_iant Partner: encryption Art in the Age of Reproduction

Original author: Li Jin

Original compilation: Deep Tide TechFlow

In March 2024, Christie’s announced the launch of SOURCE (about NFTs), the auction house’s first on-chain generative art collection. The auction comes after digital artist Beeple sold his digital artwork for $69 million through the same auction house three years ago.

This development is likely to have caught the attention of Walter Benjamin, a 20th-century philosopher and cultural critic. Benjamin was interested in the interplay between technology and culture and how they shape each other. In Benjamin’s time, the techniques discussed were photography and film. And today, they are the Internet and artificial intelligence.

Benjamin’s work, especially as embodied in his 1935 essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, raises important questions about the intersection of art, technology, and culture. What is the value of art in an age when it can be reproduced on a large scale? What is the relationship between an original artwork and its reproductions, and how does art copied on a large scale intersect with culture (especially politics) and have an impact?

21st-century technology both extends and complicates Benjamin’s arguments. Now, the act of creation itself can be digitized, eroding the entire notion of “originality”. With the advent of generative AI technology, the lines between originality and copying, author and replicator, and reality and fiction have become more blurred.

Blockchain brings a new dimension to discussions about the value, authenticity, and correlation of art, giving new meaning to Walter Benjamin’s work. Through Blockchain Tracked Ownership, Crypto Assets restores the concept of the origin and originality of digital artworks, re-giving Benjamin’s concept of “aura”. At the same time, Crypto Assets renew what Benjamin calls the “cult value” of art through rituals and traditions generated by community ownership. In an era of increasing cultural and political polarization, Tokens offer new avenues to foster community cohesion and collective action, both echoing and challenging Benjamin’s views on the relationship between art and politics. The result is a redefinition of the relationship between art, technology, and culture in the 21st century.

Aura

A persistent question is: What makes a work of art special, and why would enthusiasts flock to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, or to spend millions of dollars on an original piece of art, rather than looking at or owning an identical-looking replica?

The answer seems to stem from the existence of a work of art – its specific presence, what makes it different from other works. Benjamin named this quality “aura”, which he defined as a work of art “a unique presence in time and shorts, a unique presence in the place where it happens to appear”. For Benjamin, the aura was closely related to the authority and authenticity of the work, and in the age of mechanical reproduction, he believed that both the authority and authenticity of art were threatened.

Benjamin argues that mechanical replication erodes the concept of aura. Digital (re)production further complicates the concept of halo. Art critic Douglas Davis, in his 1995 response to Benjamin, noted that digital reproduction makes “the fictions of ‘masters’ and ‘copies’ now so entangled with each other that it is impossible to say where one begins and where the other ends”.

Crypto Assets have the ability to bring the concept of halo back into art, as it once again makes “originality” possible. By tracking artwork on a distributed ledger, encryption can trace the origin and ownership of digital assets. This ensures that each piece of digital artwork is uniquely owned and authenticated, traceable to the encryption signature of its creator, giving the digital work an aura.

Value

Xu long people think about the value of art from an economic point of view. But Benjamin was equally concerned with the cultural value of art, which he divided into two distinct dimensions: the value of worship and the value of exhibition.

The concept of exhibition value is relatively straightforward. It is the value that artworks have because of their ability to be displayed and viewed in public shorts, museums, galleries and exhibitions.

Benjamin defined cult value (what he called the “original use value” of art) as something more specific and interesting.

For most of human history, art has been closely associated with religion and ritual. Coming into contact with a work of art in a sacred shorts has a mysterious and unpredictable feeling. He believed that “the art of prehistory was first and foremost a magical tool”. Even in a more secular sense, art is a medium for expression and embodiment that is deeply rooted in the beliefs, values, and narratives of a community, whether religious, ideological, or philosophical.

Benjamin suggests that, like the aura, the “cult value” of art wanes over time, giving way to the “exhibition value” of the modern capitalist conception – that is, the value of art as it exists and exists for itself. The digital age has accelerated this process. Works of art tend to be evaluated and appreciated solely for their ability to be seen: the more likes or views a work gets, the long more valuable it is. At the same time, the consumption of art is becoming more and more individual, with consumers engaging with art alone, rather than through collective experiences.

