1 of 1 of ?

1 of 1 of ? is one image released two ways in the same week of May 2024. The unique version was offered at Sotheby's in a sale called Natively Digital: Art on Bitcoin. The same picture went out as an open edition that stayed open for 24 hours. Anyone could take one. Nobody could make theirs look different.

The text that sits closest to this is Walter Benjamin's essay on mechanical reproduction from 1936. It's the one everyone has heard of and fewer people have read, so I went back to it. The famous line is in section two: "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be."

That is the whole case for the original. A print of a painting is missing the painting's here and now. It wasn't in the room, it doesn't carry the history of the object, it can't be tested for age. Benjamin says the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.

A file doesn't have that problem in the same way. The unique image and the open edition image are the same pixels. There is no patina to test and no room it hangs in. If the only thing a reproduction lacks is presence, and neither version has a place, then the gap Benjamin describes closes. What is left to separate them is the terms. One was issued with a supply of one. The other was issued with a supply nobody knew in advance, which is the question mark in the title.

Benjamin has a sentence for the open edition too. Reproduction, he writes, "substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence." Most works sit on one side of that sentence. This one was built to sit on both, with the same image, in the same week.

The part I care about most is what the question mark cost. In the release thread I promised to sign every open edition by hand on a physical ink-on-Tyvek work, Proof of Work. Every edition minted added one more signature to the job. On 28 May 2024 I reported that 35,262 signatures were finished. The size of the edition stopped being an abstract number and became something my hand had to keep up with.

Benjamin thought that "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." He called that loss a shattering of tradition. I'm not sure it withered here. The picture lost any claim to being special, because it was everywhere. The scarcity went into the record of how it was issued, and the effort went into a sheet of Tyvek that has the count written on it one mark at a time.

So the question in the work is the same one I was left with after rereading him. Is the unique version rarer than the open edition, or only priced as if it were?