Variant Partner Li Jin: Art in the Age of Crypto Replication
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Variant Partner Li Jin: Art in the Age of Crypto Replication
Integrating blockchain technology into the art world offers artists, collectors, and communities new ways to engage.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Li Jin
Translation: TechFlow
In March 2024, Christie's announced the launch of SOURCE (an NFT initiative), its first on-chain generative art collection. This auction took place just three years after digital artist Beeple sold a digital artwork through the same auction house for $69 million.
This development would likely have caught the attention of Walter Benjamin, the 20th-century philosopher and cultural critic. Benjamin was deeply interested in the interplay between technology and culture, and how they shape each other. In his time, the technologies under discussion were photography and film. Today, they are the internet and artificial intelligence.
Benjamin’s work, particularly as expressed in his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” raises critical questions about the intersection of art, technology, and culture. What is the value of art in an age of mass reproduction? What is the relationship between an original artwork and its copies? How does mass-reproduced art intersect with and influence culture—especially politics?
Twenty-first century technologies both extend and complicate Benjamin’s arguments. Now, the act of creation itself can be digitized, eroding the very concept of “originality.” With the emergence of generative AI, the boundaries between original and copy, author and reproducer, reality and fiction, have become increasingly blurred.
Blockchain introduces new dimensions to discussions about the value, authenticity, and relevance of art, giving fresh meaning to Walter Benjamin’s work. Through blockchain-tracked ownership, crypto restores the concepts of provenance and originality to digital artworks, reviving Benjamin’s notion of the “aura.” At the same time, crypto updates what Benjamin called the “cult value” of art by generating rituals and traditions through community ownership. In an era of increasing cultural and political fragmentation, tokens offer new pathways to foster community cohesion and collective action—echoing, yet also challenging, Benjamin’s views on the relationship between art and politics. The result is a redefinition of the relationships among art, technology, and culture in the 21st century.
Aura
A persistent question remains: What makes a work of art special? Why do enthusiasts flock to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, or spend millions acquiring an original artwork rather than viewing or owning an identical-looking reproduction?
The answer seems to lie in the artwork’s existence—the specific presence that distinguishes it from all others. Benjamin named this quality the “aura,” defining it as the unique existence of a work of art “in time and space, at the place where it happens to be.” For Benjamin, aura was closely tied to the authority and authenticity of a work, both of which he believed were threatened in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction eroded the concept of aura. Digital (re)production further complicates it. Art critic Douglas Davis, in his 1995 response to Benjamin, noted that digital reproduction has made the distinction between “master” and “copy” so entangled that “it is no longer possible to say where one begins and the other ends.”
Crypto has the capacity to restore the concept of aura to art by once again making the “original” possible. By tracking artworks on a distributed ledger, crypto can trace the provenance and ownership of digital assets. This ensures that each digital artwork is uniquely owned and authenticated, traceable back to its creator’s cryptographic signature, thereby endowing digital works with aura.
Value
Many people think of art’s value economically. But Benjamin was equally concerned with art’s cultural value, which he divided into two distinct dimensions: cult value and exhibition value.
The concept of exhibition value is relatively straightforward. It refers to the value an artwork holds due to its ability to be displayed and viewed in public spaces, museums, galleries, and exhibitions.
Cult value, which Benjamin called art’s “original use value,” is defined as something more concrete and intriguing.
For most of human history, art was deeply intertwined with religion and ritual. Encountering artworks in sacred spaces carried a mysterious, ineffable quality. He believed that “prehistoric art objects were first and foremost magical instruments.” Even in more secular terms, art served as a medium to express and embody beliefs, values, and narratives deeply rooted in communities—whether religious, ideological, or philosophical.
Benjamin suggested that, like aura, the “cult value” of art has diminished over time, giving way to the modern capitalist notion of “exhibition value”—the idea that art exists for its own sake and is valued primarily for being seen. The digital age has accelerated this shift. Artworks are often evaluated and appreciated solely based on their visibility: the more likes or views a piece receives, the more valuable it becomes. At the same time, the consumption of art has become increasingly individualized, with audiences engaging alone rather than through collective experiences.
