NFT Standard ERC-721 Tops ArtReview's 2021 Power List
High-ranking human beings on the list include American anthropologist Anna L. Tsing, Indonesian collective ruangrupa, and American artist Theaster Gates.
ERC-721 source code. Screenshot. Courtesy Ethereum.org.
Contemporary art magazine ArtReview announced their 20th annual art world Power 100 list today, placing the Ethereum standard used to create NonFungible Tokens (NFTs) on top.
'NFTs without doubt offer an alternative to the ways in which art is distributed and circulated, while also introducing it to new networks and new audiences,' they wrote in the list's introduction.
'As commercial galleries and museums (and even magazines) scrabble to enter this emerging territory, it's definitely a disrupting force in the traditional art environment – while being equally disruptive (in a concretely negative way) to our relationship to the environment in general,' they continued.
In the midst of a pandemic, NFTs went viral this year. Collins declared 'NFT' their word of the year for 2021, the only major dictionary not to allude to Covid-19. (Oxford chose 'vax', Merriam Webster 'vaccine', and Cambridge 'perseverance' for their words of the year).
ArtReview argues that the pandemic and the meteoric rise of NFTs are intertwined. The cessation of real world events hastened interest in buying digital assets among a growing class of crypto elites at the same time as digital-native artists sought to monetise their creativity 'when their economic prospects seem more precarious than ever'.
ArtReview selects its Power 100 based on the input of 30 contributors using three criteria: activity in the past 12 months, influence on the kind of art being made, and international impact.
American Anthropologist Anna L. Tsing, author of The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) ranked second on this year's list, followed by Indonesian collective ruangrupa, who are the directors of next year's documenta, and 'social practice' artist Theaster Gates.
Notable inclusions from the Asia Pacific region include Chinese artist Cao Fei at number seven, Australia's indigenous Karrabing Film Collective at number eight, and Asia Art Archive's Chris Ho, Claire Hsu and John Tain at number 12.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg squeezed onto the list at number 100.
Last year, Black Lives Matter topped the Power 100. An alternative list, Collecteurs' Substance 100, placed Ghana-born filmmaker John Akomfrah at number one. —[O]
