This is the second installment of a three-part series in which I’m exploring why NFTs look the way they do, and how these aesthetics shape and reflect the discourse around them. If you missed part I, you can find it here.
All thoughts and analyses are of course my own, skewed by my experiences of life on Earth.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to deconstruct the aesthetics that have become the most prominent in the discourse around NFTs, and would be most likely to show up to the everyperson sleuthing round the internet. This is about the works that have sold for the most money (and are therefore most likely to make headlines), the top images that show up on Google, and work from minters/creators/artists that are mentioned on Wikipedia.
Last week, I introduced this mapping of the space, in which I identified two overarching tensions, and introduced four themes:
If you want a full breakdown of the mapping, head back to part I. Here, I want to unpack the top two spaces – ‘Reclaiming History’ and ‘The Digital Village’ – to explore the role that sincerity is playing in this space, and what it tells us about our relationship with society and ourselves.
1. Reclaiming History
NFTs (and the abundance of capital they represent) are being used to retroactively attribute value and importance to web 1.0 memes and internet moments.
On first glance, many famous NFTs look like nostalgia for the older internet. Doge, Nyan Cat, Bad Luck Brian, Disaster Girl. But actually, they point to digital communities’ desire to ascribe significance to the moments in history that happened while people still considered the internet to be throwaway. Because memes are important: 67% of Gen Zers and Millennials say memes have helped them cope during the pandemic. In this space, many memes are enjoying the legitimacy of financial value being attached to their images, not to mention the mischievous thrill of having been snuck into auction houses and elitist art institutions.
Tim Berners-Lee and Edward Snowden have both minted and sold their tangible offline/online historical moments to reclaim their significance, and sold them for millions. Jack Dorsey sold the first tweet for $2.9 million. It’s notable that the first two examples here both co-opt minimal black and white aesthetics that are reminiscent of broadsheet newspapers, further exemplifying their continued historical relevance even after time has past.
NFTs from Beeple solidify this sense of making history with iconography that seethes with a self-ascribed sense of creative exploration: astronauts, magical realism and endless blue skies. It’s a retro-futuristic vision of the future: one that originates in the mid-20th century novels of Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, built on the ideal that building new worlds is more appealing than fixing the ones we already live in. The symbolism here indicates that NFTs and those behind them are on the leading edge of brave new worlds. Whether they’re truly pioneers is up for debate, but that’s not the point. What’s clear is that digital audiences have felt under-credited until now.
Aesthetics you’ll recognise:
The juxtaposition of well-known meme iconography in elitist institutions (like Doge getting sold at an auction) implies mischief, playfulness and irreverence: a sense of sneaking into a stuffier and more grown-up space.
Simplistic black and white colourways imply newsworthiness and historical importance.
Slick lines, digital design and imagery of astronauts signify visions of the future, pioneering, exploring, building new worlds, or otherwise adventuring into unknown ones.
The blue skies and hyperrealism indicate creativity, vision and clarity.
2. The Digital Village
NFTs (and the notions of decentralisation they represent) are being used to demonstrate the positive impact that digital culture and communities can drive.
In May of last year, healthcare charity Noora Health minted an NFT called ‘Save Thousands Of Lives’, which sold for $4.5 million, promising to use 100% of the proceeds to improve healthcare on a global scale, truly saving thousands of lives. It’s a looping video, which starts closely cropped on an image of a baby tenderly cradled in a woman’s arms. Slowly, it zooms out, revealing hundreds of others in need of care, with ‘SAVE THOUSANDS OF LIVES’ emblazoned above them in clinical sans-serif font. The aesthetic adopts the tone of a pamphlet you might find in a hospital lobby (fitting, given that Noora Health is a medical organisation), while embodying the sickly sweet sincerity of the opening credits of Love Actually. It tells the viewer that we’re all in it together.
The use of tiled imagery is pretty commonplace in NFTs. CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, VeKings, CryptoKitties and many others: they’re as regularly pictured within tiled collectives as they are individually, autonomous offshoots of a bigger whole. Beeple’s ‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’ collages images from the artist’s daily creations, indicating progress toward a larger goal. In Edward Snowden’s ‘Stay Free’, it’s not people that are tiled, but paperwork from a seminal court reading, collaged to form Snowden’s face. His signature is handwritten at the bottom: a human touch. Despite having publicly decried NFTs, Snowden sold this signed exclusive at a charity auction, once again harnessing the power of tech and the reach it gives us for an unwavering higher cause.
Mass connection was supposed to help us make things better: to cure cancer, end world hunger, find our people. Instead, sometimes it seems like digitisation has just made home delivery quicker, racking up debt easier and social anxiety more abhorrent. In fact, research from Pew Research Center shows that 49% of tech experts worry that the use of technology will weaken core aspects of democracy over the coming decade.
“Reproductive futurism and what we can think of as ‘corporate futurism’ … both favor superficial progress,” writes futurist and theorist Alex Quicho for WIRED. “Under reproductive futurity, we are collectively biased towards non-disruptive and incremental change.” Here, NFTs are a manifestation of our collective anxiety to make technology ‘good’. It’s an exercise in (potentially misguided?) optimism: an attempt to find the positive impact that tech has long promised for society, not just individuals.
Aesthetics you’ll recognise:
Collaged or tiled imagery signifies collective power, mass connection, a link to something bigger than yourself.
Vignettes of individuals (whether the numerous VeKings illustrations or the individuals in Noora Health’s Save Thousands of Lives), hammer home the reality that we’re not all that different from one another.
The use of close-ups on tender interactions and handwriting (as in Edward Snowdon’s ‘Stay Free’) indicates humanity beneath this hyper-digital format.
In Part III, I’ll unpack the aesthetics of the last two themes – Capitalist Cosplay and Subversion as Status – and explore the role of satire in the NFT space.
If you made it this far and you’ve got an opinion, please send me your praise, your arguments and your thoughts. OR send me some requests for future analyses.