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Alison Stewart: This is All of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. I'm going to see a name and see if you recognize it. Beeple. He was a digital artist whose NFT sold for 69 million at Christie's. You meet him and a whole slew of artists in a new documentary that follows the rise and fall of the non-fungible token, the NFT, digital ownership of something like music or art. Artists and collectors were deeply invested in the idea that art could be more independent and more free on a blockchain, which is kind of like a public ledger used mainly in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

The idea was that by taking the economics of art out of high-brow museums and auction houses, artists could find new markets for their work and new sources of income without the gatekeepers of the traditional art world. The new documentary called Minted explores the impact of the NFT bubble that it had on the art world. How it attracted investors, speculators and and grifters from the world of cryptocurrency and what happened when the bubble burst. Nicholas Bruckman directed the film and it just debuted on PBS. Nicholas, thanks for joining us.

Nicholas Bruckman: Thanks so much for having me, Alison.

Alison Stewart: When you were thinking about the space, you were doing this long before it caught up to normal people like me. What do you remember seeing go down at the time that made you want to pick up a camera and film?

Nicholas Bruckman: I studied digital art before going into documentary and I learned about artists like Nam June Paik and video artists who were doing all types of experimental I was projecting onto sculptures, but I realized very early in college that this was not a very viable career path. It wasn't even something that was really recognized in the traditional art world. As many of the NFT artists point out in the film, a digital screen was really not something that you saw in a gallery or museum until much later. Now it's commonplace and we all see it and I think that's in large part because of NFTs. I had always been aware of the digital artist people.

I saw in 2020 as I was following on his Instagram, he had these QR codes that I didn't quite understand what they were and he was starting to sell them. Selling a piece of digital artwork like a print, that's what I always wanted to do before getting into documentary. At that time, I realized that there was a big story emerging and that was when we started to pick up the cameras.

Alison Stewart: In the film, you do A very good definition, basic definitions of terms that we have to get used to. Can you explain in very simple terms the baseline technical stuff we need to understand NFTs?

Nicholas Bruckman: Yes, I'll do my best. To begin, it's important to know that the definition of NFT is non-fungible token. Most people are familiar at this point with fungible tokens, those being cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. I think most people agree at this point, whether you like crypto or don't like it, that it is a real thing and that somebody can own a Bitcoin and send it to somebody else and that person now owns that Bitcoin.

That's actually a really incredible innovation because before in the digital world, everything could be copied infinitely, but a blockchain is a digital ledger, as you said, that allows people to transact directly with no middleman. A group of pioneering artists that we follow in the film, including Kevin McCoy, who's widely seen as one of the inventors of NFTs.

Alison Stewart: Right in Brooklyn. [chuckles]

Nicholas Bruckman: Exactly, right in Brooklyn, Greenpoint. He said, "What if we took this Bitcoin idea of a digital money like thing that you can transfer from person to person but we tried that for digital art?" which could never really be bought and sold because it was copyable. That small nugget of an idea turned into a $40 billion industry that we follow along in the film.

Alison Stewart: Listener, if you're an artist who works in the NFT space or if you're an NFT investor, give us a call. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. We want to hear about

experience in the art market. Why did you decide to participate in the NFT market and how has the market changed over the past few years? Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. If I buy an NFT, I'm the owner of that NFT, do I have any certain rights to the work of art?

Nicholas Bruckman: The NFT is a token which represents the work of art and the value of it is really determined, like any work of art, by what the buyer will pay for it. There are experiments where people have conveyed IP with the NFT rights where you have a true copyright, but there's many examples where people have had their NFT stolen or lost from them, and therefore, have lost that ownership or copyright. One of the fundamental things the film explores is this idea of decentralization. The idea of a world without middlemen, where people can exchange money, as we've seen in cryptocurrency, with no bank, or artists can exchange with collectors and investors with no gallery or museum in between.

In some ways, that's a beautiful, empowering thing as you'll hear from Kina Matahari, the artist who's coming on shortly. It changed her life and allowed her to avoid censorship, but not having a middleman can also be a bad thing.

