Are NFTs really art?

In January, a clip from The Tonight Show featuring Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton went viral: not because either had said anything particularly interesting or scandalous, but because the interview was so uncanny in its content and its style. In the video, Hilton, who looks like a telegenic, radioactive Barbie in a lime green cocktail dress, is discussing Bored Ape NFTs, the popular crypto images that have been selling for a minimum of $200,000 since their first release in April 2021.

Their back-and-forth, in spite of both these people having worked in entertainment for at least two decades, has all the breezy naturalism of a conversation between chatbots, as if somebody had made a Paris-Hilton-Jimmy-Fallon deepfake carefully designed to fail the Turing test.

Just because the most popular NFTs tend to be simple, bright, cartoonish and produced in enormous, variable sequences does not, of course, mean that this is the only form of NFT that can be minted. It is possible, for instance, to make one out of a video. Rewatching that very eerie, very 2022, segment of Hilton and Fallon talking with restrained enthusiasm about MoonPay and Bored Apes, I found myself wondering whether anyone had yet been savvy enough to make this particular clip into an NFT. The flatly artificial TV lighting and the stilted dialogue both give the scene an unreal, almost hallucinatory quality. As in some of the CGI pop culture collages minted by the artist Beeple, who once released an eye-popping NFT of an absurdly muscular Elon Musk in front of an exploding rocket, we are seeing familiar figures in a disconcerting, unfamiliar context.