In a piece of accessory drama befitting the surreal pandemic edition of the Oscars, an NFT of Chadwick Boseman is undergoing a redesign following the late actor’s loss in the Best Actor category during this past Sunday’s awards ceremony. The multiple layers to this controversy were succinctly summed up by one person on social media in a tweet that read, “Idk what’s worse the fact that it’s an Nft, the fact that Chadwick Boseman’s death is being commodified, or that this is in every Oscar nominees’ gift bags.” According to Deadline, that last bit isn’t entirely accurate—the NFT was only included in some of the notoriously luxe gift bags handed out to attendees each year.
Andre Oshea was one of the artists hired—not by the Academy, for what it’s worth—to design the NFT, or non-fungible token (if you don’t know what it is, Vice has like 700 articles about it), which features a digital golden sculpture of Boseman’s head, intended to commemorate the late actor and his presumed post-mortem Oscar win for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. To be somewhat fair to the artist here, Boseman—who passed away last year at the age of 43—had previously won the Golden Globe, SAG, and Critics Choice awards for his performance, leading many to believe he’d win the Oscar. In addition, one of the Boseman NFTs was reserved for an upcoming auction, with the intention to donate half the proceeds (expected to be more than $1 million) to the Colon Cancer Foundation in Boseman’s honor. Even the producers of Sunday’s telecast bet on a Boseman win; the Best Actor category was moved to the end of the show. And then the Oscar went to Anthony Hopkins for his performance in The Father.
On Monday, Oshea issued a statement via Instagram in which he apologized “for any upset caused,” and attempted to clear up some misinformation around the NFT, which he says was not included in the Oscars gift bags (Glenn Close, please advise). “I now recognize that Chadwick’s face is a triggering reminder of his death rather than his life,” Oshea said, adding that he’s still committed to auctioning the NFT—following a redesign—and donating half the proceeds to the Colon Cancer Foundation.
37 Comments
This is one of those articles that would have been 100% unintelligible just 5 years ago.
Now, it’s only 50% unintelligible.
but what percentage fungible is it?
I’m Sure* you’ll understand more after you read the 700 articles on Vice that the author referred us to…*I’m NOT sure going to Vice will help atall…
And the half that is intelligible is stupid.
What’s the controversy?
It’s a stupid waste of money and resources that is also profiting off the death of another human being.
“I now recognize that Chadwick’s face is a triggering reminder of his death rather than his life”That seems to be missing the point by a wide margin. It’s the tacky nature of it all – the piece itself, the NFT of it all, the fact that only half the amount raised will go to charity (so a cool half million to the makers of this shit) – that people object to. I can’t think of anyone saying “Never show me his face again because he is dead” – especially given how many people watched his films in tribute to him after his passing. Fucking idiot.
Seriously, his face being portrayed is obviously not the issue, I feel like Oshea is being intentionally obtuse to justify going ahead with the thing. I can’t wait for the NFT/crypto fad to pass. Both because PC parts have skyrocketed to the point where I can’t replace my PC if I need to without being gouged to death, all in service of miners, and because the whole “insane amount of emissions” thing kiiiinda sucks when the last thing we need is yet another industry fucking up the environment just so people can own JPGs and meme money. (had to vent a little, been reading a lot about NFT/crypto shit lately and it put a bug up my ass)
If I’m reading this right, they’re issuing multiple NFTs of the same “digital sculpture”? This isn’t the biggest problem with this, but it looks like we’re abandoning the fiction that an NFT somehow represents ownership of the original image with lightning speed here. Are we just straight up admitting that there are now just copies and ridiculously expensive copies because it turned out there is a huge market for being told you’re special?
From my understanding, the idea in those cases is that you own “stake” in the NFT? Someone more knowledgeable, can you fill us in on that?
But1.) An NFT inherently convey no right of reproduction or licensing. It doesn’t generate revenue except by selling it.
2.) There is no central work that you own a piece of. Your “stake” exists as a whole work that is an identical copy of everyone else’s. Your bit of “Digital Golden Chadwick Head” is (visually and artistically) complete all by itself, and you have near-total freedom to do what you want with it that you don’t have if you owned, say, 8% share of a painting. You never have to vote on its fate. In likelihood, you will never communicate with the other stakeholders in any way. In fact, you can incinerate a jump drive with your NFT without their permission and without damaging the value of theirs. If every head had a different hat on and the “sculpter” called them 200 unique NFT’d works of art, nothing about each individual owner’s rights would change.
3.) Every new piece of information about NFTs makes them sound more ridiculous.
Yeah, that’s where I’m confused on the whole multiple ownership thing. I feel like my family does when they need help with “The Googles”: like I’m missing some crucial information that makes it make sense to blow, say, nearly 400k on a link to a cheap-looking Grimes clip or 1.2m on an untextured Chadwick Boseman Blender model.