Alison Stewart: You can lose thousands and thousands of dollars and the government's like, "Okay."[laughs]

Nicholas Bruckman: Right, because they have no control. Governments do things that people like and things that people don't like. When you lose your NFT, there is no blockchain hotline that you can call up to reverse that transaction, and so for me, it was really important to show both sides of this equation. This is, in my view, whether you think it's a scam or a fraud or a real thing of value. I think it's an important technology that people need to understand and it did change the lives of many artists.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about Beeple. It changed his life.

Nicholas Bruckman: Absolutely.

Alison Stewart: Why is he a good main character for your film?

Nicholas Bruckman: Beeple's story is incredible and one that I followed long before NFTs. He had built a huge following because he posted a digital work of art every single day for 15 years, and he continues to today and built millions of followers doing it, but before NFTs, he had never sold a print of one of these works for more than $100. His art is very Internet-centric. It's memes and political jokes. Some people have called him the cartoonist of the Internet, saying what's happening in culture now from Elon Musk to a Disney character, hybrid fusion. It's certainly not what the traditional art world would see as highbrow art.

Yet during the pandemic as NFTs took off, his work ethic, his relevance and timeliness with his work really caught wind of collectors, investors, crypto enthusiasts. That as his work started to sell, Christie's took notice of this burgeoning market, gave him this opportunity, and as cryptocurrencies rose, the collectors and interest rose. He made this incredibly splashy headline-breaking $69,420,000 sale. I'll just say one thing about him, which is that what attracted me as a main character is that I think he really sees both sides of this.

Alison Stewart: Yes, he does.

Nicholas Bruckman: He's somebody who benefited incredibly personally, perhaps more than any other artist alive. He became the third highest-selling living artist in the world after this sale, and yet he also sees that many people have been hurt and have had big challenges or lost money and that it's not a panacea. That tension is what we wanted in the film and what he articulates as a main character.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Daniel is calling from Brooklyn. Hi, Daniel, you're on the air.

Daniel: Hi. Yes, I have a question. I have been offered in the past a lot of Ethereum for NFTs of my paintings and I've never made an NFT from my painting. I'm wondering if I sell the actual painting to a collector and an NFT of that painting to somebody else, can the collector publish an image of that painting, let's say, in an art magazine without the okay or anything from the person who owns the NFT?

Nicholas Bruckman: The short answer is yes and that is something that we show in the film. We also show examples of artists whose work are made into NFTs without their permission, which is something that happens. Although the main NFT marketplaces are doing their best to prevent that. This technology, I think, can be used both to protect artists, but also in ways that hinder artists or take away their rights. In your case, it is possible with your NFT to convey any rights that you would like. That is something artists are experimenting with and I recommend, you might want to try it as well.

Alison Stewart: Our guest is Nicholas Bruckman. He's a filmmaker, director of Minted, founder and CEO of People's Television. It's also showing on PBS. I wonder, we talked about Beeple a little bit, and it's how you bring us into the story, but you really take us back in history to the 50s, to the 60s, to Yves Klein's work. Describe why you wanted to go into his work and what does it show you about NFTs now?

Nicholas Bruckman: One of the most important things for me in conveying about NFTs is that this is ultimately not a new thing. This is something that has precedent in the art world. I think when everybody hears NFTs, they're just automatically confused. Blockchain technology, but this idea of artists experimenting with different types of representation of their work traces back to conceptual artists. It actually goes back even farther than Yves Klein. In the case of Yves Klein, what he did was he had this gallery in the 1950s of conceptual art where there was nothing hung up on the gallery.

It was an empty room that collectors walked into, but they could buy a certificate which represented the work. This certificate is really kind of the pro--

Alison Stewart: Physically. Like this little physical with this beautiful handwriting on it. It's like you went to this gallery.

Nicholas Bruckman: Exactly. What I think is interesting is when artists experiment with new tools and techniques to empower themselves to transact, to think about the Internet connection between the financial markets and the art market. That has happened many times and NFT artists have run with that ball and taken it to a new extreme.

