Marriage Alliance of Art and Money
Song Jinhyup (art critic)
Hunminjeongeum Haeryebon, printed in 1446 and housed in Gansong Art Museum, is constantly aging with time. This extremely rare book has been meticulously preserved by Hyeongpil Jeon, the founder of the museum. After Jeon's death, others tried to uphold his legacy with little success. Then, what should the museum do to retain the asset value of the book for the next generation? The annual budget required for the conservation of the Hunminjeongeum is significantly large, which will surely cause the depreciation of its monetary value. At best, the conventional idea for keeping the book's contents was to digitize and publish a limited facsimile edition. Some of its aesthetic value has been transferred through the delicate original to the high-resolution copies. Albeit visually indistinguishable from the original book, the facsimile edition is still too fragile to hold the book's entire value forever.
The Gansong Art Museum recently has started to produce 100 NFTs of the book, which are converted from the digital files once used for making the facsimile edition. This is a fundamental change of the book's ownership: if the original book is lost or damaged, its own financial value will be transferred to the NFTs, the mere digital copies. Recently, a NFT of Jean-Michel Basquiat's sketch was listed on an auction with the purchaser's right to deconstruct the original artwork. It shows the new hegemony of digital copies over the physical artworks. Moreover, a firm recently purchased a Banksy art print, sold an NFT of it, and burned the original print, clearly saying "the value of the physical piece will then be moved onto the NFT." In that case, other non-NFT digital copies may also claim the inheritance of the original artworks; however, NFT will have overwhelming creditworthiness over any other non-NFT copies through blockchain technology. Also by blocking the inflow of additional quantities, their unique value portion (like 1/100) will be preserved in any case. After the final death of the original work of art, the NFT will be a new owner of its commercial value.
The earth is getting destroyed incessantly. Then how can we maintain global capitalism which is based on the physical existence of the earth? No matter how productive a factory is, if California is threatened by a catastrophic wildfire annually, Tesla's assets may see astronomical losses. Even if the factory is located in Texas instead of California, the problem remains significant since it still has to rely on the physical conditions of the earth. That is why Tesla's money needs to move to Mars; then how? Above all, the location should be non-fungible against other Planet B options like Venus, Mercury, etc. Also, the money should be successfully transferred to Mars without any losses, but still be able to control the remaining assets on Earth. The gold standard, the US dollar currency, or any existing monetary system would not be able to handle this cosmic asset transfer at all. Therefore possibly one day, Tesla may purchase one of the Hunminjeongeum digital copies, as a new NFT asset collection on Mars.
NFT has become the best tool of keeping the value of both original artworks and investors' money. It's a great art-money system that is more stable than gold and less risky than the fluctuating US dollar currency. Thus, NFT minting can be considered as making a currency design rather than solely creating fine art. From the poorly carved Emperors' portraits on Roman gold coins, through the delicate US presidents' portraits on American dollars, we now see that cryptocurrencies are making their own new artistic portraits. The energetic digital music and motion graphics of the NFTs will be a perfect artistic praise for the newly enthroned art-money. These young art-money currencies will reign over a new planet, with an immortal body that is unaffected by any natural disaster on earth. As the House of Bourbon and the Medici once were related, real and virtual, Earth and Mars, art and money, the seemingly impossible unions will become successfully related.