I bought a piece of NFT art - it was an endless nuisance

By Tilman Baumgärtel

NFTs are currently being presented as the hope for digital art. They are supposed to be a way to sell digital artworks, which previously had no easy standing on the art market, as easily as paintings or sculptures. This is not so, as I have now experienced first hand. Acquiring an NFT artwork is a cumbersome, lengthy and annoying process.

But first, for those just getting into it: NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token, which is a unique digital certificate. It is a piece of hexadecimal code that you can buy with a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ether. It is considered proof of the originality of, for example, a digital video, a meme or a GIF animation, because this piece of code is registered in the blockchain, a decentralised database on the internet.

Some artists have recently earned good money with this method. The pop singer Grimes was able to sell the property rights to a few ugly music videos for millions. The graphic artist Beeple even sold an NFT for his life's work "Everydays" to a geek in Singapore for almost 70 million dollars at Christies.

I have been writing about digital art for a quarter of a century. Since the late 1990s, I have known and described the problem that artists who work on the internet or with digital media have difficulties placing these works on the art market. This is because digital files can be copied without loss. There is no auratic original like in an oil painting, but only endless copies and copies of copies.

This is why some digital artists teach at art academies or create more easily marketable, traditional works of art as well in order to earn money with their work. Long before the advent of NFTs, however, there were artists who actually sold digital art. Dutch artist Raffael Rozendaal - who most recently received a total of one million dollars for six NFTs - has been selling individual websites to collectors for years. Other artists have signed contracts with the buyers of their works or issued them certificates of authenticity on paper, which makes their ownership a matter of record.

So you don't necessarily need NFTs to certify the originality of a digital work of art - especially since registration in the blockchain doesn't necessarily have the eternal value that is always assumed. On the contrary, experience with computers shows that operating systems and software, internet directories and digital documents quickly become obsolete or get lost completely.

I am glad for all the net and computer artist that there is now a new way to earn money with their work. Personally, however, I had ruled out such purchases for myself. But then a reference to the work "Zen for NFT" by the Munich artist Volker Möllenhoff appeared in my Twitter timeline. He had created a work that deals with the technical basis of NFTs. Net art works that examine the conditions of their own existence and intervene critically in the functioning of new media are the reason why I am interested in this genre. I contacted the artist to acquire the work.

"NFT for Zen" was offered on the NFT exchange Openseas. There it is in the company of small animations and digital images created by an army of fresh-faced artists eager to participate in the current NFT boom. Most of them could hardly be more banal: Manga-like characters and landscapes like from a fantasy epic, comic figures and little wiggly animations.

Volker Möllenhoff, however, did not create a picture at all. He uploaded a file to Openseas that to a computer looks like a picture file, but does not contain any data - a so-called "zero-byte file". When you view the work on the platform, it tries to show you an image that actually doesn't exist at all. Instead, you only see a "throbber", i.e. a small, rotating circle that signals that something is being loaded - similar to YouTube when the video won't start. So basically I haven't bought anything - like all the other NFT holders, by the way.

The title "Zen for NFT" refers to a historical work by Nam Jun Paik: "Zen for film" (1963), a film without images that slowly catches dust and scratches when shown as a loop with a film projector, marking the projected nothingness with traces of its physical existence.

My work also slowly begins to show traces of time. Probably because there is always background programming work going at Openseas, the little animation is also ocassionally changing: the rotating circle has first become smaller, then larger again in the two months since I purchased this non-work. Currently, a part of the circle is cut off at the top and bottom. So the "eternal" digital artwork is already showing signs of its transience. Maybe at one point someone at Openseas will discover the trick of the "zero-byte file" and put an end to this programming error. Then my NFT will unmistakably point to nothing at all.

In order to be considered the owner of this work and to be able to show it to other art lovers on my smartphone (apart from speculation, the "bragging rights" are probably the main reason why people acquire such works in the first place), I had to go through a tedious procedure. First, I had to register with a cryptocurrencies exchange - because at Openseas you can only pay with the digital money Ether. In order to buy Ether, I had to open an account at the online bank with which the crypto exchange cooperates - including an online video conference in which I had to show my identity card to a shadowy figure at the other end via webcam to confirm my identity. There was something decidedly shady about the process.

Then I had to transfer money from my regular bank account to the new account in order to purchase Ether. As the price of the cryptocurrency kept rising during this time, so did the price of the 0.1 Ether I needed to buy “Zen for NFT”. I had to top up several times in a race against the price until I finally had enough to buy a tenth of an Ether from a nameless trader I personally didn't know with a bank account at the Stadtsparkasse Villingen - because cryptocurrencies are not offered by the crypto exchanges themselves. They are only intermediary platforms where cryptocurrency holders sell it back and forth at prices that constantly change according to supply and demand.

Finally, I had to create a "wallet", i.e. a virtual pocketbook, with the company Metamask in order to be able to shop for digital art at Openseas. Securing these transactions required a jumble of passwords and PINs sent to my mobile phone. If I forget a password and screw up the file in which it is recorded, it's all gone. Of course, nobody knows whether Metamask, Openseas or the crypto exchange will still exist next year. Or next month, for that matter.

As an investment, by the way, the whole thing was a bad deal: since I bought it, the price of Ether has fallen dramatically. You can see that right away in the Openseas listing - it's as if a work of art is always displayed along with its price tag.

There was already an interested buyer who offered me 0.15 Ether for "NFT for Zen". But I didn't go for it. I'd rather continue to enjoy the way a small rotating circle in my browser window occasionally changes a little. And at the fact that I "own" a virtual nothing, through which the artist has taken the whole NFT system ad absurdum.

Volker Mühlenhoff, by the way, was kind enough to send me two signed prints of the work and the absurdly long code hidden behind it - quite old-fashioned on paper. This will remain even if the blockchain disappears into virtual nirvana at some point. Better safe than sorry.