The Triple Significance of NFT―Archeology (Copyright M Leruth)
Why does Fred Forest’s NFT―Archeology matter? It matters first for historical reasons. When Beeple’s Everydays―The First 5000 Days was sold for $69.3 million at an online auction by Christie’s in March of this year it was treated as a historic event. Christie’s hyped Everydays as “a unique work in the history of digital art” (whereas Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee rather less charitably called it “one more riotous example of high-roller groupthink”). More tellingly, it fetched the third highest auction price for a work by a living artist (after Jeff Koons and David Hockney) and set off a media frenzy around the money-making potential of digital works sold in the form of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. However, as is often the case with hyperbolic art market sales pitches that speak in glowing terms of historic and game-changing works, what one is trying to pass off as unprecedented in the history of art has a longer and more complicated (and neglected?) backstory. Before Everydays, there was Peter Halley’s digital print Superdream Mutation (1993), the first entirely digital work to be sold as such (by Wolfgang Staehle on the website of THE THING in 1993). There was also Douglas Davis’s The World’s First Collaborative Sentence (launched in 1994), considered by many the first true example of net.art, privately acquired and subsequently donated to the Whitney Museum in 1995. And there was Fred Forest’s Parcelle/Réseau (1996), which has the distinction of being the first exclusively web-based work of digital art to be sold at an in-person public auction that was also carried live on the internet (16 October 1996). Like Davis, Forest is a member of the “pioneer generation” of new media and (tele)communications art. He has made prescient and provocative works using virtually every new and mass medium that has marked our age (often in strikingly original combinations): newspapers, video (in 1967, he was among the first in Europe to work with a Sony Portapak), telephones, answering machines, radio, television, telex, fax, LED message boards, internet, etc. Forest’s media art and activism are characterized by two qualities that were honed through his foundational association with Sociological Art in 1970s and the Aesthetics of Communication in 1980s and early 90s: a ludic and transgressive modus operandi that is similar in spirit to the Situationists’ practice of détournement (Forest is a media pirate/hijacker at heart) and the fact that the main aim of his artistic practice is not the creation of visual objects for public display or private consumption (such objects are at best its secondary byproducts), but the orchestration of “trans-media events” in public space of a broadly participatory (i.e., “relational”) and socio-critical nature. In the context of Forest’s visionary body of work, which also gives it its art historical significance, NFT-Archeology is not just a work of digital art that someone may buy in the form of an NFT. Strictly speaking, it is not even a purely individual creation of Fred Forest. It is a social sculpture à la Beuys that all of us have a hand in making: the press covering the event, the critics who may argue about its (in)significance, the host institution which has lent its space and prestige to the operation, the technicians and collaborators involved in different aspects of its production and promotion, everyone curious enough about it to visit the project website or attend the auction, the competing bidders engaged in a ritualized performance, the buyer who will become its titular custodian, etc. As a trans-media event, NFT—Archeology is the reenactment of the original Parcelle/Réseau (a more fitting name for it might have been Parcelle/Réseau 2.0). It is the latter’s commemoration. As such, it is not just a ceremonial act of remembrance or official consecration, but an opportunity to reflect critically on the object of commemoration and what the part of the past that this object represents means in terms of the present. In this case, the past in question includes what digital and online art used to mean for pioneers like Fred Forest, might have been, failed to be, is at its margins, and may become in the wake of the NFT bubble. It is one more idealistic attempt by Forest to make the art of the cyberspace age live up to the promise which Pierre Lévy―one of a long list of philosophers and critical thinkers who have admired Forest’s work―expressed in the following terms in Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace: “The collective imaginary is born in taking the time to invent the ceremony that is its own inauguration.”
