Disaster Girls
Hard work doesn’t matter. Good taste doesn’t matter, and neither do good bets or ‘doing all the right things’.
There’s a well-known internet meme called Disaster Girl. You’ve probably seen it. It shows a four-year-old girl against the soft-focus background of a burning building. She is looking back over her shoulder, throwing the camera a knowing, curiously adult smile that jars with her rosy cheeks and the disaster that seems to be unfolding behind her. The photograph is of a then four-year-old Zoë Roth, taken by her father Daniel in 2005. The burning building is not a neighbour’s house on fire, but a controlled experiment. This is a drill. Disaster Girl is commonly underscored with messages of the child-sociopath trope: ‘They said it was nap time. I agreed’, or of wipe-out mayhem – the burning house labelled ‘2020’, the smiling girl labelled ‘God’. Roth sold the meme of her four-year-old self as an NFT in 2021 for $485,000. She used the profits to pay off her student loans.
In October 2023, a dappGambl report demonstrated that most NFTs are now completely worthless. The study, drawing on data from NFT Scan and CoinMarketCap, examined 73,275 NFT collections and found that more than 95% of these had a market cap of 0 ETH.
The report follows the launch of a platform called Unsellable, offering to buy investors’ worthless NFTs for Tax-loss harvesting Purposes. Unsellable take NFTs that have lost all exchange value and buys them as a write-off. Scrolling through their pages, you’ll find a repository where all the minor apes and punks and also-ran kitties go to rot. Sometimes NFTs are “disrupting the art world” and “reforming the financial system”, the Unsellable team writes on their About page, and, then sometimes, they’re just “silly expensive Jpegs”. There you have it. Not just bad art, but a bad investment. The disaster meme for this moment might caption the burning house ‘NFTs’ and the little girl ‘2023’. I feel like I just have to search hard enough and somebody will have made it already…
But NFTs were only ever desperate bets on a broken future. For a generation in permanent crisis, with no stable assets or equity, saddled with debt and with no prospect of home ownership or stable employment, what was left but to shill a disaster?
In the summer of 2016, not long after the shock Brexit vote and not long before the shock election of Donald Trump, the LA art dealer Stefan Simchowitz was quoted as saying that art could be a “good hedge against structural changes in the relative value that currencies have against each other”’. Art is not a safe investment exactly, or a particularly liquid investment, but that’s also what sometimes makes it a good investment in moments of uncertainty or crisis. Placing some of your bets in art can pay off if disaster strikes elsewhere. In the 1970s, in the face of an oil crisis and high inflation, the British Rail Pension Fund chose to invest £40 million of its workers’ money in Impressionist art. By the time the last works were auctioned in 2001, the fund had made a respectable 13% return on investment. Following this trend, the pandemic did not impact art sales as expected. There was a temporary recession in 2020 due to gallery closures, but then the global art market grew rapidly in 2021, surpassing pre-pandemic levels. Throughout the past decade, art as an asset class has appreciated in value in ways that don’t necessarily correlate to broader economic crises or political unrest.
NFTs have been around in various guises since 2014, but they rocketed in value in 2020 and 2021 along with crypto and retail trading. Why? Millennials and Gen Zs, in debt and with no chance of financing their futures through so-called ‘legitimate’ channels, were investing in high-risk, high-return stocks for the chance to win a down payment. They passed the lockdown dreaming of home ownership. Why not? The good life wasn’t coming any other way. The media framed it as gambling in the absence of organised sports or horse racing, but that doesn’t really capture the desperation. Everywhere there was a sense that the path to the future had been rigged by a generation that nimbly pulled the ladder up behind themselves. It was gambling for a spot in the life boats.
Millennials and Gen Zs were raised to be entrepreneurs of the self, to believe that if they simply worked and studied hard enough, success and security were waiting in their futures. Failure was a personal blight for refusing to invest their time wisely, for refusing to grind hard enough. Along with Bored Apes and other useless tokens, many now feel they have been sold worthless promises. Instead of speaking about investment in their university education, my art students speak to me of investing in NFTs or on retail sites to try and make rent, or of buying a little breathing space, a little time to make their art. Security isn’t coming with study and safe choices, so why not go all-in on a long shot?
These generations are a product of their environment. The day traders were teenagers or children in the financial crash. Fledgling adults in the pandemic. Born between the mid-eighties and early noughties, their identity is shaped by the vacuum of Post-Communist politics (I, personally, was sent to a five-year old fancy dress party as the Berlin Wall) or shaped by the speculation and excess of the dot com era, or racked by the uncertainty of the 2008 financial crash. They’ve encountered the death of the American dream (or in Ireland, where I’m from the Celtic Tiger) and the withdrawal of the state’s contract. The post-war security and investment in public goods like education and housing their grandparents and parents enjoyed has been replaced by volatility and risk. Retail trading forums like WallStreetBets and NFT discords have become spaces where people trade crazy investment advice, but it’s also where they articulate their loss of hope in those dreams.
Financial markets are no longer a space where investors allocate capital to businesses to grow profit and enrich the economy, just as people don’t necessarily invest in art to enrich the culture or their loves or to make the world a better place. It’s all about gambling on hype or network effects in the gulf left by financial and social and political systems in total freefall. The market is a giant lottery in search of the prize of security.
Of course, financial markets have been divorced from the so-called ‘real’ economy since the 1970s, just as what we call ‘art’ has been divorced from material or aesthetic qualifications since conceptualism, if not since Marcel Duchamp’s readymades in the early decades of the twentieth century. So what’s new here, exactly? Many students will be familiar with concepts about ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘postmodernism’ (and heavily in debt for those seminar debates for years to come).
But, maybe, in the era of post-truth and political apathy, what is new is an acceleration of these sensations, a total sense that nothing matters anymore. Hard work doesn’t matter. Good taste doesn’t matter, and neither do good bets or ‘doing all the right things’.
A report just confirmed what most of us already knew: NFTs are just silly, cartoon jpegs. And, yet, they just might be the ideal token of a desperate, broken future. But now that they are worthless, is the disaster over?