Token Supremacy:
The Art of Finance, the Finance of Art, and the Great Crypto Crash of 2022
By Zachary Small (Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor)
Token Supremacy is a necessary book, but has a limited audience.
There are a lot of books out there about NFTs. Some of them aren’t even trying to sell you something! Others aren’t books. We are still in the sorting out what happened period of history, with no promise that this will be more than a Jeopardy 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, Token Supremacy 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 Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, 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.
CITATION HEEDED 