthorized copies. Whether it will prove to be the "salvation" of many a starving digital artist beavering away in their freezing garret, however, remains to be seen. You can of course always copy the picture from this blog, or any number of other websites, but it won't be the real, high-resolution thing. 

I'm not totally sure that the whole concept of crypto art is particularly to be welcomed. But if billionaires with more money than sense want to spend their ill-gotten gains on this kind of thing, then go ahead, knock yourselves out, I guess.

One last point: Vignesh Sundaresan, who was the buyer of the above-mentioned work, bought it using, not cash, not credit, but the cryptocurrency ethereum. Which is possibly the ultimate in post-modernism: buying something that doesn't really exist and has no real intrinsic value with something that doesn't really exist and has no intrisic value.