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Token Supremacy: The Art of Finance, the Finance of Art, and the Great Crypto Crash of 2022

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Description

A New York Times investigative reporter wades into the murky, pixelated waters of the multibillion-dollar NFT market—the virtual casino that sprang up overnight in 2020 and came crashing down, with all its celebrity hucksters, just two years later. A vibrant and witty exploration of the increasingly blurry line between art and money, artist and con artist, value and worthlessness. “A perfect book to understand and to laugh at the craziness of the art world today." —Jerry Saltz, author of How to Be an Artist In 2021, when the gavel fell at Christie’s on the sale of Mike Winkelmann’s Everydays series—a compilation of five thousand digital artworks—it made a thunderous announcement: Non-fungible tokens had arrived. The ludicrous world of CryptoKitties and Bored Apes had just produced a piece of art worth $69.3 million (at least according to the highest bidder). On that day, the traditional art market—the largest unregulated market in the world—put its stamp of approval on a very new and carnivalesque digital reality. But what did it mean for these two worlds to collide? Was it all just a money laundering scheme? And come on, what was that piece of digital flotsam really worth anyway? In Token Supremacy, Zachary Small works through these and other fascinating questions, tracing the crypto economy back to its origins in the 2008 financial crisis and the lineage of NFTs back to the first photographic negatives. Small describes jaw-dropping tales of heists, publicity stunts, and rug pulls, before zeroing in on the role of "security tokens" in the FTX scandal. Detours through art history provide insight into the mythmaking tactics that drive stratospheric auction sales and help the wealthy launder their finances (and reputations) through art. And we cast an eye toward a future where NFTs have paved the way for a dangerous, new shadow banking system. A wild and spellbinding tour through a world that strains belief. Read more

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf (May 21, 2024)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593536754


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 59


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.8 x 1.48 x 8.55 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #1,086,455 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #559 in Digital Currencies #676 in Money & Monetary Policy (Books) #4,010 in Arts & Photography Criticism


#559 in Digital Currencies:


#676 in Money & Monetary Policy (Books):


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • True story that reads like a thriller!
I've been following Zachary Small's work as a New York Times reporter for years, and their debut book does not disappoint. Small has used their vast knowledge and insider connections to the art world to expose the reader to a plot that's both current and links us to a scam that's been going on under our noses for years (decades? centuries?). Small is a great journalist, but a natural at long form narrative, and I'll continue reading their NYTimes articles as I anxiously await their next book! ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2024 by Eleanor Beckman
    • when art and finance collide
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. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2024 by D. Woollard
    • Makes Sense of the NFT Rollercoaster
If you've dealt with NFTs from 2021 onward, you've seen some crazy things. Some good, some bad, and some ugly stuff that sells for insane money. It's hard to explain, but somehow this book pulls it off. I appreciate that it's not from the perspective of either an ideologue or a hater -- just someone who is taking it all in, calling the plays along the way, and memorializing this ... interesting period of time on paper. There are heroes, there are villains. Their are winners, there are losers. There are also made shades of gray. The author does a great job of spotlighting all of the above and walking the reader through the labyrinth of NFTs, digital art, and crypto culture. If you sat on the sidelines of this phenomenon, or you checked out early, or you're discovering this book years into the future -- Token Supremacy will help to make it all make sense. Finally! ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2024 by L Watson
    • Necessary Book with 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, 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. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2024 by Logan

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