We had to get there. The International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) begins Thursday evening with the presentation of a documentary on a strange and fascinating cryptoartistic affair which sums up our opaque era. The very recent story begins in a New York auction house in October 2018. The ghostly portrait Edmond de Belamycreated by the French collective Obvious, then made history by becoming the first work produced by artificial intelligence to be sold at auction.
Christie’s believed it was selling off the synthesis of classic portraits for $10,000. The work ultimately brought in 50 times more (with commissions and taxes). It was bought by a rich Hong Konger who reveals himself in the film as being certain of having got his hands on the equivalent of The Mona Lisa. In the film, when the young digital artists reveal their creation to friends for the first time, we hear them laughing very loudly…
The film Obvious, art hackers tells what happens next. Since then, the trio of young French creators has struggled to establish themselves, despite some inventive projects such as this idea of creating a new Marianne by amalgamating thousands of faces of “ordinary” French women.
FIFA is also interested in another even more crazy cryptoart story. In 2017, two Canadian programmers, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, were freelancing in their office in a seedy corner of Brooklyn when they had the idea to entertain themselves by creating a little art project inspired by well-known hockey cards. from our home. Their algorithm built in around fifteen hours generated 10,000 rectangular characters of 24 pixels by 24 colored pixels. The entire CryptoPunks collection was linked to the Ethereum blockchain and left for anyone to speculate on.
“It was a Tuesday afternoon, we put it online and went for a beer without thinking about it,” says John Watkinson in the documentary What the Punk!. The craze took off over the weekend after an article on the site Mashable covering social media. One digital creation nourished the other. In the article, the journalist questioned the real value of the production: was it a hoax or the contemporary equivalent of Warhol’s screen prints?
The formula hit the mark and speculators were willing to believe in the second option, that of brilliant creation in spite of itself. The series has become the mother of all cryptoart productions using the non-fungible token (NFT), a technology guaranteeing the originality of a computer object (a token) using a digital identifier.
Investors traded and accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars once the fever was over, often paying themselves in cryptocurrency of course. “It’s like being able to buy a Picasso for a few hundred dollars,” says one of the investors. “In 30 years, the work will be in all museums. Except that what was supposed to happen in 10 years happened in 10 months…” Drawing number 7523 from the series alone sold for US$11.7 million at a Sotheby’s auction in June 2021 .
Hyperspeculative madness
Both films have the merit of exposing a staggering reality that is changing at an exponential speed. Even Obvious’s prowess seems to belong to the digital stone age compared to what is now possible with image generators freely available online for everyone. And a new program unveiled last month, Sora, already produces breathtakingly realistic videos in the blink of an eye.
The creative revolution by machines is spreading. Existential questions around “authenticity” and the relationship between real and virtual are growing. American actors were on strike for months last year to limit the use of AI. This week, in The Guardian, composer Guy Chambers worried about the very real possibility of his craft disappearing. “Anyone could insert a command into an AI program like: ‘I want a song at 100 bpm that sounds like a cross between Abba and Artic Monkeys.’ Music will then be created and it will sound pretty good,” he noted.
Speculation around digital experiments also says essential things about our time. Both films refer to the work Everydays, by the American Beeple, collage made online from 5000 computer-generated drawings and animations. Its sale at Christie’s brought in more than 100 million Canadian dollars, while master paintings no longer find buyers at a tenth or hundredth of this price. The success of CryptoPunks stimulated the production of the series Bored Apes, which generated two billion dollars in transactions in a few months. The bidding now concerns non-fungible and non-tangible land and buildings in the metaverse.
Cryptoart thus becomes the symptom of an unhealthy capitalism fueling hyperspeculation on emptiness (or almost). The same delusional madness explains the stratospheric sums exchanged around cryptocurrencies. The most detestable part of our world is concentrated there, starting with money and no longer knowing what to do with it to the point of using it to pay fortunes for small, insignificant drawings. Moreover, the magazine Current Affairs (but not the two documentaries, too hagiographic) recently wondered if NFTs were not, ultimately, “the stupidest thing that happened in the history of humanity”…
Obvious, art hackers is presented at the opening of FIFA on Thursday at 7 p.m., at the Outremont theater, and will be available online from March 22. What the Punk! will be presented at the McCord Stewart Museum on March 17 at 7 p.m..