Token Supremacy Presents a Sensationalized Version of the NFT Boom

Art and finance have salacious appeal, as writers from Danielle Steele to Steve Martin have found, the latter stating tongue-in-cheek toward the end of his novel, An Object of Beauty: “Art was still art whether it was tied to money or not.” Yet Rembrandt died in penury, as New York Times reporter Zachary Small recounts in the introduction to Token Supremacy, their newly published book on the 2021 NFT market bubble and its aftermath. Small notes this while describing the infamous 17th-century Dutch tulipomania, an apt comparison to the NFT boom, and one that artist Anna Ridler, represented by Nagel Draxler, first made in her video series Mosaic Virus (2018 and 2019), though neither she nor her work are mentioned in Small’s book. Several artists making work about or with blockchain in the technology’s early years addressed its potential and the problems with its underlying financial model: Simon de la Rouviere, Simon…