Norman Rockwell Museum steps into the age of digital collecting with its first NFT release
I’m not too proud to admit that, while they may have stoked a lifelong passion for art history, my childhood museum visits were often highlighted by the gift shop.
Who doesn’t love a trinket: a patch, a pencil, a postcard, something to look at and squirrel away? Something to remember the trip by and, in a poetic sense, something with which to mimic the museum’s great task of collecting on a much cheaper scale.
All this to say: I don’t mind when museums commercialize their holdings. I don’t think it threatens the beauty of artmaking. A million mugs of Whistler’s Mother cannot equal the spine-tingling awe I experienced the first time I saw it at the Clark Art Institute in 2015. Indeed, selling replicas that museumgoers can cherish back home fulfills a positive role.
The Norman Rockwell Museum’s non-fungible token initiative, to my eye, does none of this. It seems to me an unceremonious pawning of the museum’s reputation, and that of perhaps America’s favorite artist, for what one imagines is a minimal fundraising prospect. (Insider reported in September that 95 percent of the NFT market is now basically worthless.)
Some Berkshirites who love Rockwell’s work and want to feel they own a piece of his heritage might be forgiven for thinking that, since such a respected museum is offering this “collectible,” then perhaps it is worth a look. I disagree. Let me be clear: I accept that the Rockwell museum and family developed this program with utmost care. NRM says this offering will reach new audiences in the digital world, and allow it to showcase seldom-seen studies — crucially, images that aren’t tied up in other publishers’ rights. Proceeds will support care and conservation of these important objects.
I have no reason to believe the Rockwell NFTs are anything but bona fide. Heck, buyers will also get a commemorative print. But I also believe NFTs, no matter the source, are entirely ridiculous.
With an NFT, you buy the rights to what is essentially a piece of code. It is dressed up with an image, in this case Rockwellian, and it is charted on a massive group of pieces of code called a blockchain, ostensibly to ensure that no two pieces of code are alike.
If you are a technophile for whom owning an obscure string of code seems exciting, more power to you. For the rest of us, it is paramount to understand that NFTs do not guarantee any real ownership over the work of art depicted and are not a reasonable avenue of investment for most people. Only the string of code has any expectation of uniqueness, and even that has been eroded by theft.
Like all get-rich-quick fantasies, some people made beaucoup bucks. NFTs are worth whatever one is willing to pay, and people were briefly willing to pay incomprehensibly large amounts. Some played this “market” like a fiddle. But wealth likely was never in the cards for most NFT buyers, and it seems even less likely now.
Wrong for the region, wrong for the world
So, why do I care? What business is it of mine if someone cares to spend money on an NFT, especially if a local museum raises some money in the process?
More than destructive, I believe NFTs are immoral, and their true cost is global. Blockchain technology relies on countless computers cross-checking strings of code, and crypto adds a “mining” element, wherein computers unleash brute force to unearth new units of currency. All of this consumes vast amounts of electricity. The New York Times reported in 2021 that the creation of the average NFT was, energy-wise, “equivalent to driving 500 miles in a typical American gasoline-powered car.”
At a time when our good Earth is lurching headlong into a climate catastrophe, to use our precious resources for a purpose that generates no real product, offers no social good, employs very few workers and enriches very few people seems unconscionable.
The verdant Berkshire Hills that Rockwell loved, which draw thousands upon thousands to spend money and time at the museum and in our communities, are not immune from the effects of climate change. We will continue to face stronger storms, more temperamental temperatures and the global shockwaves of whole regions becoming unlivable due to climate change.
Should an institution dedicated to preservation, and dependent on the Berkshires’ accessibility to tourists, really stick its toe in this tarpit?
Don’t get me wrong: Of all artists, it is silliest to criticize commercializing Rockwell. Here was a man whose most iconic works were accompanied by the newsstand price of The Saturday Evening Post. But here was also a man who articulated what it means to be a moral, ethical citizen.
So by all means, sell Rockwell postcards, oven mitts or ornaments. The museum has such cachet it could be trusted to sell limited-edition prints without the blockchain palaver. But I think it should rethink selling a fad product that carries so heavy a price for our planet.