In college, I ran the soundboard for our campus music venue. A highlight was supporting the eccentric composer and electronic musician Dan Deacon. 

Deacon’s reputation was built through his live shows. He didn’t play on stages. He performed on the ground, at audience-level, perched behind a table of hardware – an electronic mess of knobs, dials, cables and patches, glowing across varicolored LEDs.

As he played, he asked listeners to participate. Sometimes that meant sitting in a circle. But mostly, it meant movement. He asked us to use our arms to form tunnels while others ran through them. And we did, weaving through one another, laughing, outside the venue and back in again. 

Parked outside was Deacon’s signature school bus. The vehicle’s engine had been modified to run on recycled vegetable oil. Today when I hear his music, I still think of that bus, and the gleeful tunnel runs – the context at the periphery that adds flesh to his art.

These days Deacon’s scoring Tom Hardy-fronted films (Venom: The Last Dance) and documentaries about non-fungible tokens (NFTs). In the latter – the recently arrived MINTED: The Rise (and Fall?) of the NFT – Deacon provides a characteristically buoyant electronic backdrop, shifting moods as we encounter various characters.

The film, which debuted in 2023 at the Tribeca Film Festival and is now streaming for a limited time on PBS, was directed by People’s Television founder, Nicholas Bruckman (Not Going Quietly). He and Deacon went to high school together. Through a diversity of spirit and voice, Minted decodes the NFT gold rush through the windfalls and heartbreaks of those who lived it.

“It's not an NFT explainer,” Bruckman told me recently. “It does that in the process, but at a much bigger level [it’s about] how artists can lead the way for how technologies are used. How can artists make a living without selling out or without compromising their values? Fundamentally, that's what the film is about.”

Across 77 minutes and a multitude of perspectives – from collectors to pundits to the creators themselves – Minted is an exercise in value, compromised and otherwise, rooted in the story of a kid who didn’t realize digital art might someday offer a tenable career.

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Bruckman was born in London and grew up in Manhattan. His father was “sort of a technologist.” “I remember him bringing home a giant briefcase with big cable bands coming out of it when I was like 7,” he told me on a call from New York, where he lives. “He was like, ‘this is an external hard drive – it holds 32 megabytes.’

“I was on the internet in like 1991,” he continued, speaking on a video call from his standing desk, dressed in a salmon shirt. Behind him was a table stacked with papers and figurines, illuminated by the morning sun. “ I'm not a coder, but I grew up with technology, so Bitcoin and blockchain clicked for me early on.”

Bruckman studied digital art at SUNY Purchase, “running away from my dad’s business and tech” worlds,” he said. “ I was projecting onto sculptures, making art on CD-ROMs, using Max MSP for interactive art that you stepped on a certain place in the projector and the art would interact with you.”

Though fulfilling, Bruckman questioned whether this work could make a viable profession. “ So I got into documentary filmmaking, and commercial filmmaking,” he said. (I first met Bruckman through that work, circa 2017, when I did some copywriting for his creative studio, People’s Television.) “In addition to making feature films, I work in the commissioned film and client space, much like the artists in the film do.”

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Minted begins inside the living room of Mike Winkelmann, better known as the artist Beeple. Surrounded by friends and family, he’s watching as an NFT of his now iconic piece "Everydays: the First 5000 Days" is auctioned by Christie’s for an astounding $69.3 million. It was the moment that shook the earth. Frontpage headlines introduced NFTs to the world, conveying shock, wonder and skepticism that this might be the future of art.

But it was also art’s past. When Bruckman started filming Minted in early 2021, he’d already been following folks like Beeple for years. They were digital artists, like him, toiling to find viable routes to monetize their work – a struggle steeped in  a broader philosophy of art.

Read more: Proof of Artwork: Ryan Zurrer on His $29 Million Purchase of Beeple’s ‘Human One’

To make the point, Bruckman grounds us in the work of French artist Yves Klein. “Klein always understood that the way his work was bought and sold would be an aspect of the experience of the piece,” says artist and film interviewee Mitchell Chan. In one 1958 Klein exhibition, “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility,” there was “nothing at all – not a painting, nothing” hanging on the gallery’s walls. Klein put these “pieces” up for sale.

“Whenever you bought one of these,” explains Chan, “you would get in exchange a certificate. And each one is unique. And, crucially, that certificate is not the art. It is a token which indicates you own the art. But it is not the art.”

Rarely do observers bother to contextualize NFTs within the larger scope of art history. Via Klein, we might understand NFTs as a new kind of certificate of authenticity. That’s why this lineage is crucial – especially for the layperson who may miss the point.

"Fundamentally the ideas behind blockchain – like privacy, decentralization, peer-to-peer transaction – are all really great and inevitable,” Bruckman told me. “People need to understand how it works and why it works."

Minted creates space for that comprehension. The word “minted,” for instance, is defined on a fittingly terminal-like interface: “to create a unique token on the blockchain,” and – in British slang – “to be suddenly successful or wealthy.” 

These definitions appear periodically to help the viewer grok the basics. What does “non-fungible” actually mean? “Irreplaceable, unique, cannot be copied.” And what, exactly, is a “token.” “A representation of a thing, fact, quality or feeling.”

Mostly, though, we learn what NFTs are through the characters that use them. Bruckman sought a "kaleidoscope" of perspectives, tapping artists working across music, photography, painting and various forms of digital art – all around the world, and for myriad reasons. 

We’re brought into the lives of music artist Latashá Alcindor (aka Latashá) and photographer, Justin Aversano – both of whom have leveraged NFTs to tremendous success. 

