Credit: Dangerous Minds / Madonna / SuperRare
Remember when everyone from Madonna to Damien Hirst seemed convinced that NFTs were the next step in art?
It sounds stupid to say now, but people really were saying with their entire chest that the blockchain was going to revolutionise the creative world and finally give artists the leverage that they’d lost in the streaming era. God, were we ever so naive?
The answer to that question was, as it pretty much always is, yes. The promise at the heart of NFTs was that the blockchain could provide a concrete way that art could be traded for currency. Nobody would ever be able to get away with copying, forging, or replicating a piece of art. This is because, so the logic went, tucked away in the great blockchain, would be concrete, unignorable proof that you owned the film, song, painting, bored ape, or whatever. You would always be able to prove beyond all doubt that you owned that piece of art and that if anyone else used it, they were breaking the law.
You might have noticed that this is bollocks. This ties the worth of a work of art to a made up certificate of authenticity (one that was a lot easier to lose than an actual physical document due to link decay, lol), and, as the great piracy wars of the 2000s showed, the problem wasn’t that people were using Napster, Limewire and the like to commit copyright fraud, they were using it to take the piece of art itself. Y’know, the thing that anyone cared about.
This made it so disappointing when actually good artists would fall for the NFTs scam. It showed these artists to be what they actually were. Bored moneyed elites that could fall for a well-delivered spiel that prioritised their capital, portfolios and status above all else. We all expected better from Grimes and Quavo, but it was a particular heartbreak when the mighty Madonna announced a line of NFTs in 2022, even before we actually saw what they were. After all, it’s Madonna. This is a woman that spent decades being not just one of the biggest pop stars in the world but one of its prime tastemakers as well.
Who could identify the most exciting, transgressive and scandalous things in pop music, put her own spin on it and make it a global phenomenon. The woman who made vogueing into a globally recognised dance craze. Who took the need for pop stars to be sexy and pushed it to the absolute extreme, showing it to be the hypocritical demand for control of women’s bodies that it actually was. Who, in her late 40s, was still tapping into electro-pop, classic disco and hip-hop scenes and making them mainstream concerns. By 2022, she’d lost her touch so utterly she’d fallen for NFTs!?
Now, it’s not quite as bad as the others. Madonna’s line of NFTs weren’t for her own benefit, unlike the thousands of other “artists” who saw the fad as a way to make a quick buck. The proceeds of her work with the digital artist Beeple all went to charity, with The Voices of Children Foundation, City of Joy and Black Mamas Bail Out all benefiting from the $600,000 they raised at auction. Fine, Madge, at least it was for a good cause.
Because the cause was the only good thing about this fucking monstrosity.
Madonna and Beeple had made a set of agonisingly awful digital artworks called Mother of Creation. Ones that show a PS2 cutscene version of Madonna, naked and giving birth to mechanical millipedes, before zooming in close on her vagina as she begins to give birth to a giant, purple tree. All this happening over a soundtrack of Madge herself reading the poetry of Rumi. I’m sure the 13th-Century Sufi mystics was absolutely delighted.
If that wasn’t enough, she was only too happy to point out that the work was based on a 1:1 digital scan of her entire body. Meaning every single part of her depicted was anatomically identical to her own body.
Just keep reminding yourself, “It’s all for charity, It’s all for charity, It’s all for charity…”