NFTs (thread now extremely NSFW)

it's kind of offensive to compare him to guston

bosch is safely distant, warhol was a great artist but he also flirted with the kind of market nihilism that made beeple possible, but guston's late work is a real attempt to capture the grotesque aspect of vietnam-era america. there is outrage behind it and real sadness. it's nothing like beeple's scattershot collection. there is no coherent point of view with beeple.

also, like, what is "the comic book aesthetic"? there are many artists working in different styles in comics.

Hieronymous dosh amirite

The digital art community is basically imploding right now as it has polarized into for and against jumping onto this train. People that knew nothing about this two weeks ago, are now cool with creating dox lists of other artists they think are on the wrong side. It’s pretty distressing.

― Kim, Thursday, March 11, 2021 6:57 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Why is it bad for people to publicly tell other people that their morals suck and that their art does, too? It isn't "doxing" if it's publicly available information, too.

Fuck NFTs. The only thing that's distressing about the situation is that it's just another playground for rich fucks to get more rich, and further evidence that the only art that matters will never actually matter to a market.

http://beeplegenerator.com/

It's not too much of a stretch to make a reference to Hieronymus Bosch's 15th Century densely weird masterpieces,

Actually, it is too much of a stretch ... none of the images used in the article have much "density" to them. If you want to make a reference to a famous painter, Magritte would be closest in terms of "weird" and the lack of density/commercial aesthetic.

or Andy Warhol's Pop Art,

how so? because he is a household name?

or the macabre nature of Philip Guston's surreal, cartoonish paintings of the late 1960s and 70s.

because one of the images selected for this article has a somewhat similar color palette to that period of Guston's?

the warhol comparison has to do with the way he incorporates pop culture symbols. there isn't much similarity in how the two artists use this material though.

it's just a very inept artist. this writer is just itching for the chance to "legitimate" art that the hoi polloi don't "get." they think that is the situation here, elitist gatekeeping. when in actuality what's happened is a total collapse of standards instituted from above, not any kind of democratization.

a lot of those "standards" were kinda problematic tho

Yeah but this isn’t the way to smash them though, that’s my point. The pressure is coming from above here, not below.

is it? where is the pressure coming from? honestly, it's not clear to me. the pressure is coming from crypto people + money. to the degree that you think those two overlap. is that "below", in the sense that they're championing terrible art and don't know what the fuck they're talking about? or is that "above", in the sense that they have money?

and where does christies fall in a scheme like that?

Above/below maybe is a bad way to frame it.

This isn’t an insurgency led by artists. There have been many such movements through the centuries, carried out for different ends. This is something else.

Above/below is too simplistic. It’s more like it’s coming from people who don’t care about art, who are neither reformers nor revolutionaries. It’s just trashing the joint to no real end, and defended using this older language of the avant garde redefining what art means, language that is irrelevent to this moment.

what's been disturbing to me is the realization that to the extent that there is an institutional structure around this thing, it's places like rhizome, and they've been championing blockchain shit for years. and maybe for good reason! it may very well be a way to deal with a longstanding issue with provenance and digital art, cool. but what seems to be happening is that it's just getting co-opted by the crypto world, which is even larger and richer, and the art people kind of...don't give a fuck? some of them? it's very telling, I have to say. i don't know who kim is, upthread, and there are a lot of other people online expressing similar views, but YEAH: it' a fucking turd, y'all

it's that eternal question:eating shit and dying is at some point on the spectrum. at what point is the pain of trying to persist in a world like this greater than the pain of eating shit and dying?

on the spectrum of bliss and searing pain i mean

Christies will learn to justify beeple. Their catalog writers will inscribe him seamlessly into the canon. One day he will have a museum retrospective. The whitney.

Karl aw man I wanna give you a hug and play you some Cocteau Twins rarities, someday man. Go to a park if you can, I know it's like 9 PM in Chicago

reminder: none of this shit works if the magnetic fields flip and kill the grid

stephen merritt just woke up from a cat nap, startled

his iPhone has mysteriously died

it is oddly silent

Above/below is too simplistic. It’s more like it’s coming from people who don’t care about art, who are neither reformers nor revolutionaries. It’s just trashing the joint to no real end, and defended using this older language of the avant garde redefining what art means, language that is irrelevent to this moment.

