An estimated 1.7 trillion images were produced in 2017. Think about that figure. Actually, you can’t think about that figure; you can’t even really get your mind around it. The estimate comes from a book on photography published a couple of years ago. With the continued spread of smartphones to all corners of the world, the number of images produced every year must be into double-digit trillions by now.
We are swamped each day by a tsunami of images, and it’s easy to forget how miraculous image making once was. I like to say that there was only one truly original artist in history – the first caveman or cavewoman who drew a mastodon on the cave wall. All other artists have been stealing from him or her ever since.
Yet, while making images is a distinctly human activity, something we did even before our species emerged from their sheltering caves, actual images have been comparatively rare until recent times. How many images did medieval European peasants see in their lifetimes? Perhaps a painting over the altar or a mural if the village church was rich enough. Perhaps images on large pieces of canvas used by storytellers at fairs. Later on, as printed images spread, the humble folk might have a rough woodcut in their cottages. But highly-accomplished images outside of church were seen only by the privileged and their servants.
In the 19th century, new printing techniques brought fine art within the means of the general public, and newspapers became expected to provide illustrations for their readers. Improved still cameras made photography dominant, and then the age of the movie began. With television, a flood of images entered our homes. The web completed the process.
How can we possibly deal with the thousands of images that pass our eyes daily, a glut that nevertheless corresponds to only a minute fraction of the images being produced every minute? Most are glanced at and quickly forgotten, but what about those images that belong to the realm we normally designate fine art? I’ve written about the pressure that art fairs put on artists to produce large, splashy works that can catch the eye of the passing fairgoer. There’s an equal pressure to produce something that can prove compelling within the confines of a smartphone screen, an image that can delay the swiping thumb for the time it takes the artist’s creation to truly register in the viewer’s consciousness. Everything visual goes into the blender in such a format, from an image of the Mona Lisa to a Bored Ape NFT. They are equals in that tiny arena.
But the physical world still exists. If an artist’s splashy painting sells at an art fair, he or she gets paid in real money, and the purchaser now owns a physical object. What artists are trying to do now is to devise a reliable way to get paid for their works currently appearing on your smartphone screen. How can they put a price on a quick viewing?
And how can an appraiser value such an artwork? We normally appraise works of art using the Sales Comparison Approach; that is, we set a valuation based on the prices realized in the marketplace by comparable works of art by the same artist. In the extremely fluid online marketplace for NFTs, setting a price for something that exists online is like trying to nail down a blob of mercury.
How do you appraise something that exists only on a server? How do you deal with works that were sold in Bitcoin? There’s not a huge demand for such appraisals at present, which is a good thing because there aren’t yet any generally agreed-upon parameters for doing them, but appraisers are beginning to talk about the matter.
Perhaps one day NFT appraising will have its own chapter in the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice, the bible of our profession. In the meantime, it’s the Wild West out there. “Don’t take any wooden nickels,” people used to say. And don’t set your valuations in cryptocurrency, at least not yet.
