Were NFTs a fad? If there were a simple yes or no answer to this question, then Zachary Small wouldn’t have a whole book to write. Small’s book, Token Supremacy, isn’t just about non-fungible tokens, it’s about the entire ecosystem that allowed the NFT boom to happen, a heady mix of a generation frustrated with traditional finance, a flush market looking for new opportunities, and the allure of a new technology with seemingly limitless applications.

It’s tempting to make the Dutch tulip bulb analogy and Small does but the book is about far more than just a mania of speculation and its aftermath. It’s about the centuries-old dance between art and finance and how value is assigned, inflated, and just as quickly deflated. One of my favorite motifs in the book is the tension between the traditional art world, the rarified land of top-tier auction houses, and white-walled galleries, and the young, rogueish upstarts who don’t play by the old rules, turning a staid gallery opening into a bit of a rave.

Small wrote this book as the cryptoeconomy imploded, shredding trillions of dollars in value in its wake and turning the NFT craze into an embarrassing “what-were-we-thinking” moment. But that’s not really all there is to the story. Underneath the antics of Beeple and the downfall of the crypto bros is blockchain, a real chance to create unassailable chains of ownership and potentially create value for artists once their work hits secondary markets. Decentralized finance is in a way, abstracted finance. We are a culture comfortable paying for things with a tap on an app. Is it any surprise that the idea of art that primarily served to augment a life lived at least partially online would have allure?

The post-crash world of NFTs and cryptocurrency is a more sober and regulated one, at least for now. NFTs aren’t gone, although they have mostly lost their value and a lot of their sheen. This book is a little snapshot of a time that was, and likely, will be again, just in some other form.

The introduction opens with a digressive pondering about Renaissance art and tulip mania. Then, there is a definition of the central promised subject of this book: “NFTs” are “recording transactions for digital goods and providing creators with access to resale royalties.” This is followed by a realistic note that this simple goal was side-tracked into ideology, as users began describing themselves as “human gods” to drive speculation or a steep irrational increase in NFT prices. Then, the tulip bubble is compared to this new mania. Then, finally a revelation: Rembrandt was “bidding on his own paintings” to solve his “money problem” that escalated into bankruptcy. This led Amsterdam’s painters’ guild to institute “a new rule: nobody in Rembrandt’s financial circumstances could trade as a painter.” But the starving-artist trope is pretty much why any artist has achieved fame in the past? Histories tend to report that some kind of publicity stunts, or manipulations of markets were involved in making any artist famous above billions of others. An example is the art thefts in Picasso’s circle, which indirectly spiked the value of Picasso’s art through the publicity associated with imprisonment of his affiliates. A description follows of a gallery showing without any art on blank walls, when $7 million in sales happened at a single event, orchestrated by Hobbs, who was a specialist in “code” in “cryptomania”. NFT’s can theoretically prevent forgeries, but when the “code” sells without any serious art behind it, then it is not protecting art from being duplicated, but is rather selling nothing for enormous sums by merely marketing it or puffing its cultural value. They were taking advantage of a pandemic that was keeping people away from physical art-shows to sell empty digital space. While there are some interesting ideas here and there, this book lacks coherent structure to systematically research this complex subject to arrive at concrete useful answers. The author reports that this began his research by spiking his curiosity.
Then, chapter “1: The New King of Crypto” begins with an attempt to put readers to sleep by describing a guy sitting on a sofa. Then, finally there is a description of Beeple as a series that began by doodling on “internet bile (racist caricatures, nude women… political satire)” before using animation software in 3D. It just gets more unreadable after this point, as the author digresses into random characters in this world without explaining where these stories are going, without citing sources, and just generally altering from puffing specific NFT providers, to ridiculing them as being absurdly counter-artistic.
There is probably some kind of useful information somewhere in this book but it is hidden under piles of digressive meaningless ramblings and ponderings. Why couldn’t this author sketch out an outline for what he was planning to say, create sub-sections in chapters that specify what NFT creators they cover, why each is significant, and then have some chapters that analyze trends? Instead, all chapters have puzzling titles such as “We’re All Gonna Die”. And the narrative just runs wherever Small feels like going, as if he just kind of sets a timer to babble for an hour before bed, when he is too sleepy to do real work, about dudes he met online that day. Unless all this sounds interesting to you, do not attempt to read this book.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an advance copy of this book about the rise and fall of the NFT market, the ties to the art world, the world of technology, and both the hucksterism and visionary ideas that were used to promote it.

The road,or Hyperloop, to the future has a breakdown lane that is loaded with ideas and technology that were hyped but soon forgotten. Some were great ideas, that were either passed over, not promoted, or replaced by something inferior, but cheaper for investors. Some of these products and ideas should have never left the dry erase board they were written on during that brainstorming meeting where nobody really could say no to the money man. The idea of disrupting things has driven many a profit making idea, even if these disruptions get co-opted but what they intend to disrupt. Money is the prime motivator, but there is a bit of Steve Jobs attitude, the I know better than you/ do your own research/ I have money you don't therefore I am smarter/ mentality that has in its own way corrupted tech thinking and its vision. Everyone wants wealth, no one wants to point out the Emperor has no clothes, nor currency, and in NFT nothing to even hang on a wall. All promoted by a market that was new, not well understood, not regulated and well kind of shady. Token Supremacy:The Art of Finance, the Finance of Art, and the Great Crypto Crash of 2022 by journalist and editor Zachary Small, is a look at this world of NFTs, from the beginning to what happened, and where it all might end up.

