The Original in the Digital Age

Abstract

In 2021, an NFT of a digital artwork by the artist @beeple was sold for $69 million. This sale is the starting point for a logical-historical journey tracing the fate of the Original in the digital age. We follow the footsteps of two seminal works exploring the concept of the Original, the celebrated The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin and Nelson Goodman’s book, Languages of Art. We examine two case studies: the Lost Leonardo - a recently surfaced painting claimed to be by Leonardo da Vinci, which remains highly disputed, and the grandiose saga of van Meegeren, the famous counterfeiter of Vermeer’s works from the 1930s and 1940s. Both tales are read as fascinating detective stories. We provide an analysis of our own that anchors the idea of the Original with the logic of Singular Rule - thereby giving structure to the ‘one-of-its-kind’ property that we associate with the Original. Our final remarks discuss the relevance of our analysis to the digital art of today.