The Digital Wild West
The digital world is getting more lawless with each passing day. If staring into Marina Abramovic’s eyes across a table is considered art, couldn’t hacking be considered art as well?
This article was originally published in Turkish on GQ Turkey, on May 6, 2021.
Marina Abramovic — MoMa 2010 / Getty Images
Arguably the world’s leading performance artist, Marina Abramovic had had her most public impact in 2010, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For her exhibition “The Artist is Present,” she traveled to the museum every day for three months, offering her own presence as the work of art, and sat down with museum visitors across a table, one at a time, alone together despite the audience that watched this performance unfold.
The hotly debated performance had raised many questions at the time about what is or isn’t art. As the amount of people who began sobbing, or laughing, or shouting in frustration at the artist after sitting with her grew, thanks to the sheer number of Youtube videos shared by museum-goers, the world had witnessed, perhaps for the first time, the power of performance art.
Such was the cultural impact of “The Artist is Present” that in 2013, Jay-Z ended up recording a performance-art-cum-music-video at Pace Gallery which featured Abramovic, for his single Picasso Baby.
The history of art is filled with moments like these, where the actual financial value is perhaps not definable, but the cultural ripples are undeniable.
The sale of a $70 million JPEG by Christie’s in March once again had people asking what is, or isn’t, art. The number one topic being talked about in art world circles is how an artist named BEEPLE became a social media phenomenon by selling digital works of art. No one is expected to look at his 3D animations and feel what Caravaggio can make them feel, but it seems an artist today is also not required to have such an emotional impact. However you look at it, the history of art is really the history of art that was purchased by collectors.
With NFTs, we are entering an age where every kind of creativity can be commodified. Therein lies the danger. The evolution contemporary art underwent, beginning in 1917 with the question “Is Marcel Duchamp’s urinal really a sculpture?” and eventually leading to “Is it art to look into Abramovic’s eyes?” was rather accelerated when it came to NFTs.
There is a new job type in the growing field of cyber security called Vulnerability Researcher, tasked with ensuring a company’s digital systems cannot be hacked. Engineers who have this posting often work for tech giants such as Twitter, Google, Facebook, identifying security flaws in the systems. A reductive example would be for a bank to hire a thief to determine how safe its safes are.
Matthew Hickey offers such services as the owner of Hacker House, and he decided put a “hack” for sale as an NFT in March, positing that he viewed the vulnerability as a work of art. Rather than a computer virus as one might expect, the NFT for sale was a manual on how to exploit a code used in several first person shooter videogames from the early 2000s.
Despite not posing a threat to anyone other than vintage videogame afficionados, the NFT platform OpenSea where this hack was being sold, pulled the sale without an explanation. Hickey reacted by saying that he felt censored and that he would pursue legal means if necessary. It is possible that OpenSea pulled the sale in order to avoid setting a precedent that would turn the platform into a marketplace where more dangerous hacks could be bought and sold.
It is interesting that Hickey opted for an art-focused and prominent marketplace rather than using Twitter itself to sell his code. In a way, his NFT was a challenge both to our understanding of art and the NFT market as a whole.
Computer codes and security exploits are not things we are taught to view as “art.” But much like a car engine we never even see (unless it breaks down), there is an entire digital universe that we never question or peer into as long as it works that way we expect it to.
If someone were to hack our Facebook profile, or take down a bank, and then claimed it was for art, and the forensic specialists examining it found the code “beautiful,” would the hacker still be tried for a digital crime?
The digital world is becoming increasingly lawless. If staring into Abramovic’s eyes is in fact art, is it too farfetched to suggest hacking can be art too?