Alison Stewart: If you're an artist who works in the NFT space or if you're an NFT investor, give us a call. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Want to hear about your experiences with the blockchain-based art market. Why did you decide to participate? 212-433-WNYC. Okay, I'm going to read this to you. "Hello, my name is Akiti. I will not say I am a full NFT convert, but I have dabbled. More than anything, I'm most attracted to the blockchain possibility of art that lives online. Verification systems and trackings will be vital for artists to sustain a practice moving forward.

The NFT market, like any other game changing technology, experienced saturation on its debut, followed by a gross decline. Over the next five years, we'll see steady usage and adoption of NFT or NFT like operations within the art world and larger financial systems." Do you agree?

Nicholas Bruckman: I do agree. It's very tempting to think of this as tulip mania or Beanie Babies 2.0. There's many fads and that's why in the subtitle of the film we put "Fall?" with a question mark in parentheses because we're not sure if it's the fall yet. We show the collapse of the NFT market as happened in '22 and '23, but it is resurging. It is worth mentioning for those that are skeptical, the cryptocurrency market is near all-time highs right now as we speak. People do fundamentally believe in the value of these digital tokens. Again, our incoming president has dabbled with NFTs and sold his own NFT collections for political fundraising, whether you are a fan of that or of his or not.

I think it's important for audiences to understand this tool because it does inspire very strong reactions. I should mention, Alison, I made films about immigration, about healthcare, justice, really tough political topics, and I think this film has the most passionate, controversial, strong feelings behind it. People are really invested deeply in either the success or the detraction of this tool in technology.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because there's a character, a person in your film named Latasha, who is an artist, she's a rapper, and she sees it as a way of taking control of her art. There's a subtext, not even that bit of a subtext, but the idea there are gatekeepers. How much do you see the broader story of NFTs as a response to gatekeepers in art?

Nicholas Bruckman: I think it's the main reason for it and I think it's the main reason for the rise of cryptocurrency is a lack of trust in institutions and middlemen in general. Certainly that's been the case in the art world. One of the constant frustrations I heard from Latasha and the other musicians using NFTs, because this is not just for visual arts, is the challenges they've had with Spotify, which is now the only central middleman for essentially most of the world of music. Some of the artists in the film showed me their proceeds from millions of streams on Spotify of their work, and it's $118, and that's not a living.

Versus the NFTs they sold to their true fans for thousands of dollars. Latasha sold a music video for tens of thousands of dollars, which was unprecedented because it's not just about the value that she got to pay her bills and support her art, it's that music videos had not really been seen as something that was a transactable, collectible good. She really pioneered that using this tool, and that was really inspirational for me.

Alison Stewart: At some point, there becomes this divide in the NFT world. Those who are using the marketplace to sell their fine art, and a group called the Degens, D-E-G-E-N.

Nicholas Bruckman: Degens.

Alison Stewart: Degens, thank you. Who are speculative traders. How would you describe them?

Nicholas Bruckman: As with any market, once there's a lot of money to be made, people will come in and try to maximize their profits and returns. The Degens are folks who like to engage in high-risk speculative trading. They exist in the cryptocurrency market, they exist in the traditional financial markets, and they certainly exist in the NFT markets. As these things grew to huge valuations, they would do very intense and continue to day trading of these tokens trying to gain any advantage.

There was a lot of schemes called pump and dumps where people would pump a lot of value and heavily promote an NFT collection, and then only to sell it off right at the top so that all of the new money at the bottom of that pyramid got washed out. That's a big challenge, but it's not something that's unique to the NFT market. It is also something that's happened in the traditional art world and the traditional financial markets as well.

Alison Stewart: We'll have more with Nicholas Brunkman and talking about his film Minted after the quick break. This is All of It.

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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In studio, I have Nicholas Bruckman. He's a filmmaker and the director of Minted. He's telling us all about NFTs, the rise and the fall? [laughs] Oh, great, I'm glad she's here. I wanted you to tell us about Kina Matahari. She's a artist you meet, we meet her in Cuba, and she is involved with NFTs because she's interested in what?

