Presenter: Frederico Barros
Registration Number: 041
Institution: Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Abstract: This paper discusses some of the controversies around the recent spike in interest for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) concerning the visual arts and music. NFTs have been around since the mid-2010s and played a key role in the development of Crypto Art, but since the second half of 2020 have been sparking interest beyond its borders, leading to a generalized feeling of “gold rush,” according to many of those engaged in and around the now called NFT Community. This presentation deals with four deeply intertwined themes and how they give form to the controversies under investigation (Callon; Latour; Boltanski and Thévenot): copyright and scarcity in the digital world; blockchain technology, economics, and environmental issues; artists, gatekeepers, and platforms; artist income during the COVID-19 pandemic. NFTs are being heralded as a means to create scarcity in the digital world, which historically has been regarded as an economy of abundance due to the capacity of infinitely producing exact copies of digital assets (Fricker; Doctorow; Rifkin). This touches on copyright issues, bypassing gatekeepers such as galleries and record labels, but also putting digital platforms such as Rarible, The Foundation, OpenSea, etc. front and center, even if the theme of decentralization often plays a key role in the actors' discourses. Since NFTs rely on blockchain technology, the controversy also touches on problems associated with cryptocurrencies, though with a twist due to the specificities of the art market and artistic labor itself. Charges of it "not being about the art," but sheer speculation instead and, most notably, matters related to energy consumption and the environment come to the fore here. This leads us, finally, to the need of opening other income streams in a time marked by a pandemic and social distancing, when concerts, art fairs, and conferences have been canceled, galleries were closed, and artists see the internet as their sole venue for showing and selling their output. The research is being made through ethnography in virtual spaces (Postill and Pink), especially on Twitter and Clubhouse, dealing with musicians and visual artists from a comparative perspective. The rapidly growing debate around NFTs (media articles, op-eds, podcasts, blog posts, etc.) also plays an important part in it, for there is a marked difference between the ideas expressed in these pieces and how the community behaves. Some themes are all but silenced, dismissed, or simply glossed over among the community, while figuring as central issues in other accounts that attempt to historicize and deal with the phenomenon in a more comprehensive fashion. Though not by any means a novelty in ethnographic research, these discrepancies receive attention in order to propose some broader lines of interpretation about the controversy at hand.
Bio: Frederico Barros is Music History professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His current research interests include decorative and applied arts, music for film, TV and games, musical and artistic labor, and technology. His past work deals with popular and concert music in the Americas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Modernism, nationalism, and electroacoustic music.