Crypto-Preservation and the Ghost of Andy Warhol

Abstract

For its enthusiasts, the blockchain is an archivist’s dream come true: an immutable historical record that is publicly accessible and immune from censorship. Distributed file systems such as IPFS aim to store creative works in a redundant, networked fashion outside the control of any single cloud provider. Projects designed to work with blockchains such as Filecoin and Arweave propose a dedicated cryptocurrency as financial incentive to support the cost of governing and sustaining this “permaweb”. As dreamy as this picture sounds, many of these promises depend on technologies that have yet to be sufficiently developed or adopted. Rather than forecast the future, we can separate the hype from the reality in the present day by examining a real-life example, namely the 2021 auction of Andy Warhol’s digital art with NFTs. This essay focuses less on blockchain’s general promise as a preservation medium and more on the particular case of the digital Warhols, which both in form and spirit would seem a perfect application of NFTs to preserve historically important works of digital art. Which promises of the crypto-dream of permanent access to digital heritage ring true for this case study, and which are overblown?