A New York Times investigative reporter wades into the murky, pixelated waters of the multibillion-dollar NFT market—the virtual casino that sprang up overnight in 2020 and came crashing down, with all its celebrity hucksters, just two years later. A vibrant and witty exploration of the increasingly blurry line between art and money, artist and con artist, value and worthlessness.
“A perfect book to understand and to laugh at the craziness of the art world today." —Jerry Saltz, author of How to Be an Artist
In 2021, when the gavel fell at Christie’s on the sale of Mike Winkelmann’s Everydays series—a compilation of five thousand digital artworks—it made a thunderous announcement: Non-fungible tokens had arrived. The ludicrous world of CryptoKitties and Bored Apes had just produced a piece of art worth $69.3 million (at least according to the highest bidder). On that day, the traditional art market—the largest unregulated market in the world—put its stamp of approval on a very new and carnivalesque digital reality. But what did it mean for these two worlds to collide? Was it all just a money laundering scheme? And come on, what was that piece of digital flotsam really worth anyway?
In Token Supremacy, Zachary Small works through these and other fascinating questions, tracing the crypto economy back to its origins in the 2008 financial crisis and the lineage of NFTs back to the first photographic negatives. Small describes jaw-dropping tales of heists, publicity stunts, and rug pulls, before zeroing in on the role of "security tokens" in the FTX scandal. Detours through art history provide insight into the mythmaking tactics that drive stratospheric auction sales and help the wealthy launder their finances (and reputations) through art. And we cast an eye toward a future where NFTs have paved the way for a dangerous, new shadow banking system.
A wild and spellbinding tour through a world that strains belief.
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A lot of cultural phenomena fall into the 'smile and nod' category—we hear about them, we read about them, we might even have opinions about them, but deep down we don’t really understand how they came about or what they mean. Zachary Small’s rip-roaring account of the NFT boom and bust is a path out of 'smile and nod' and toward true engagement. It shows us that any story about business and culture—as long as it is well told—is actually a story about people in all their flawed, ambitious, and curious glory.
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Julia Halperin, former executive editor of Artnet News