Speculative labour: The financialized imagination of creative work and the assetization of digital art through non-fungible tokens (NFTs)

Abstract

This article investigates – based on semi-structured interviews and conversations on cryptoart forums – how digital artists experience the blockchain-enabled assetization of their work through non-fungible tokens, including the transformation of digital artworks (which previously had negligible if any economic value) into assets capable of increasing in price value over time and generating future income from resale provisions. We show how this assetization of digital artworks has kindled artists’ financialized imagination and incentivized them to perform speculative labour – that is, to speculate on the potential capture of future financial proceeds from present-day underpaid or uncompensated activities, while mobilizing fictional expectations of imagined rentiership futures. We suggest that the commodification thesis, which has traditionally explained the future orientation of creative work as tied to commodity exchange, may be insufficient to account for artists’ speculative, asset-based imaginations of the future under financialized capitalism. Therefore, it may be beneficial to complement it with an assetization lens.