Beeple, NFTs, and the Return of 'Aura'
A bit of background on this project from art school
In the winter of 2021, I was in my second quarter of art school at the Savannah College of Art & Design. The class was titled Contemporary Art and here was its description:
In response to the complexity of the centers and the peripheries of the art world, students discuss a spectrum of different theoretical discourses, art historical methodologies and art practices of the recent decades. An in-depth analysis of central art works and their relation to crucial issues of cultural surroundings are the focus of each class discussion
We spent the quarter diving into contemporary artists and theoreticians like Michael Foucault, Shazia Sikander, Walter Benjamin, Ai Weiwei, and Maurizio Cattelan (remember the duct-taped banana?). During that same time while I paid SCAD thousands of dollars to learn about famous artists, a much less famous artist, who goes by the name Beeple, sold a piece of digital artwork for $69 Million. This happened smack in the middle of our quarter at school at not a single mention of it at class. I was dumbfounded how a Christie’s auction for such a large amount in the “contemporary art” world could get crickets from a professor for whom I was paying thousands of dollars. Did I mention how much art school costs?
By the end of the quarter, we were asked to select a contemporary art figure and examine their work through the lens of a noteworthy (professor-approved) theoretician from the past. I took that opportunity to dive into what was actually happening within the contemporary art world at the exact moment I was taking a grad school class on the subject.
The purpose of my discussion is to examine how the unique cryptographic minting process used to authenticate this digital media not only affected its market value, but also transformed this seemingly soulless array of sketches, spoofs, and pastiches into a body of work with what Walter Benjamin calls an aura.
Why Beeple’s $69M NFT matters
In March 2021, digital artist Beeple sold a single JPEG collage—Everydays: The First 5000 Days—for $69 million at Christie’s.
At first glance, this looks like hype. A digital image, infinitely reproducible, selling for the price of a masterpiece painting.
But the sale wasn’t really about the image. Some might say it was about ownership, authenticity, and what makes something feel “real” in a digital world. Others might argue it was a hype machine for early crypto adopters atop the Ponzi scheme to wield their newfound monetary power.
What Walter Benjamin meant by ‘aura’
Walter Benjamin described the “aura” of a work of art as its unique presence in time and space, its authenticity, history, and unrepeatable existence.
Even a perfect reproduction lacks something:
The “here and now” of the original—its lived existence and historical continuity.
Before digital media, aura was tied to:
- physical objects
- cultural tradition
- scarcity
Reproduction (through photography, film, and print) erodes this aura by making “copies” infinitely accessible and detached from their origin.
The ownership problem with digital art
Digital art has historically struggled with value because it is:
- infinitely copyable
- easily distributed
- detached from any singular “original”
A JPEG can be duplicated perfectly, endlessly, by anyone.
Because of this, digital works often feel interchangeable, disposable, and lacking authenticity.
This is why many critics initially dismissed Beeple’s work as a “digital product” rather than fine art.
NFTs solve that problem…at least that was the promise
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) change the equation by introducing verifiable ownership.
Built on blockchain technology, NFTs create a permanent, tamper-resistant record linked to an individual. In Beeple’s case, Christie’s didn’t just sell a JPEG. They sold a cryptographic certificate of authenticity tied to that image.
This transforms the work from a copyable file into a singular owned asset. However, ownership of a physical asset usually comes with some sort of exclusivity. For example, people flock from all over the world to the the Louvre in Paris to see the original Mona Lisa painting. The exceptions for those of us in the US was akk the way back in 1963 when she traveled stateside for a bit. With a digital assets today, it’s still not possible to stop people from downloading and exchanging the exact JPEG owned by buyer.
I suspect blockchain is going to change that quite a bit, if and when that technology gets applied to what we call the internet. It’s still early, but I’m preparing for a time when digital assets truly are owned by their creators. These assets could be jpegs, mp4s, txt files, python scripts, pretty much anything.
Since the time I wrote this paper, large language models have made quite a stir by scraping the digital world for any content not yet protected by their owners. I think we will look back at this time like the Wild West of the United States during the 1800s. People will get away with lots of crimes until there is a strong enough infrastructure to make enforcing order a viable job. Until then, yee-haw!