Emily Ratajkowski is auctioning an NFT with Christies, called Buying Myself Back: A Model for Redistribution.
On her insagram she says: “The digital terrain should be a place where women can share their likeness as they choose, controlling the usage of their image and receiving whatever potential capital attached. Instead, the internet has more frequently served as a space where others exploit and distribute images of women’s bodies without their consent and for another’s profit. Art has historically functioned similarly: works of unnamed muses sell for millions of dollars and build careers of traditionally male artists, while the subjects of these works receive nothing. I have become all too familiar with this narrative, as chronicled in my 2020 essay for New York Magazine, Buying Myself Back.
NFTs carry the potential to allow women ongoing control over their image and the ability to receive rightful compensation for its usage and distribution”.
I agree with her first paragraph wholeheartedly. The second? Not so sure.
With lockdown relaxed I got my hair cut. My hairdresser’s boyfriend is a fashion photographer. He’s being encouraged to mint his photos as NFTs so that they can’t be misused by others. I was told it would cost him about £80 of crypto to mint each one. He’s tempted because some teenager had been using one of his images to sell products on ebay, and even though she stopped when he asked her, he thinks others might try to use his images too. He had no idea of the massive energy usage involved.
I asked: how will you decide which images to tokenise? How will this stop someone using them without your permission? How is this better for you than simply watermarking anything you put in the public domain? Who benefits from you buying crypto to fund the process?
Emily Ratajkowski’s images are likely to be a bigger deal. But still I don’t see how NFTs will help her. Agreeing ownership and distribution rights of images contractually with photographers before a shoot, and then fighting to defend those contracts when necessary, would seem a better approach to me. She would need to do that anyway if they were tokenised, and I don’t see how tokenisation would give her any additional protection practically.
