From pictorialism to NFT art

Written by Luisa Miller

The article deals with the problem of applying to artistic photography the idea of uniqueness as an obligatory feature of a work of art. The work is of an overview nature, it notes the methods of giving photographs features of originality that arose at different stages during the hundred-year history of artistic photography. Previously, the attention of researchers was not concentrated on the fact that photographic artists constantly followed the path of artificially limiting the technical reproducibility of their works. Addressing this question determines the novelty of this work. This was required by an approach to assessing photographic images This approach was necessary to assess the photographic images from the standpoint of traditional art, which was reflected not only in determining their aesthetic value, but also in the legal aspect. The presence of a machine nature in photography became a stumbling block in the development of legislative norms on the copyright of pictorial photographers. The entry of photography into the art market environment endowed it with obligations to limit the number of copies, based on commercial considerations. The relevance of the study lies in entering the topic of replication in the field of digital art, its acquisition and sale. An attempt has been made to interpret the phenomenon of the blockchain system as a concept that influences new ways of understanding and evaluating digital photography in the light of its previous history. The emergence of the NFT format is seen as a moment of overcoming the attitude towards the reproducibility of artistic photography as a problem, and not as its natural property. It is suggested that the emergence of a virtual artistic environment can harmonize this long-standing conflict and also raises the question of the need to develop new legal norms in this area.

Throughout the history of fine art photography, authors have struggled with its inherent property of being replicated. It was a confrontation between the manifested will of the artist and the machine nature of the image, which often came to the fore in the eyes of the audience. If in the era of pictorialism the uniqueness of the picture was quite natural due to technical reasons, then in the future this requirement was imposed on it artificially. Walter Benjamin talks about the metamorphoses of the very nature of a work of art, associated with socio-cultural changes in society. He notes that in relation to photography, the criterion of authenticity and uniqueness does not make any sense, since "a reproduced work of art is increasingly becoming a reproduction of a work designed for reproduction" (Benjamin, 1996, p. 28). However, one can still meet the point of view that the photographer plays only the role of an automatic machine operator.

Relevance and novelty of this work is to comprehend the topic of reproducibility of a work of art in the context of the NFT format that exists today. It should also be noted that the constant situation of limiting the ability of art photography to be replicated was not considered before as problematic and requiring special attention. Blockchain is a chain-like data system, where each subsequent block contains information about the previous ones. digital works (primarily from the field of digital art and photography, but also from the field of music and even video clips of sports games). This system is based on NFT, a unique non-fungible token, which is a digital key created on the basis of cryptocurrency. A number of foreign studies have been devoted to understanding the relationship between the art market and the NFT format. We note the most, in our opinion, interesting in the context of our studies (try to revise this, not sure what your intending to say here — Maybe: We note the most interesting, in our opinion, in the context of our studies). This is the work of Rachel O'Dwyer "Limited Edition: Producing Artificial Scarcity for Digital Art on the Blockchain and its Implications for the Cultural Industries" (O'Dwyer, 2018), where the author addresses the issues of uniqueness of a digital work and copyright protection in a virtual environment. The article “Financialization as a Medium: Speculative Notes on Post-blockchain Art” by Laura Lotti (Lotti, 2018) analyzes “how the sociocultural logic of finance is increasingly embedded in the information environment of contemporary art through new methods of evaluation” (Dobuski, 2021, p .97). The results of a large-scale study of the history of the commercialization of art photography are presented in the book Photography and the Art Market by Juliet Hacking (Hacking, 2018), but the author does not touch on the topic of digital photography. Now it is no longer possible to ignore the question of the place of a photograph that exists in digital format in the world of art and collecting.