A well-researched but overly dense account of the impact of NFTs on the art market.
An in-depth exposé of the recent multibillion-dollar surge and explosive crash in the speculative realms of digital art and crypto finance.
New York Times reporter Small dissects the recent history of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and their significant effect on the investment art community, initiated by the sale of a digital artwork compilation at Christie's in 2021 for $69.3 million. “It was an outrageous sum for digital art—the kind of world record that raises conspiracy theories about the motives of its buyers and sellers,” writes the author. “Suddenly the art market was on the fulcrum of decentralized finance, splitting its weight between the invading crypto billionaires and the ancien régime of traditional art collectors. But auctioneers tipped the balance in favor of the new money, scrambling to find a historical precedent for their new cash cow.” In this sprawling narrative maze, Small profiles a diverse range of digital artists as well as other influential and often shadowy players across the finance, entertainment, tech, and gaming industries. They also expand the context with forays into pivotal movements in art history, a summary of the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of the crypto economy. Throughout, Small sharply critiques the erosion of art collecting's prestige by sellers and investors driven by insatiable greed. “The NFT explosion,” writes the author, “had begun with a deadly symmetry exposing culture’s worst tendencies: toward trustlessness, toward scarcity, toward desperation and sycophancy…criminals took advantage of the zeitgeist and errant entrepreneurs played at expertise.” In their meticulously documented exploration, Small reveals insights hinting at a compelling core story. However, the intricate details and tech-speak will overwhelm many general readers. In the hands of a more seasoned storyteller such as Michael Lewis, the material would resonate with a wider audience.
A well-researched but overly dense account of the impact of NFTs on the art market.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536759
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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