NFTs are non-fungible tokens, basically giving a person the rights to own, via blockchain, a piece of digital art or media. Stoned Ape photos, celebrities, ex-presidents all make appearances, along with they usual grifters, hucksters, true believers and artists who thought they finally found a way to make money in art. The book is unique in that it is not just a business book, nor an baking story or current events but looks at NFT's with the eye of a person who has covered the art market for years, and knows the sort of lose morals and ways art is packaged and sold. The book discusses how the idea of NFT's might have started in a German disco in a discussion among three people, an artist, and two money people. The book looks at the beginnings of digital art, with a young woman in Paris finding a computer lab open and creating something new on a computer. This same woman, aged almost a hundred, returns to the scene when during the peak of NFT's and COVID she began to sell her art again. The book looks at the business, what went wrong, tracing the rise of speculators familiar with the large profits in the regular art trade, and how they turned to digital to make even more money.

This book was much more than I expected, and I learned quite a bit from it. Not just about bitcoin, and NFT's but about the art of auction houses, and what a world that is. There is also a lot more about art, especially the creating of digital works that will appeal to a lot of readers outside of technology. Small is a very good writer, able to discuss technology, art, business, creativity, and even the psychology of many of these people, from creative to frankly sociopathic. The book follows a chronological path, with a few diversions, and even Small seems amazed at how things went and the places that the book took him to.

A book that looks at the big picture of what is going on in the world of technology, and the dark future that many seem to be embracing. Recommended for people interested in technology, art, and the art market. And for those who like to read about how greed seems to be infesting just about everything around us. A book I enjoyed, even if I was confused at how this could possibly work, and why so many bought into it.

<blockquote>"It's gone," he kept saying. "It's gone. It's gone. It's gone."</blockquote>

<i>Token Supremacy</i> is a necessary book, but has a limited audience.

There are a <b>lot</b> of books out there about NFTs. Some of them aren't even trying to sell you something! Others <a href="https://www.goodreads.com">aren't books</a>. We are still in the sorting out what happened period of history, with no promise that this will be more than a <i>Jeopardy</i> question in sixty years or if we will be on Web5 by then where the entire internet lives Borges-like in our minds but lacks shared knowledge with any one else's internet, and what we think of now as the internet is more like what The CurAItors create in temporary opera to keep each of us in a state of pleasurable uneasiness and from walking into walls.

Of this lot, <i>Token Supremacy</i> is unique. It takes the face value proposition of NFTs as a form or format of art, and takes that idea seriously: in the context of them in history of art, in their creators and artists working in the field, and in the market around them. And I hope that your reaction to that is "that's absurd." Not only is this not even the sort of thing that the boosters usually discuss, it is the sort of critical discussion on art that many people do not take seriously for anything contemporary, particularly among the same right-wing punditry that otherwise are bullish on crypto.

But Small gets it, and they have a wickedly cynical curve that shows up after giving each of these ideas an earnest go at understanding their intellectual premises. Some of this may be that, like [book:Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon|149105520], Small was already working on this book when the market tanked, and so can compose the book out of parts originally written in more skeptical enthusiasm and parts in more of a post-crash schadenfreude. This is something of a criticism of the writing; at points a reader feels the gears shift between different modes.

But I think that this approach of giving people enthusiastic understanding, then turning on the lights to show how the trick was done, is part of what makes the book so unique. As opposed to idealist or grifter, the persons biographed here are a collection of unsympathetic tragic heroes, possessed of sound and noble ideals (or sounder than at least I associate with blockchainers), but whose ends are foreseeable to the extent of feeling deserved.

The real villain of the piece is the art market, and this is where Small does their best work as a reporter who has worked within that space. I feel that the thesis around the importance of the Great Recession, the Pandemic stimulus, and generational trauma is already a sort of going theory - and frankly the book loses me when it starts to bemoan the loss of the gold standard - but as taken in a view that includes the art market in general they feel more like the next verse of a song than some disrupter or hustle.

There is a whole critique-sided history to the NFT, the early attempts, the artists who started working in the electronic and procedural space, and the other ventures to solve the same problems. It is so not a direct line that Small at points even mocks those who try to draw one.

But what that history gets at is the more gatekeeper-side parts of the NFT stories, focused less on the crypto side of things and more on the ways in which that then interacts with the real world, and real law. Inelegantly, there are a lot of shady characters in the art world doing questionable things. Small has the depth of knowledge and range of contacts to show the articulations there, this also gives them a particularly unusual and wide range of perspectives to then address the crash itself.

Unfortunately, the book is disorganized. I kept reading sections that had amazing stories, and wishing that they had been drawn out into framing devices, but instead feeling like they did not get enough time. It is meant to be chronological, but there are so many incursions into side topics, or there is a tension between presenting characters in biography and presenting them in order. It is not beginner-friendly. I can understanding explaining cryptocurrency in a sentence (I can also argue against that for reasons the book itself brings up), but something like a DAO needs more of an explanation if the chapter is then going to center around what that explanation means. Some of the financial malfeasance sections are similar.

The singularity of the book's perspective is often its value. Some of the stories here were most edifying in the way that they led to me understanding other stories better (Winkelmann and Buterin jump out as examples) in extra narrative that filled in gaps or provided connections that made things make a lot more sense. It is shocking to learn that even post crash NFTs remain deeply embedded in the art market. And if nothing else the events, conferences, and parties that the author attended and gets to include here make for amazing storytelling. But that idiosyncratic nature operates within the book as well, and I feel like a lot of readers will struggle to find the parts that they like, unless they happen to have the sort of catholic interest and sufficient random knowledge for it to sing.

The quip is that if you read one book on crypto, this isn't that, but if you've read three books on crypto, you must read this one.

Thanks to the author, Zachary Small, and the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, for making the ARC available to me.