While the aesthetic merits and cultural significance of Beeple’s Everydays are still debatable, there is no denying that it is a historically significant work by virtue of its unprecedented sale price and reliance on the same blockchain data technology that is used by cryptocurrency traders. In other words, it is significant in terms of the history of late capitalism and the art market. In contrast, Forest’s NFT-Archeology seeks a different type of significance through its sale at auction. Make no mistake, Fred Forest, who has never earned a living from the sale of his art (he was a postal worker in his younger days and is now a retired university professor), wants to fetch a good price for a work that he believes has great value. However, for him, this operation is also something of an anti-auction: an inveterate dissident’s attempt to question the fundamental operational premises of business as usual in the art market. Such disruption has been a central thrust of Forest’s sociological artistic practice for over forty years. After all, this is the artist who created Video Portrait of a Collector in Real Time in 1974: a work that consisted of the videotaping of its own auction in progress … with the additional contractual stipulation that the purchaser have himself filmed by Forest, on the same tape, consuming three meals. This is also the artist who famously attempted to sell “artistic square meters” of land (miniscule plots of undeveloped land in the French countryside) as a new type of real estate investment venture in 1977―until the police and syndicate of notaries prevented him from doing so. This is the activist and thorn in the side of the French art establishment who sued the Centre Pompidou’s National Museum of Modern Art over the lack of transparency in its acquisitions process. Hence, the symbolic asking price of $69.3 million + $1. Forest wants us to question how a work like Everydays came to be “worth” $69.3 million (as the Covid-19 pandemic and associated economic crisis have left millions unemployed and struggling to make ends meet, while the net worth of the world’s cyber-billionaires has skyrocketed). He wants us to question the role that the marketplace, the media and publicity ecosystem/echo chamber, and institutional power play in what any work of art is deemed to be worth. He wants us to question what art is worth to society aside from being a commodity, a decorative nicety, or an elegant means of money laundering money and reputations for super-rich patrons. Personally, I hope Fred gets a fantastic price for NFT-Archeology. He deserves a break. He also deserves a vacation (he works too hard for a man of his age). That is why I assess NFT-Archeology to be worth $69.3 million + $1 + one square meter in the shade of a Moroccan palm tree (one of the sealed bids received for the second phase of The Artistic Square Meter venture).
Last but not least, NFT-Archeology matters because it offers an opportunity for both the purchaser and everyone else who participates in this operation in some thoughtful fashion to spend time in one of the most original and important utopian spaces to have taken shape in all of contemporary art: Fred Forest’s Territory of the Square Meter. The black rectangular shape featured prominently in NFT―Archeology is the telltale sign. It is not just a reference, but a sort of portal to Le Territoire, which has its origins in 150 cm2 of Newspaper: the blank space for public participation, free expression, and dialogical communication that Forest inserted in the pages of Le Monde in 1972—a breakthrough work that prompted Vilém Flusser to call him the “artist who pokes holes in media,” and Pierre Restany to consider him a worthy successor to Yves Klein as an artistic plier of the void. Other early manifestations of the Territory’s signature and constitutive utopian motif include blank “protest signs” carried in the streets of S?o Paulo (1973) and the previously mentioned artistic square meters of land for sale (1977). Its canonical physical embodiment is located in Anserville (Oise), where Forest owns a property which he declared a free an independent state in 1980—where a section of the gardens was subdivided into tiny allotments to which prospective “citizens” of the Territory could purchase lifetime subscriptions. Its later iterations range from the temporary center of the world set up in a shrine-like installation at Espace Pierre Cardin (1999) and a square meter of cyberspace on the floor near the checkout lanes of a supermarket in suburban Paris (2001), to the virtual stage for a tongue-in-cheek Traders’ Ball (2010) held in a Second Life version of Occupy Wall Street and an updated version of Plato’s cave (Ebb and Flow: The Internet Cave, Albi, 2011). In retrospect, most of Forest’s artistic production may be seen as part of The Territory: an improbable series of media-endowed “Temporary Autonomous Zones” (Hakim Bey) and liminal spaces (Victor Turner) where people may―for a short while―play, interact, express themselves, think, and reject the status quo more freely than is possible in their regimented everyday lives. NFT—Archeology now takes its place among them. We shall see how close it gets to its $69.3 million + $1 asking price. Nonetheless, through its association with Fred Forest’s unique utopian body of work, NFT—Archeology is ultimately hors prix.
Michael F. Leruth
College of William & Mary (Virginia, USA)
Author of Fred Forest’s Utopia: Media Art and Activism (MIT Press, 2017)