Here, crypto offers a counterbalance. Crypto has the potential to restore the concept of cult value. Just as traditional art was once closely linked to shared rituals and beliefs, crypto projects generate a sense of belonging and shared identity among holders. NFT projects like Bored Ape and Botto (a community-governed AI artist), or even memes that might be considered a form of crypto art, come with their own rituals, languages, and shared online spaces. These rituals may carry economic value, reflecting a dimension of shared interest within their communities. Crypto art is inherently participatory, allowing individuals to directly engage, contribute, and shape the cultural meaning of these projects, reinforcing their cult value.
Politics
It’s easy to interpret Benjamin in purely pessimistic terms—as mourning the loss of aura and the ritual value of art in the face of mechanical reproduction. But beneath this apparent lament lies a more nuanced exploration of the transformative political potential inherent in the democratization of art.
Benjamin saw mechanical reproduction as a profoundly democratizing force. He referred to the “tremendous upheavals of tradition” and the “crisis and renewal of contemporary humanity” as being “intimately connected with contemporary mass movements.” In a world where aura fades and exhibition value supplants cult value, Benjamin argued that art’s significance becomes rooted in something else: namely, politics. He cited the example of a photographer capturing street scenes in Paris, photographing them “like crime scenes,” noting that photographs “become standard evidence of historical events and acquire implicit political significance.” Iconic images can carry political weight, galvanizing action.
Benjamin, a committed socialist, described photography as a “truly revolutionary means of reproduction,” one that “emerged simultaneously with the rise of socialism,” thus directly linking the democratization of art through photography with the democratization of politics through socialism. For instance, Depression-era photography drew attention to workers’ struggles, building momentum for pro-labor initiatives. Yet the politicization of art could also be extremely dangerous—living as a Jew in fascist Germany, Benjamin was acutely aware of how totalitarian movements could exploit art to hijack and manipulate attention and perception for their own agendas.
The digital reproduction era has given us extreme examples of art’s political impact. Consider the massive spread of memes surrounding Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency—some posted directly by him. At the same time, the rise of AI, misinformation, and deepfakes has undermined our shared sense of reality.
There are several ways to explore how crypto intersects with art in the political sphere. Crypto may be profoundly liberating in economic terms, enabling broader participation, more accessible ownership, and economic benefits derived from that ownership. As I recently wrote about the attention economy in crypto: the difference between crypto and Web2 is that everyone in the value chain can benefit from being owners of “attention assets.”
The censorship-resistant nature of blockchain also protects artistic expression from suppression. During global pandemic lockdowns, some netizens uploaded videos and messages—deleted by censored platforms—onto the blockchain, using NFTs as tools of political resistance. As mentioned, crypto is highly participatory, encouraging people to build communities around shared values and enabling novel forms of capital formation for political purposes. For example, in January 2023, Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and artist Shepard Fairey encouraged supporters to express their “proof of protest” through an open-edition NFT collection titled “Putin’s Ashes,” with proceeds donated to Ukrainian soldiers.
Ultimately, crypto art—and crypto as a whole—are tools for community coordination and capital formation with political implications. Just as the Web2 internet balanced information access and creation, mobilizing hundreds of millions, crypto and crypto art provide tools for economic coordination and community building. Unlike the mostly passive consumers of Benjamin’s era, today’s audiences now have the opportunity to own and actively participate in these assets.
Conclusion
The story of art intersecting with culture is one of evolution and adaptation. It encompasses the many ways in which artistic expression reflects, shapes, and responds to cultural values, social norms, and technological progress. As for how crypto will influence this story—that chapter is still being written.
Benjamin observed that the superstructure (art, culture, politics, and society) takes time to adapt to changes in the means of production (technology). Painting is an art tradition spanning millennia, while the history of digital art production can be measured in decades, and crypto is even younger. The cultural and political impacts of crypto will take time to fully emerge.
For Benjamin, art represented a site of resistance and transformation—one capable of challenging dominant power structures and sparking social change. The integration of blockchain technology into the art world offers artists, collectors, and communities new modes of engagement. As these technologies continue to evolve, they hold the potential not only to transform the art market but also to reshape broader cultural and political landscapes in ways we can only begin to imagine.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
Variant
