Minted

Rated TV-14 • PBS

What is art? If you have to ask, you’ve probably never duct-taped a banana to your wall. (Just in case you were wondering, that bit of “art” sold for $6.2 million at auction.)

The digital art world, with its multibillion-dollar trade in virtual objets, can be even more difficult to wrap your head around. The new PBS documentary Minted sheds light on this strange new world. Seeing how fame and money seem to be its driving forces, the whole business has a familiar cha-ching! to it.

It’s best to start with some definitions, as the film does. A nonfungible token (NFT) is a digital certificate of authenticity and ownership for a unique asset, such as a digital picture or video clip. Artists create a piece of digital art then mint (publish) their NFT on a blockchain, which is a public ledger maintained across a decentralized network of computers that validates and records digital transactions. Anyone can make identical digital copies with a few clicks of a mouse, but only one person can “own” the NFT.

Minted identifies Ethereum as the most widely used blockchain for NFTs. Ethereum also has its own native currency, similar to bitcoin.

According to the documentary, “the center of the NFT world [has] shifted from art” to PFPs, short for profile pictures. Essentially, a PFP is an image or avatar displayed next to a user’s name. One of the best-known PFP brands is the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 NFTs with unique combinations of accessories, such as an eye patch and cigarette. At the time of this writing, the least expensive Bored Ape PFP on one trading site was listing for the equivalent of about $57,000. Yes, an easily copied JPEG for more than 50 grand.

Buyers can bid for NFTs on marketplaces such as OpenSea, the most “dominant” NFT trading platform, and many try to flip NFTs for a profit. (Early on, artists earned royalties on resales of their NFTs, but that practice is no longer enforced.) Collector Adam Lindemann says the “greater fool theory” characterizes the NFT market.

“There will always be a guy to pay more until that guy doesn’t exist,” Lindemann explains. (Corollary: A fool and his ethereum are soon parted.) On his phone, Lindemann shows a Beeple he bought for $65,000. Who’s Beeple? We’ll get to him in a moment.

Minted lightly explores the idea of commodity as currency. Mainly, though, it traces the careers of a few digital artists. (The film contains a brief glimpse of nudity in art and bleeps all expletives except for dozens of misuses of God’s name.) Latashá recounts her failure to break into the commercial hip-hop music industry, but when she minted one of her videos on a blockchain, she received a $10,000 bid within three minutes. Justin Aversano’s digital photo Twin Flames #49 was resold in 2022 for $2.5 million, making it one of the highest-selling photographs of all time.

But that’s chump change compared with Beeple’s chef d’oeuvre.

In 2007, Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, began posting one digital picture online every day. He assembled 5,000 of these images into a montage called Everydays, the first piece of digital art Christie’s auction house ever sold. Minted documents the March 2021 event as it happened: After listing initially for $100, Everydays sold two weeks later for $69 million.

For that price, you could almost buy an entire bunch of duct-taped bananas.