Nicholas Bruckman: Kina's story is a really important example of the power of NFTs and blockchain outside of just the traditional financial models that people think of when they associate with these tokens. Kina had experienced a great amount of censorship as a painter in Cuba. Her work deals with sexual liberation and freedom and women's rights and was considered counter-revolutionary by the Cuban government, in which there's really only one venue to show work in Cuba or to sell it, which is in state run galleries. Kina had to literally censor her work, cover up parts of the painting with paper in order to distribute it.

When she discovers NFTs, it allows her for the first time to sell work outside of her country. That, to me, was just an incredible example of the true power of this decentralized tool.

Alison Stewart: Let's see, do we have Kina? Okay, Kina, we're going to ask you to unmic your computer. Hi, can you hear me?

Kina Matahari: Yes. Alison, hello. Good afternoon. How are you doing today?

Alison Stewart: I'm doing well. Thank you for joining us. When you first started selling your work through NFTs, what changed about your work? What changed in the way you were able to deliver your work?

Kina Matahari: My work before the NFT, it wasn't too different because I was doing painting, photography, and video, and that was easy to translate to the Web3 because the nature itself of the artwork was digital. There's another kind of artwork like painting. It was more difficult to me how to do that, how to translate that. I just use an image of my painting, but I think that was for-- I am so sorry, I'm a little nervous. It's a huge privilege to be here today with you. Thank you, Nick, for made me part of [unintelligible 00:17:39] and I'm sorry for my bad English.

I'm still trying to with that imposter syndrome in my mind and the fear, but thank you so much for having me here. Okay, my work changed of work. I move of the real life to the Web3, but the nature of my work for itself didn't change too much.

Alison Stewart: Kina, how did you feel constrained by the art market or your ability to make a living as a Cuban artist making what was somewhat political?

Kina Matahari: The big difference, I'm still on the first question, the main difference was in the commercial process because I never sold an art before after NFT. NFT was my first time. I think every artist can know how it feels that first meeting with the market, how it feels to sell an artwork. That was amazing. I can experiment with that for several occasions. In Cuba, I'm not that thousands or millions artists. I sold my art for hundreds. Maybe in total between my daughter and myself, we did, I don't know, $3,000, but was and is a lot for us life. That change of life that allow us to prove an income in an embassy for travel out of Cuba.

That allows to live, to survive on the pandemic on Cuba in a situation we cannot make money. Specifically, in that moment, I cannot work with the estate galleries, with the system of galleries. All the galleries, the legal galleries in Cuba belongs to the government. There's another kind of galleries like artist studios that works under that name, Artist Studio. I was not able to work on galleries on my profession, so that changed. That gave me a space to expose, to sell my art. NFT and Web3, it wasn't a space of community. It was my gallery all the time that changed my life, the NFT.

Alison Stewart: Kina Matahari, thank you so much for joining us. Did you want to add anything about Kina's story?

Nicholas Bruckman: Yes, just for folks who haven't yet seen the film. Kina's journey takes her from Cuba all the way to Europe and ultimately now the United States because NFTs allowed her to sell her work for the very first time outside of the control of the Cuban government. That's an incredible use case that actually we saw happening all over the world. Of course, as a documentary filmmaker, you have to pick the story and Kina's is incredible, but we also film artists in Nigeria in the film making NFTs.

What I think is so important about this for audiences who really don't know anything about this world is many people, when they hear NFTs, they might know about people, they might have seen those monkey pictures, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, but there's a much deeper story about artists changing lives, avoiding censorship, finding their communities and, and finding their collectors, like Kina did, that I hope people discover in Minted.

Alison Stewart: We have a call. This is Ami, I believe, is in Austin, Texas. Hi, Ami.

Ami: Hi, how are you?

Alison Stewart: Doing okay. What's your question?