That has never been the case. The NFT is never the original work, it is not a numbered print. You can verify that something is a “real” NFT, but there is no way to distinguish NFTs from each other so it can’t be a “numbered print.”
That’s my point. For the last few months, artists have been at least maintaining the illusion that the NFT version was the “real” one by only issuing one of them, like with Beeple’s Everydays, which I don’t think would have gone for almost $70 million if he had released four hundred other NFTs of it at the same time.
There now exist “copies” and “copies with an NFT,” and the only meaningful difference is that people are charging insane amounts for the second one.
Man, I bought an RTX 3070 Vision OC in October last. It was $1080AU. Now? From the same retailer?
Yuuup. I was stunned when I saw that the PC I had bought about 5 years ago (and it was hardly impressive even then, bog standard build slightly more powerful than a PS4) is now double the price for the exact same dated specs.
It does not feel good to say “I have a $1900 video card”. My poor best mate didn’t upgrade for a while, and is now looking to upgrade – that’s actually what caused me to look up the prices a few days ago when he asked. I can honestly say I have not seen rises like this ever, not in 20 years of dicking around with PCs. That’s not an updated version of my card, or anything like that. It’s not some improved model – it’s the exact. Same. Card. Except now it’s six months old. And nearly twice the fucking price.
You’re not wrong, I didn’t think it was possible for me to think worse of the artist, but he’s managed to pull it off.
…yeah I thought the reasoning was going to be that the 3-d model of Boseman’s head was licensed for $50, and now the “artist” is getting a cool half mil for appropriating someone else’s work and pasting a new texture on it.
“I now recognize that Chadwick’s face is a triggering reminder of his death rather than his life”My kids say that about me and I’m still alive.
We have a winnah!
The ultimate way to commemorate Chadwick Boseman’s death is apparently an “artform” that destroys the environment and adds nothing of value.
The half-assed nature of the design just makes it more insulting. Dude just bought a Boseman face model someone else already designed for $50 and placed a gold texture on it.
And now is he going to just buy a new 3D model and plug that in?He seems to think that’s the whole problem with all this.
Doesn’t redesigning an NFT make it fungible?
It’s like a snake oil sales man saying that half the money they made from snake oil would go towards developing a genuine cure for what they told customers the snake oil would cure them of.
This misses other parts of the controversy: The guy bought the model of Boseman’s head for $50 on some shady website, and there’s comments that indicate said model was stolen
I have a better idea. How about don’t. Just… Don’t.
Seriously, how can one person be this fucking tone deaf, to wreak pointless ecological destruction to “honor” a dead man by crassly cashing in on his death… and then decide that the problem was the dead man’s face?!Seriously, WTF is wrong with this asshole?
I have a better idea. How about don’t. Just… Don’t.
Seriously,
how can one person be this fucking tone deaf, to wreak pointless
ecological destruction to “honor” a dead man by crassly cashing in on
his death… and then decide that the problem was the dead man’s face?!Seriously, WTF is wrong with this asshole?
He said the quiet part out loud in terms of what artists are hoping to get out of this – arbitrarily driving up the cost of their work because people already own a link to a jpg of it. Not a license, not a numbered print – a link to a jpg. If they want the jpg to be worth anything, they have a vested interest in driving up the cache and value of the original work, taking advantage that of the fact that people think they own something equivalent to a print before realizing no – its a trading card.
It gets even worse. As folks on social media pointed out the night of the Oscars and like fellow AVC commentariate member Bull Shannon talks about up thread, the artist licensed the image from someone else for fifty bucks, then did minimal alterations before passing it off as some kind of stirring original tribute. So to stick with the trading card analogy, it’d be like if Upper Deck or Fleer had licensed the use of player photos from Topps, then just redesigned the border and font for the players’ names.
And even though you “own” it, the artist (or whoever) can apparently change it whenever they want.
It’s worse than a trading card. If I own a rookie Wayne Gretzky I know it has a certain authenticity that can’t be replicated, though there may be other ones out there. But with an NFT its as if my rookie card is itself a copy, not an authentic original, but the trading card can be duplicated forever and everyone who has one technically owns something as tangibly “authentic” as what I own. But this idea that mine has been “deemed” the original, despite not being the original, makes it valuable. It’s actually insane.
How would an NFT even be in a gift bag? I’m still a little unclear on how one even acquires an NFT.
I suspect that the gift bags held head statues or whatever that were just physical containers/representations of the more incorporeal NFTs(sounds like they made a bunch, like how you see 1 of 50 on collectibles).
I’m going to go against the grain here and say I love NFTs. I can’t think of a better way for rich people who view art as an investment and don’t actually care about the artwork itself to throw their money away on. More NFTs I say, if the physical art market cools enough some galleries might be able to afford works they otherwise couldn’t.
You seem to have missed the part where the artist paid 50 bucks for someone else’s rendering of Boswock’s head to use in this awful thing. They didn’t even craft the damn face themselves!