Here, Crypto Assets provide a balance. Crypto Assets have the potential to revive the concept of cult value. Just as traditional art was once closely associated with shared rituals and beliefs, encryption projects create a sense of vesting and shared identity among holders. NFT projects like Bored Ape and Botto (a community-managed AI artist), and even memes that might be seen as a form of encryption art, have their own rituals, languages, and online shared shorts. This series of rituals may have economic value, which is a dimension of mutual interest between their communities. encryption art is inherently Depth participatory, allowing individuals to directly participate, contribute, and shape the cultural significance of these projects, reinforcing their cult values.

Politics

It is easy to interpret Benjamin with a purely pessimistic attitude, arguing that he lamented the loss of the aura and the ritual value of art in the face of mechanical reproduction. But underneath this palpable lament is a more subtle exploration of the transformative political potential inherent in the democratization of art.

Benjamin saw mechanical reproduction as a profoundly democratizing force. He referred to “the great upheaval of tradition” and “the crisis and renewal of contemporary humanity” and “the intimately connected mass movement of our time”. In a world where the aura of art is fading and the value of the exhibition has replaced the value of worship, Benjamin argues that the meaning of art is rooted in something else: politics specifically. He cites the example of a photographer who shot street scenes in Paris, shooting them “like crime scenes,” noting that photographs “become standard evidence of historical events and acquire implicit political significance.” Iconic images can have political significance and inspire people to take action.

Benjamin, a staunch socialist, pointed out that photography was a “truly revolutionary means of reproduction” that “appeared at the same time as the rise of socialism”, thus directly linking the democratic art of photography with the democratic politics of socialism. For example, photography during the Great Depression drew attention to the plight of workers, thus building momentum for projects to support workers. The politicization of art can also be extremely dangerous – as a Jew living in fascist Germany, Benjamin was deeply concerned about how art can be used by totalitarian movements to kidnap and manipulate attention and perception in the service of their own agendas

The age of digital reproduction brings us some examples of extreme artistic political influences. For example, the massive spread of memes surrounding Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency (some of which were posted directly by him). At the same time, the advent of artificial intelligence and the rise of disinformation and depth falsification have undermined our shared sense of reality.

There are several aspects that can be explored about how encryption intersects with art in the political realm. Crypto Assets can be profoundly liberating in an economic sense, as it allows longest participants to have more accessible ownership and reap economic benefits from that ownership. As I recently wrote about the attention economy in Crypto Assets: Crypto Assets differ from Web2 in that everyone in the value chain can benefit from being the owner of “attention assets.”

The censorship resistance nature of blockchain also protects artistic expression from suppression. During the global COVID lockdowns, some netizens uploaded videos and messages deleted from social media platforms by censors onto the on-chain, using NFTs as a tool for political resistance. As I mentioned, Crypto Assets are highly participatory and can inspire people to create communities around shared values and enable novel forms of capital formation for political purposes. For example, in January 2023, Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and artist Shepard Fairy encouraged supporters to express their “proof of protest” through an open-version NFT collection called Putin’s Ashes, in which the proceeds were donated to Ukrainian soldiers.

Ultimately, encryption art and Crypto Assets as a whole are tools for community coordination and capital formation with political significance. Just as the Web2 internet balances access to information and creation, mobilizing millions of people, Crypto Assets, as well as encryption art, provide a tool for economic coordination and community formation. Unlike Benjamin’s audience, which was longest passive consumers, they now have the opportunity to own and actively participate in these assets.

Conclusion

The story of the intersection of art and culture is a story of evolution and adaptation. It encompasses the longest ways in which artistic expression reflects, shapes, and responds to cultural values, social norms, and technological advancements. As for how Crypto Assets will affect the story, that’s a chapter that’s still being written.

Benjamin points out that the superstructure (artistic, cultural, political and social spheres) needs time to adapt to changes in the means of production (technology). Painting is an artistic tradition that lasts for k years, while the history of digital art production means can be measured in decades, and Crypto Assets is younger. The cultural and political impact of Crypto Assets will take time to fully manifest.

For Benjamin, art represents a place of resistance and change, capable of challenging dominant power structures and triggering social change. The integration of Blockchain technology into the art world offers new ways for artists, collectors, and communities to get involved. As these technologies continue to evolve, they have the potential to revolutionize not only the art market, but also the broader cultural and political landscape in ways that we can only imagine now.

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