Daniel: I'm an artist and I've done a lot of work in animation and I was approached a lot early on about NFTs and I was very interested because I thought, well, this is a way I can actually sell my animations, but the problem I had and why I resisted and never ended up doing it was the environmental impact, both in the mincing of them and all the transactions was tremendous. The amount of energy and as someone who cares about the environment, I felt it was contradictory to my beliefs to just make art in a way that was really so environmentally straining and energy intensive. I don't know if that's changed or if you have any point of view on that or have you talked about that in the documentary?

Nicholas Bruckman: Yes, I can share about that. That is something that's briefly touched on in the film and is, of course, an incredibly important part of this story. The answer is very technical, but yes, it has changed. Blockchains work through a mechanism that used to be called proof of work, which means that you expend a lot of energy to secure the network. There have been advancements in the Ethereum blockchain, not in the Bitcoin one, that uses a new mechanism called proof of stake, which actually makes the energy usage about the same as any other digital transaction, like sending a tweet or posting an image.

There are folks working on that and there are still many environmental issues with the Bitcoin blockchain, and of course, there are many issues with AI-generated art, which is the new topic that many people are leaping into from the NFT world. Your concern is valid, but I would encourage audiences, NFT artists, et cetera, to look into the proof of stake, upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain, and how that's lessened the environmental impacts of the Ethereum NFT market specifically.

Alison Stewart: The NFTs helped break down censorship and gatekeeping in certain circumstances, but new issues arose. What came to play?

Nicholas Bruckman: As this market got frothier and frothier, many celebrities jumped onto the NFT bandwagon.

Alison Stewart: Oh my gosh, we saw that. I'm sorry, that was a very funny compilation of artists. It was very funny.

Nicholas Bruckman: Yes. You have Snoop Dogg and Eminem and Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon all jumping into the NFT game. I think many of them were sincere about their interest in this technology and tool, but it created a very large speculative frenzy where regular folks who didn't know much about this at all were jumping into these PFP or profile picture collections. People may have heard of the Bored Apes or the CryptoPunks are the most famous of these that ended up being worth literally millions of dollars, and I should note, are still worth tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars today.

As many people got in at the peak of the market, they were ultimately wiped out very badly when that market crashed. As Beeple says in the film, be very careful what you invest in. Is this art or is this finance? Is this a commercial token? Is it an investment? Some of those questions play out in the traditional art market as well, where speculation and gatekeeping and certain kinds of curatorial voices drive what has value and what doesn't. I think one thing I wanted audiences to take away from the film is that what value is is pushing mediums forward. The things that hold value and hold our attention, Beeple ask in the film, what's going to last 100 years?

Why do we still talk about Jackson Pollock? Why do we talk about Van Gogh? What is it that we're talking about with Warhol's work? It's because they did something new that pushed the medium of artwork forward. I think many of the artists in the film, whether you like NFTs or don't, I think you admire their bravery and creative tenacity to dive into this new world and to experiment with this new technological medium. That, to me, is inspiring. I think we are entering a period of extremely rapid technological transformation, both blockchain and AI.

A question I wanted to pose with the film is what role do artists have in that transformation? Artists often pioneer these tools from blockchain art to AI art, how can we make sure they're protected as these tools advance.

Alison Stewart: That comes up in the film, yes?

Nicholas Bruckman: Absolutely.

Alison Stewart: They used to be able to get almost residuals in a way, and then it stopped.

Nicholas Bruckman: Exactly, yes.

Alison Stewart: Who can stop it?

Nicholas Bruckman: One of the important use cases of NFTs is that it allows for artists to gain royalties after their sale, so if you have a Jackson Pollock, if you sell it to a second party or third party, the original artist or their estate is not getting money, but with NFTs, that is possible. However, some of the marketplaces took that feature away and reneged on that promise, which caused a big disruption to that path for those artists. This is a tool that can be used for good or a tool that can be used for evil, and so I think we all have a choice to make sure our technology reflects the best of human nature.

Alison Stewart: To be continued we say, yes? Nicholas Bruckman, the name of the film is Minted. You can watch it or stream it now on PBS. Thank you for coming in. We really appreciate it.

Nicholas Bruckman: Thanks for having me.