MAU-MAUING THE FAUX CATCHERS:

As we have written elsewhere, the novelty of NFTs has been much exaggerated. In fact, they are the logical conclusion of a long historical process which was identified almost 50 years ago in Wolfe's notorious satire of aesthetic modernism, The Painted Word (1974). Wolfe's extended essay adumbrated modern art's inexorable drive toward abstraction. It described a revolt against object-based, realist art, which began in the middle of the 19th century and continued throughout the 20th, moving from Cubism through Abstract Expressionism, and culminating in the often entirely abstract genre of Conceptual Art. Wolfe emphasized the continuity of these developments, pointing out that Abstract Expressionism "was a reaction to Modernism itself ... an abstraction of an abstraction, a blueprint of the blueprint, a diagram of the diagram."

During this process, the physical manifestations of an artwork gradually ceded their significance to the abstract theory it exemplified. The New York Times critic Hilton Kramer complained that realism lacked the "crucial" element of "a persuasive theory," without which he quite literally could not "see a painting." According to Wolfe, by the 1960s, abstract theories had become the whole point of art: "the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text." In his view, the rise of theory (which took place in literature as well as in the visual arts) was a betrayal of the original, 19th-century modernism, which had largely eschewed theory as a matter of principle. As the painter George Braque declared: "The aim is not to reconstitute an anecdotal fact, but to constitute a pictorial fact."

Reading The Painted Word nearly five decades after its initial publication is quite a trip. Peter Plagens was not incorrect when he labeled Wolfe's prose "relentless glib" in his Artforum review. Wolfe admitted as much in 1975, when he appeared on Firing Line with William F. Buckley. He described The Painted Word as "a social comedy" intended to reveal the ways in which cultural mores shape the artistic canon, to expose the mysterious "process by which art becomes serious, by which it becomes praised." Wolfe's "social comedy" has now had time to mature into a full-blown tragedy for the kind of art that Plagens and others so valiantly defended 50 years ago. The art world's evolution since 1975 confirms Wolfe's claims about the primacy of theories over objects. And his merciless exposé of the socio-economic motives that determine aesthetics is more important than ever in the age of the NFT.

As Wolfe pointed out, the disembodied character of art is a weathered cliché in art theory. As theory grew increasingly influential on practice, it was only a matter of time until the object disappeared altogether from the artwork. By 1968, Lawrence Weiner could contend that an artwork doesn't "need to be built" in order to exist. And as an old Russian proverb goes, "a holy place is never empty." The missing object was supplanted by the new importance of the artist's personality on one hand, and by validation through purchase on the other. Wolfe described how an artist's image, their "story," or what Dave Hickey called their "creation narrative," came to take precedence over their work.

The emergence of NFTs brought the financialization of art to a climax. NFTs exist only in theory. An NFT is not a material entity. It comes into being through a financial transaction, in which the purchaser acquires ownership rights to a digital image otherwise available to anyone with an Internet connection. Anyone can view the artwork, but only the buyer of the NFT can own it. The pleasure of ownership is now an aesthetic experience. The blue-chip auction houses fell over themselves in their rush to validate digital art NFTs: these days money talks and walks (and runs) too. An artwork's total lack of physical existence is evidently no obstacle to its acquisition of financial value.

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