As you’re probably aware right now, there was recently advertised on MICA’s official channels a class on the basics of NFT creation, which has received significant backlash: hundreds of angry tweets and comments from current and former students and staff alike. NFTs are a relatively new media format with a lot of inherent flaws built into it that, despite being a New Cutting Edge Thing That Exists Now, provide a severe net disservice to artists and the art community alike that runs converse to MICA’s mission of empowering artists and providing more equitable access to art resources. MICA’s endorsement of this format, as a result, has made many people angry, as well as concerned about the precedent this sets for the Insititute and its ideals.

Firstly, I’d like to discuss the sustainability aspect as that is the most hot-button issue among those upset. The vast majority of NFTs are hosted and sold on the Ethereum Blockchain, which, to verify each transaction in which art is purchased, uses (as of December 8) 209 kilowatt hours. For one monetary transaction, that is the equivalent of 4-5 full electric car batteries, or 836 hours of use on a PC.

Here is a video of a server farm, recently built, for the purpose of mining the digital currency used to exchange NFTs.

https://twitter.com/codypritchett3/status/1451646962571169796 

There are, collectively, thousands of these now being built on that scale, the majority of which have been created since March 2021. These facilitate thousands of those 209KWH transactions per second. The energy impact is enormous, and increasing at an exponential rate, with a collective energy use higher than many countries, to where it is directly affecting the environment around them, such as Lake George and Seneca Lake in NY having water temperatures increased due to adjacent facilities, triggering toxic algae blooms:

https://www.syracuse.com/opinion/2021/08/dont-let-bitcoin-mining-ruin-seneca-lake-your-letters.html

This institutional acceptance of these systems 1) threatens to erase and reverse all progress made by MICA’s sustainability initiatives and 2) signals a blatant disregard for environmental ethics in the name of the ‘progress’. The argument can be made that we already are functioning on a system which is damaging and unhealthy to our surroundings, which we are trying to mend as we speak. Why would we intentionally increase that burden? Frustrating.

 

Now, secondly, is the economical and moralistic aspect of things.

The entire premise behind NFTs is that they can verify the ‘authenticity’ of a digital work, that anyone can submit their work and its provenance is set in stone. The system does not lie by design; however, you can lie to the system.

I work as a photographer, and my works are primarily digital. I share my work online for free, unwatermarked, for the purpose of allowing people to access it for free. However, using the NFT system, someone could easily take that file, convert it into an NFT, and then, suddenly, it would be their work to sell. On that system, the attribution is there by default and there are extremely little options to DMCA claim the work, thus having it literally stolen from them, having been turned into a digital sellable object. I cannot begin to list the number of artists who I am colleagues with who have had their work copied by anonymous person, listed on the system, and sold for thousands in profit. I’m constantly dreading the day that someone will inevitably exploit my work for those purposes. It’s easy to do, as cryptocurrency’s main purpose is to anonymize transactions. Thus, I’m constantly told, ‘put all your work on there! You have to get in before it’s too late!’ That’s the main argument that gets told every time: this is a brand new exciting thing, and you need to get in before it’s too late. People are making quick and easy money. Don’t think about the long term.

The very idea of ‘digital scarcity’, of files which are simple to access and replicate suddenly being commodified into 1/1 versions (which cost money to add to the system in the first place), requiring a financial transaction to access anything and everything online, is frankly terrifying. The internet was created for the purpose of free and open access to information and the precedent this format sets is totally antithetical to that. With NFTs, the idea of a ‘priceless’ work of cultural value is impossible; everything and everything by default has a quantifiable monetary value stamped onto it within the system. This is incredibly bad precedent, and we can see its evolution happening in real time. Adobe is integrating ‘convert to NFT’ as an export option in Photoshop. Twitter and Facebook are testing NFT profile pictures. Pretty much every major multinational corporation is selling them. The majority of customers are investors, and the majority of the art is not bought for the sake of appreciation or patronage but to trade and inflate its value, with the bulk profit to the customer. (Granted, this already happened with physical galleries–however the process is now thousands of times quicker and more efficient.) And this is supposed to be a good thing? How much longer do I have to make my public identity, before it totally becomes something I have to buy? Why is any of this even necessary, or even ethically justifiable? What kind of future for art is it when art is treated as an asset, rather than a vehicle for entertainment, inspiration, and further creativity?

I absolutely believe in MICA’s initiatives to promote creative entrepreneurship. Artists should be able to thrive and sustain themselves independently, make a good income, and have an engaged audience. Absolutely. But is this really the appropriate way to achieve that? Do the ends really justify the means here, and is the collateral damage from that supposed to be beneficial? There are many means to sell work online, and get good creative jobs. There are also many ways to verify digital work without using NFTs, with watermarks, and embedded metadata. NFTs do not solve any existing problem, and are nothing more than a new means of Making Dirty Money. Plain and simple. And that MICA is blindly endorsing that and rolling with it because it’s “new” and “exciting” ; I believe I can speak on behalf on the majority of the student body when I say that is offensive, especially when that support is being treated as a priority to other means of creative entrepreneurship, or other, even greater/pressing issues on campus..

The only way to prevent this kind of system from taking precedent is to disavow it and refuse to be involved. If MICA continues the precedent of accepting NFT systems and endorsing them, the end result is not going to be good. So many people in online comment forums discussing the issue have voiced that if this continues further, they will be looking into dropping out. 

MICA must cancel the NFT class offered by Open Studies and cease involvement with blockchain, with a written commitment to doing so.