Jumping into the conversation mid-stream, let me catch you up:
“Non-fungible tokens” (NFTs) are unique digital identity markers, recorded on lines of blockchain (think “crypto currency coding stuff”). It is, ultimately, a digital signature of, well, anything. It marks and records ownership. So I make an NFT which is a meme of Dcn Dawson in a Hello Kittie costume, and you purchase it. The blockchain records the ownership. That digital “identity tag” as it were, now says “this meme belongs to (insert your name).”
If this sounds like we’re all just trading around idle strings of code that’s because that is precisely what it is: an imaginary value marker. The only material value an NFT carries, is the wattage used to support the clouds in which it resides.
Okay, moving on. A little bit ago people started making art NFTs. “Wait?! Art NFTs?! How does that work?”
I take a funny pic of Dcn Dawson in a Hello Kitte costume (titling it, “The Enigma Within”) and turn it into an NFT (i.e. recording it on a blockchain) and I sell it at an art auction. That person owns my artwork and their ownership is marked in the digital signature of the NFT.
Yes. It’s wild.
“But Mark” someone may ask, “isn’t art all about great works that are unique and original?”
It used to be that way, maybe.
Sparing a long genealogy about how we got here culturally let me jump to the conclusion: art NFTs emphasized the fact that modern delight is no longer aimed at experience or materiality or beauty but on sheer ownership of abstract value. I sell that NFT to you for 3 million dollars (this is not hyperbole, go and look-up what some art NFTs sell for), you now have the joy of “having” a “thing” that is in some way “worth” 3 Million dollars.
With NFTs what matters is not the thing but the receipt of purchase. Transaction alone matters.
Strange times.
Now for the theological reflection:
The problem here is theological —particularly a variety of heresy is at work we might call, variously, “immanentism” or “Gnosticism” or “Catharism.” The main idea, in the words of Anna Kornbluh: “to have done with mediation” (Immediacy, 2023:5).
NFTs of the second millennium and Cathars or the middle ages and Manicheans of the late antique world all find creation (stuff-ness and time-ness) distressing, and God who is Creator problematic.
We want pure gnostic ascesis: to be like unto God Himself, timeless and spaceless. I do not want to recognize the value in things, history, bodies, genders, symbols, metabolism, noise, senses. And, while we’re on the subject, a Creator who relates to these things?! Bah-Humbug!
The ancient Gnostics wanted a God who was far beyond the mess of creation (especially all that hideousness involved in thinking about an ‘Incarnation’); the medieval Cathars wanted a direct contact with Heaven, not this mess of History while we wait for the Second Coming; and modern art NFT apologists love the idea of “sheer digital value” without all our fiscal gains being hazarded by this emphasis on “goods and services” or, heaven forbid, “reality.”
For us, living in this increasingly Gnostic age, it is important for the Church to live into the creational character of the world that God made without allowing it to become an idol. The Book of Common Prayer offers a perfect way of prayer through the madness:
O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
For, as Martin Hegel once said (correctly, for even a broken watch is correct twice a day), “Immediacy itself is essentially mediated” (as quoted in Kornbluh).