Read more: Latashá is Manifesting Her Way Out of the Matrix

In 2021, Alcindor’s NFT sales amounted to more than $100,000. And Aversano’s “Twin Flames #49” sold for an astonishing 871 ETH ($3.7 million at the time), making it the seventh most expensive photograph ever sold.

Minted takes us into their studios and their homes, and we witness as NFT sales roll in and their emotions bubble over. Before they landed six- and seven-figure payouts, though, NFTs were providing rent and grocery money – allowing them to circumvent near-impenetrable traditional markets. 

Outside the US, that assumed another dimension.  ”We heard about these amazing twins in Nigeria – Taslemat and Taesirat Yusuf – who are both digital artists making a big splash overnight,” Bruckman said. “To me it represented the movement that was emerging in places where it just wasn't considered that you could be an artist professionally, period. This technology made that possible and changed the perception.”

Also highlighted are artists from Cuba, operating in the wake of Decree 349. In 2018, the controversial piece of legislation required artists to obtain government approval for their work, granting authorities power to suppress art deemed objectionable. 

Cuban curator, gallerist and painter Kina Matahari was one victim of the decree. “She was actually forced to cover pieces of her work because her work dealt with female liberation and sexual expression,” Bruckman told me. NFTs enabled her to transcend local censorship and, eventually, earn enough money to leave Cuba. She and her daughter emigrated to Spain and now live in the United States.

But NFTs were not the emancipatory cure-all they may seem. Fellow Cuban artist, Paolo De, for instance, was barred from OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, because of political tensions between the U.S. and Cuba.

Just marketing

“The platforms talk about decentralization – that’s just marketing,” Paolo De says in Spanish. “Decentralization is a very spectacular concept, but the truth is that we are human beings who are manipulating all of this, and human beings are political.”

Alcindor felt that, too, when her set at the conference NFT NYC was shut down because the venue didn’t want any more hip hop. “It reminded me of the way I felt excluded from the music industry,” she said.

Critically, Bruckman doesn’t shy away from this darker side of crypto. He introduces us to collectors and traders, too, like Topshotkief, who quit his job to “flip” NFTs. “[I was] maxing out my credit card and I was always flipping,” he says. One day he clicked on a deceptive URL and lost everything. “I called the police,” he said. “Obviously the police had no idea what I was talking about. Five hundred thousand dollars, one click, all gone.” 

Scams helped catalyze NFTs’ spectacular collapse – but not by themselves. The Ukraine war incited a supply chain bottleneck and induced a global recession, when risky asset classes – of which crypto is perhaps the most glaring example – tend to fare poorly. Then FTX imploded and the entire ecosystem bore the blame. With NFT sales plummeting, NFT platforms ditched artist royalties to buoy their margins and keep the transactions flowing. 

Suddenly the immense promise appeared doomed – a dot com bubble-esque flash in the pan. “NFTs aren’t dead,” says Gino the Ghost, a Grammy-winning producer and NFT trader, “but a lot of people’s hopes and dreams are for the moment, for sure.”

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What the dot com bubble burst did do, though, was accelerate a legal framework that ensured more security and legitimacy. NFTs, as Cornell professor James Grimmelman notes in the film, have done the same. “The legal system can do more to integrate NFTs sensibly,” he says. “At the end of the day we have to ask: are we going to protect the artists, wherever they are?”

Recently, crypto regulation has taken the form of ETFs and, via a consequential Securities and Exchange (SEC) decision, the allowance of most memecoins. (On February 27, the commission announced that memecoins are generally not considered securities.) 

Trump coin

But the regulatory landscape is still developing. Look no further than Trump coin to see that real-world practice often eschews the web3 ideals – “privacy, decentralization, peer-to-peer transaction” – that instill hope when answering Grimmelman’s question. Moreover, despite NFTs serving as much needed creator lifelines, the SEC’s actions against some creators suggest NFTs are securities and should not be used as such. 

Filmmaker, lawyer and law professor Brian L. Frye and Jonathan Mann – aka “Song A Day Mann” – are currently suing the SEC over this view. And Frye, who went to art school prior to becoming a lawyer, has long been trying to articulate Klein-like parallels. 

As a junior securities lawyer, he “couldn’t help but notice that the SEC’s definition of security looked an awful lot like contemporary art,” he said in a podcast last August. “The way the art market transacts with conceptual art is with certificates” where artists “sell the conceptual art in the form of editions represented by ownership of a certificate.”

These are the historical precedents that should be considered. “That is the level of nuance that I wanted in the film,” Bruckman told me. “This is a very powerful technology, whether you like it or not, and we need to ask ourselves: where does it benefit? And where does it need regulation or guardrails to protect people?”

And that’s where Minted succeeds. It’s not trying to convince you NFTs are good or bad. Any tool worth its salt can be used for nefarious deeds. NFTs unlock new ways to collaborate and access markets – and to scam people and plagiarize artists’ work. What’s most important, as Bruckman said, is that we understand “how it works and why it works.” 

“We're talking about really big philosophical issues right now,” he said. “I’m interested to see what the next four years look like because obviously we've got a memecoin-launching president in the White House and, while I'm certainly not a supporter of his, I understand why folks in the crypto space are excited about having somebody who embraces this technology.

“Now is the president launching memecoins and NFTs and then rugging everybody going to help artists?” he continued. “Probably not, but it's going to get interesting and people should really learn about this world.”

In web3 we get uncompromising reflections of our multitudes, vegetable oil and all. “We’re recreating the world in miniature, the whole range of human emotions and human actions,” says digital artist Kevin McCoy – regarded as the creator of the first NFT – in the film’s denouement. “There’s incredible altruism and there’s incredible greed. That’s the world and you see it laid out right in front of you.”

lead image: the artist Beeple from the film, courtesy of NFT Film LLC