The Boca Bauhaus Marcel Breuer, BRiC and Lynn University’s NFT museum

Abstract

‘Art and Technology–A New Unity.’ This was a slogan of the Bauhaus art school, but it could also be a slogan for digital artworks that have been minted as NFTs. We trace the lineage of the idea of the unity of art and technology from: the Bauhaus art school, which operated from 1919–1933; to buildings in Boca Raton that were co-designed in the late 1960s by a former Bauhaus teacher, Marcel Breuer; to an exhibit of the Lynn University NFT museum that, as of July 2023, is displayed in a building that was co-designed by Breuer and is now part of the Boca Raton Innovation Campus (BRiC). We juxtapose the Bauhaus’s approach to the unity of art and technology, understood by reflecting on Breuer’s architecture, with the unity of art and technology exemplified by NFT artworks. We argue that while audiences do not experience NFT artworks with the same ‘aura’ that audiences experienced when viewing artworks in the past, audiences can experience NFT artworks with what we call the ‘simulacrum’ of aura. Audiences can experience the simulacrum of aura because an NFT can be understood as original and authentic and cannot be identically reproduced.