Post 2 of Left Open, CLT’s leftist coverage of the 2023 Australian Open.
Of the grand slams, the Australian Open most represents optimism and possibility. The youngest, least formal and first of the big four tourneys, “the happy slam” fills January with a sense of hope. Forget the losses of last year, nevermind nagging injuries or realistic limitations—on the sunny hardcourts of Melbourne, a whole season of opportunity lays ahead; anything is possible.
While inspiring, a credulous belief in the possibility of limitless success of course comes with great risk—just ask anyone duped by FTX or Theranos. You may be thinking, “woah Club Leftist Tennis, it’s a bit of a stretch to compare the emotional affect of a sporting competition with famous Silicon Valley scams.” Yet the existence of AO Artball, the NFT project overseen by Tennis Australia, the national governing body of the sport and its Open, readily invites the connection.
AO Artball was created in 2022, when Tennis Australia sought to remedy the pandemic-era drop in real world fandom with a turn toward the virtual. As a description of the project (directly copied from official press release into articles in idiotic capitalist media like BusinessWire and Tennis.com) states, it “exists at the intersection of sport and innovation and offers a membership that unlocks a new arena to keep fans in the game – on and off the court.” If you don’t follow what any of that gobbledegook means, allow us to translate. It means: “give us your money, sucker.”
Last January, the project released 6,776 unique NFTs, called ArtBalls, each linked to a 19cm x 19cm plot of the court. If the winning shot from any matches landed on that plot, that data was uploaded to the NFT, allegedly inscribing it with real monetary value.
Sidebar: if you are still skeptical about the link between the emotional spirit of the Australian Open and capitalist techno-optimism, just look at how closely recent Aussie kits resemble the lazy AI-generated vibe of the Artballs. There’s clearly something in the water Down Under.
Back to the 2022 Artball release—at the time, rubes, sorry, I mean, “investors,” also received some actual, tangible benefit like merchandise, perhaps so they could have a physical reminder of their virtual idiocy. “Senior Metaverse Manager” Ridley Plummer, an official of Tennis Australia, and an official dumbass according to Club Leftist Tennis, has pointed to Flyfish, a restaurant started by investor/media huckster/rampant stimulant abuser Gary Vaynerchuck, which requires purchase of an NFT to acquire a reservation, as a model the tournament seeks to emulate. If you already feel stupider after reading that stream of bullshit, just wait, there’s more!
Savvy readers who have tuned into the news literally a single time in the last year are probably aware that crypto and NFTs have cratered in value. According to Forbes Australia:
“In the past 12 months, Ether (the token that most NFTs are purchased in) has lost 70% of its value. Bitcoin is in the same boat. NFT sales also dropped to just $3.4 billion in the third quarter, down from $8.4 billion in the previous quarter, according to DappRadar.”
So how has that impacted AO Artball? As an insightful new piece from the Guardian reports:
“The balls were priced at 0.067 in the ethereum cryptocurrency – about AU$278 at the time of minting on 22 January 2022 – and all NFTs were sold. Ethereum’s value has since declined, so that 0.067ETH is now worth only $130. On the OpenSea market where the AO Artball collection is held the floor price is higher than the original price at 0.092ETH, which still represents a loss of about $100 from a year ago for people selling the balls.”
Yet as the project has tanked in value, and the collapse of FTX has led to a broader awareness that the world of crypto and NFTs can be best described as something rhyming with “Fonzi Scream,” Tennis Australia has doubled down. Plummer told Forbes, “We’re just getting started.”
Accordingly, this year the Open has upped their game, providing a complimentary pair of seven-day ground pass for week two of the tournament to purchasers of the 2,454 newly-minted 2023 Artballs, and the 115 new Artballs in the “Collaborator” series, designed with such iconic and storied brands as, um, Collective Shift, Creature World, Crypto Chicks, Metakey, Opensea, Decentraland, and Marriott International. We told you it was going to get dumber!
It is unclear whether Tennis Australia is aware of the irony of compensating for the worthlessness of their virtual project by having to attach them to greater and more valuable real world benefits, but regardless, their continuation of the project begs the question: who is this for?
Using the provided numbers of 6,776 NFTs sold last year at $278 AU a pop, we can estimate the tournament stacked roughly $1,883,728 AU, or just over $1.3 million USD (minus other costs like transaction fees, profit-sharing with the company that actually created the pieces, etc)—if indeed the tournament realized their profits and cashed out their crypto into real dollars. Not an insignificant sum, though a small fraction of the hundreds of millions generally generated by the tournament each year.
For the purchasers of the most valuable Artballs, those representing the locations of the championship-winning shots of Nadal and Barty, $278 AU was a small price to pay for digital images that then skyrocketed to valuations of $11,836 AU ($8,438 USD) and $5,094 AU ($3,632 USD). Though the average Artball value has long since dropped precipitously, there was a short period during which the savvy made profit.
Here it is worth revising our previous description of all purchasers of Artballs as suckers and rubes—those who successfully flipped their Artballs are rapacious speculators, enabled by Tennis Australia to exponentially profit off meaningless junk. This is ultimately who the project is for: not the losers who have watched their wretched digital spheres tank in value, but their counterparts who sold high, including Tennis Australia itself.
Remember though, the profit is allegedly incidental—the stated goal of AO Artball is to bring in more fans. Well, mark us down as highly, highly skeptical that this program achieved that goal. And even if a few NFT purchasers did magically become bigger tennis fans through this swindling, what a shame for that to be who time, money and effort was focused on wooing. The fact that people involved in this scam were granted preferential access to the actual tournament reveals who the Australian Open sees as its target audience—certainly not its unpaid ballkids, a growing number of rural indigenous tennis programs, or those who might not otherwise be able to afford a ticket, but those willing to take part in the riskiest, stupidest forms of naked speculation.
As a fraudulent money-making scheme obsessed over by major tennis institutions, these NFTs are not unlike pickleball (a comparison made by many other major tennis analysts). Pickleball boosters also play fast and loose with hard data in order to sell investors on a vision of infinite growth, and instead of reasserting the massive popularity of tennis (which has as many new players in the last two years as pickleball has total), Big Tennis rolls over—Tennis Magazine puts pickleballers on its cover, Tennis Channel shows the “sport” over tennis content, pro players jump sports to get the bag. Rather than growing the Open’s cultural presence by highlighting the sport, Tennis Australia either thinks it has to attach itself to trends, or wants to cash in on them, revealing an utter lack of confidence in the idea that the general public might actually like tennis for what it is.
A few paragraphs ago we labeled Tennis Australia a rapacious speculator in regard to their facilitation of a system of rank profiteering. But in seeing that system as valuable in the first place, Tennis Australia is not unlike the chumps who bought Artballs genuinely believing in the product.
The Australian Open was a business long before the creation of AO Artball, and it will continue to serve primarily as a money-making scheme long after this project eventually is swept under the rug. This is not so different than any other tournament or league. All professional sports are caught in contradiction between the intrinsic beauty of games and the ugliness of their commodification. But with the AO Artball program, Tennis Australia and the Australian Open have doubled down on their side in a particularly brazen fashion. So let this saga serve as renewed motivation for tennis leftists, the only true believers in the beauty and power of the sport, to fight even harder for ours, for real life tennis not speculative bullshit.
Or as Justin Timberlake croons on the 50 Cent smash hit from which this essay borrows its name, “Ayo! I'm tired of using technology / I need you right in front of me.”
at the core of it, 'trinkets that track if someone hit a ball on a spot on the court' is a really funny idea that i kind of wish wasn't attached to nfts
this post contains an absolutely perfect pun from which I will never recover