The NFT Book: Everything You Need to Know about the Art and Collecting of Non-Fungible Tokens

by Noah Charney, Kenny Schachter, Alex Atallah (Foreword by)

Overview

NFTs, non-fungible tokens, as collectible, digital, blockchain-secured files became an international sensation in 2020, with the trend in trading them peaking in the fall of 2021. Many sold for millions, and one even sold for $69 million. And yet what exactly are they, and why do they have value? This is the definitive book on NFTs in the story of art and collecting.
It is co-authored by an art historian who has written often on the value of art and the history of collecting. NFTs caught Noah Charney’s attention and fascinated him. He, too, felt that initial knee-jerk reaction that so many who hear of a $69 million sale do: how is this digital image different from me clicking “right-click save” on my touchpad and downloading it to my computer? Why would anyone pay $69 million for something that’s not f*cking there?
This book provides answers to these questions and far more. Charney sees in NFTs a direct parallel to the history, sociology and psychology of art collecting. He was recently a “normee” but he’s now halfway inside the club—he is also an acknowledged authority on the history of art and collecting. He knows all there is to know about humans collecting things of no practical value but that we just really want. But then he worked for a period with two crypto-related companies, and got to know this world from within.
He’s not alone on this ride. The second half of this book is written by someone who knows just about all there is to know about NFTs: Kenny Schachter. Kenny is an artist, collector, curator, professor, columnist and NFT influencer. In fact, he was listed in the fall of 2021 as among the 30 most influential people in the world of NFTs. He even coined (and trademarked) a term, NFTism. While Charney is an art historian considering the NFT phenomenon from the thoughtful but remote perch of his couch, examining NFTs historical and within the context of collecting and the value of art, Kenny has been “in the field” more than anyone, even during the pandemic, zipping from London to Zurich to Art Basel Switzerland to Art Basel Miami. He has his finger on the virtual, digital pulse of this fascinating, bizarre, hugely lucrative phenomenon.
Welcome to the definitive book on NFTs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538174760
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	11/15/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	152
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Noah Charney is an internationally best-selling, Pulitzer-nominated American author. Noah presents on television (with appearances on CBS, BBC and also here, Discovery, History, Nat Geo and more) and he writes regularly for numerous major publications, including The Washington Post, The Observer, The Art Newspaper, The Atlantic, Salon and many more. His first book, a novel called The Art Thief was translated into fourteen languages and was a best-seller in five countries. His subsequent books have been non-fiction, including The Art of Forgery and The Museum of Lost Art, both #1 Amazon best-sellers in their category. The Museum of Lost Art was the finalist for the Digital World Book Awardand Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and drew critical praise from The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review and beyond.
Charney has taught for American University of Rome, Yale University, Brown University and now teaches at University of Ljubljana (he lives in Slovenia). He lectures at major museums around the world, including recent talks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington, DC, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and the Dallas Museum of Art. He has given TEDx talks (one on Leonardo da Vinci and another on art crime) and recently did a TED Ed video that got 250,000 views in the first three days and is now over a million.

After having made digital art for decades, Kenny Schachter has spearheaded the traditional art world’s adaptation of Non Fungible Tokens in 2021 by lecturing from Yale to the Hirschhorn Museum and written a series of feature articles for Artnet on the subject. He has curated wide-ranging NFTism exhibitions (which term he trademarked) at Nagel Draxler in Cologne, Institut in London and Nagel Draxler’s booth in Art Cologne, Art Basel Switzerland and Art Basel Miami.

Schachter has curated contemporary art exhibits in museums and galleries and teaching (art history and economics) for more than thirty years; presently in the graduate department of the University of Zurich (appointed to advisory board January 2021) professorships at the School of Visual Arts (NY) and New York University Schachter has a regular column on Artnet.com in addition to writing widely for various international publications including most recently New YorkMagazine and The Times Magazine (UK)

He recently staged the first phygital NFT group exhibit at Nagel-Draxler Gallery in Cologne, and participated in a two-person show with Eva Beresin at Galerie Charim in Vienna (both in May 2021)

Schachter is presently the subject of a documentary being produced and directed by Chris Smith (Tiger King/Fyre Festival), and a Hulu/ABC NFT film, and has been profiled in The New York Times Magazine (cover story, September 1996), and London’s The Observer, The Independent, and The Telegraph.

He is currently based in New York.
Noah Charney is an art historian by training and is the founding director of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA), a non-profit think tank and consultancy group on art crime prevention and solution. He has been written about internationally, including feature articles in the New York Times Magazine, Italy's Ventiquattro, Time Magazine, and has made appearances on National Public Radio, MSNBC, CNBC and ITV television, and many other news outlets. His novel, The Art Thief, was published in 2007 and has sold in sixteen other languages to date.


Dr. Noah Charney is the internationally best-selling author of more than a dozen books, translated into fourteen languages, including The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, which was nominated for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and Museum of Lost Art, which was the finalist for the 2018 Digital Book World Award. He is a professor of art history specializing in art crime, and has taught for Yale University, Brown University, American University of Rome and University of Ljubljana. He is founder of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a ground-breaking research group (www.artcrimeresearch.org) and teaches on their annual summer-long Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection. He has written for dozens of major magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, the Washington Post, the Observer and The Art Newspaper. His recent books on art include The Devil in the Gallery: How Scandal, Shock and Rivalry Shaped the Art World, Making It: The Artist's Survival Guide, The 12-Hour Art Expert: Everything You Need to Know About Art in a Dozen Masterpieces, and Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art, several of which were Amazon #1 best-sellers in their category. He also published the critically-acclaimed The Slavic Myths (Thames&Hudson) in the fall of 2023 and The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: The Complete Story of the World's Most Famous Artwork (Rowman&Littlefield, February 2024), which was praised in The New York Times Book Review and The Telegraph among others. He recently fronted an influencer campaign for Samsung, in 2022 he presented a BBC Radio 4 documentary, China's Stolen Treaures, his TED Ed videos (some on art crime) have been viewed by millions each, and he featured in a recent Amazon Prime documentary, The Picasso of Thieves. A course of his, “Lost Art,” featured this summer for The Teaching Company's Great Courses/Wondrium, the first of several that are scheduled, and he teaches online courses for Atlas Obscura, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery UK, and Yale University on art theft and forgery. He lives in Slovenia with his wife, children and their hairless dog, Hubert van Eyck (believe it or not).

Editorial Reviews

A great read for people who are looking to learn more about NFTs and are wondering how this breakthrough technology has impacted our world today.

Alexander Salnikov

If you want to be the person imagining new art, or at least understanding other people's fundamental contributions to new art, be sure to read both parts of this book.

Vuk Cosic