Hito Steyerl — essays against the NFT boom

2021

Artists: Hito Steyerl · Year: 2021 · Medium: Critical essays and installation-video work engaging NFT-era art markets critically · Substrate: Essays published in e-flux and other critical journals; video-installation work exhibited at major biennials · Place: Berlin, Germany · Institution: Independent; various publications Hito Steyerl is one of the most consequential essayists and video artists of the post-2000 era; her 2020-21 public critique of the NFT moment constitutes one of the few substantial and sustained artistic-theoretical responses to the NFT economic phenomenon from within the contemporary art establishment. Steyerl's critique — delivered through essays in e-flux journal, public lectures, and her continuing video work — argued that the NFT market was not an emancipatory new distribution channel for artists but rather a specifically extractive financialization mechanism that transferred value from artistic labor into speculative-asset returns captured primarily by platform owners and early-collector speculators. Steyerl's argument has specific force because she is not a reflexive critic of digital technology. Her video-essay practice (How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013; Factory of the Sun, 2015; This is the Future, 2019) has consistently engaged the specific technical and economic conditions of digital culture with substantial technical fluency. Her critique of NFT markets was not a Luddite rejection but a specifically-leftist political-economic analysis of what the market was doing to artistic labor. The critique has proven historically substantial. The 2022-24 NFT market correction has substantially validated several of Steyerl's specific arguments; the promised sustainable-income-for-artists that the 2021 NFT boom rhetoric had claimed has largely not materialized, and the market's primary beneficiaries have been the platform operators and early speculative collectors rather than the broader artist population. Steyerl has continued to produce video-essay work through 2023-25. Her public opposition to NFT markets has been sustained and has shaped substantial portions of the contemporary-art-establishment's institutional-skeptical stance toward the medium. Lore Steyerl's critique has not been universally endorsed within the digital-art community; several substantial counter-arguments (from Marisol Escobar, Brian Droitcour, and others) have pushed back on specific aspects of her analysis. The counter-arguments have generally been that Steyerl's framing is too categorical and that specific sub-segments of the NFT economy (the Tezos-based low-transaction-cost community, the fully-on-chain generative-art scene, the Feral File curatorial model) have supported artists in ways her general critique does not fully register. The subsequent market history has, in general, been closer to Steyerl's specifically-skeptical position than to the 2021 boosterism, but the counter-arguments continue to carry weight in specific contexts. Sources • Steyerl, Hito — "The End of the Ends of Art" (e-flux journal, 2021). • Steyerl, Hito — Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (Verso, 2017). • Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC — Hito Steyerl catalogue.