What Do NFTs and Squid Game 2 Have in Common?
Thoughts after binge-watching Squid Game 2
A rapper with purple hair who likes to do drugs has lost millions he earned from his music. He is furious with the influencer who convinced him to invest his fortune in a new cryptocurrency with financial tips on YouTube. The personal encounter comes unexpectedly; the two suddenly face each other in the dormitory, and there’s a lot of shouting, just like in the second season of Squid Game. One says he didn't force anyone to buy the coins. The other says he advised investing, claiming it would bring profits.
The first season of Squid Game premiered on Netflix in September 2021 and became the streaming service's most successful series. On the second day of Christmas, the series was continued, offering as much new insight and excitement as the new online art market. “You have no idea what people are capable of in here!” Gi-hun cries out in despair; he is the player who won the game and all the money in the first season. So he survived. All the other participants died in the games. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Squid Game was described as “a great metaphor for the times, for late capitalism as a machine that dehumanizes.” The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung referred to it as a “satire of capitalism,” while the New York Times stated that the theme of the series (“capitalism exploits the desperate”) is not the most interesting aspect of it. Director Hwang Dong-hyuk attributes the success of the first season “to the circumstances of the pandemic,” as quoted in the FAZ. People spent a lot of time in front of the television, and the unequal distribution of wealth in the world was hard to overlook.
This reminded me that during the pandemic, people also spent a lot of time in front of their computers and began trading NFTs or reading about how people started trading NFTs. And with that, they either made a lot of money or lost even more. Three years later, somehow the second season has also begun regarding the new online art market. However, there is no main character who shouts his insights into the world: You have no idea how much the art market is driven by money! The world is paying attention again (at least a bit more) after Justin Sun paid $6.2 million for Maurizio Cattelan's banana; he is a crypto entrepreneur. And to ensure that cryptocurrencies were definitely mentioned in connection with this auction record, he made the following statement: Cattelan's banana “represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community.” Sotheby’s also confirmed that he paid in cryptocurrency. You can read more about it here on Artsy.
The hype around NFTs was triggered by the auction record set by Beeple at Christie's in March 2021. The New York Times headlined on March 11, 2021: “JPG File Sells for $69 Million, as ‘NFT Mania’ Gathers Pace.” A digital file was sold for $69 million, which was a sensation at the time. This made Beeple the third most expensive living artist after Jeff Koons and David Hockney. Who, please? What, please? Why, please? Those were the reactions. It was mocked that hardly anyone had looked at the 5,000 individual works that make up “Everydays,” the title of the auctioned piece. Ben Davis from Artnet took a look at it and, as he wrote, what he found is not pretty: porn, sexism, misogyny, satire.
Since the beginning of the NFT hype, the media has essentially been discussing whether NFTs are either worthless or dead or what has become of the hype. Here’s a little best of headlines:
How NFTs Went the Way of Beanie Babys? (2022, artnet)
The vast majority of NFTs are now worthless, new report shows (2023, Guardian)
The Overwhelming Majority of NFTs Are ‘Dead,’ Report Says (2024, ARTnews)
Was ist vom Hype um NFTs geblieben? (2024, Capital) For this text, I provided information to the author, among others.
Beeple is still not happy that his work has not been fully accepted. In a conversation with Artnet a few days ago, he said: “A hundred years ago, we decided that you could turn a toilet upside down and call it art, but I draw pictures on the computer every day solely for the purpose of them being art, and people say that it’s not art. How is that possible?”
Now back to my question: What do NFTs and Squid Game 2 have in common?
Media reports everywhere are stating that writer, director, and creator Hwang Dong-hyuk had not actually planned a second season. When asked why he changed his mind, he initially only said: “Money.” The longer answer in an interview with the BBC was: “Even though season one was such a huge success, the system means that honestly I didn’t make much. So I had to do series two to help compensate me for series one as well. Honestly, that was one of the big reasons why.”
So money is the answer, and almost no one is upset about it. On the contrary: In the comment sections of social media, people are responding with understanding. One example, @richierobson5 writes: “People need to normalize saying money is the reason I do anything. The fact that the guy said it straight up when his whole show is about the horror of capitalism shows he’s the real deal.”
Some time ago, I spoke with Kevin McCoy, who is also known as the inventor of the concept of NFTs (he used the term monetized graphics), and his partner Jennifer McCoy about why NFTs. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
AM: You invented monetized graphics during the Tumblr days. Everyone was reblogging art from artists who had uploaded their work for free, hoping a brand would find them and pay them to create content.
KMC: To go back to 2014, we were proposing an essentially private property concept for these images. It was the height of Open Source and Creative Commons. Social media platforms are still seeing this kind of utopian gesture, as evidenced by the way legions of users upload and give multinational companies access to their images.
There’s a way we could put ownership claims on those images. It was hard for people to understand, and I was really going against the grain of the times.
At that moment, I contemplated it within the context of having no real choice; while the 'give it away' logic is commendable, if it stands as the sole option, it doesn't truly feel like a choice. It was already clear because of our involvement in the early days of net art, where substantial critiques of corporate networks and ties were already in place. It was still apparent that these social networks were parasitic, appropriating the value of their users. So, it seemed important to give people an alternative to emphasize that such an option could exist.
JMC: I remember when Rafaël Rozendaal was showing with Postmasters and selling his work—selling the URL. I found his gesture hilarious because anyone can still visit the website, and this idea wasn't fixable. In this moment of artists creating gestures toward closed-walled networks and ideas of ownership, it makes more sense to consider it an artistic contribution.
Artists who want to make money with their digital works essentially have only the option of relying on NFTs, as there is now a new online art market.
People need to normalize offering digital art as NFTs to sell.
And what do cryptocurrencies and the contemporary art market have in common? Tilman Baumgärtel has reflected on this for the German art magazine Monopol.