― treeship., Wednesday, March 24, 2021 6:45 PM (four hours ago)

it's just kinda odd to me ... idk, maybe it's rationalizing me getting out of the "art world" even at the provincial level I was at, but I feel like the fact that art is being sold and speculated on in this way isn't inconsistent with the history of art speculation and sales. Like some legitimate art that is sold is similarly arbitrary in its "artness" ... the difference is the artists who made that art were part of the art world and were playing the game.

Honestly, I think the NFT is going to evolve to be about things more lucrative than "art" tbh. It'll be dumber shit like naming rights for some celebrity child.

I feel like the focus on the art sales via NFT is a result of the fact that Covid has given art writers a lot less to write about, and so this is a bigger thing than it could have been if there were festivals, and fairs, and high concept big budget museum blockbusters ... though it is interesting in the sense that there seems to be more coverage and discussion about this beeple thing than the growing organization and activism of lower level art museum workers around cultural and economic equity vis a vis art institutions' programming and the huge pay discrepancy between executive staff and "star" curators vs. lower level workers who were the ones most financially impacted by museums closing due to covid.

One of the Winklevoss boys spent today arguing with people about the superiority of NFTs and my god there has never been a better argument for a 100% estate tax than someone that stupid being worth ten figures.

I'm really starting to understand how a marginally clever nerd stole a multi-billion company right out from under his nose.

— Respectable Lawyer (@RespectableLaw) March 24, 2021

what's been disturbing to me is the realization that to the extent that there is an institutional structure around this thing, it's places like rhizome, and they've been championing blockchain shit for years. and maybe for good reason! it may very well be a way to deal with a longstanding issue with provenance and digital art, cool. but what seems to be happening is that it's just getting co-opted by the crypto world, which is even larger and richer, and the art people kind of...don't give a fuck? some of them? it's very telling, I have to say. i don't know who kim is, upthread, and there are a lot of other people online expressing similar views, but YEAH: it' a fucking turd, y'all

― Zach_TBD (Karl Malone)

the crypto world and people who are into blockchain shit are the same thing

I feel like the fact that art is being sold and speculated on in this way isn't inconsistent with the history of art speculation and sales. Like some legitimate art that is sold is similarly arbitrary in its "artness" ... the difference is the artists who made that art were part of the art world and were playing the game.

this is a good point -- i have to think about why this bothers me so much.

compare beeple to likelike, something like martin creed's "the light goes on and it goes off." this work is also mischievous, especially when you look at the things he says about it, denying that there is any "deeper significance" and urging viewers to simply enjoy the experience of the light going on and off. it's designed to add humor to the gallery, it's an attention-grabbing thing for the artist, but it doesn't really try to damn art, even if it lightly pokes fun at its pretensions. there is a long history of this kind of thing in art -- work that baffles the public and that curators justify on kind of absurd, guffed up academic grounds. the public dislikes it, but in any case the art world chugs along, a space for display, discourse, debate, whatever. there are many earnest people in that world too, even as there are many cynics.

beeple seems like a new chapter, i guess because he reflects this harsh, reactionary kind of meme aesthetics. the spirit of his work just seems really "off" to me, like if the art world embraces it, they're embracing the worst aspects of themselves.

sorry for all the typos

To clarify my “distress” up thread, what I’m referring to isn’t people going after opportunistic dude bro artists grifting on this - but there were lots of independent, freelance or commercial concept artist types of people, many of them women etc that have been chipping away for years to get become viable in the field, that were just saying things like “what’s all this about, and should I get into it?” and then immediately getting pitchforked and backing away. But the dude bros are still in it and capitalizing like they did before those other people breached their club. That aspect feels shitty and backward.

beeple seems like a new chapter, i guess because he reflects this harsh, reactionary kind of meme aesthetics. the spirit of his work just seems really "off" to me, like if the art world embraces it, they're embracing the worst aspects of themselves.

― treeship., Thursday, March 25, 2021 3:13 AM (five hours ago)

I guess I view the art world as similar to capitalism, in that it will incorporate things of value or perceived importance into itself. It recoups.... Like, after "The Art of the Motorcycle" and all the corporate-sponsored consumer goods-as-art exhibitions, and the expansion of art museums into "design" ... this thing seems consistent. Granted, the museums aren't doing shows like "The Art of Napalm" or "Fascists' Favorite Paintings" ... like, the scope of what is art may be broad, but there are ethics in terms of the exclusion of "bad" things. I guess my question for you is, should this be excluded because it shouldn't be "art" or because it is a "bad thing"?

I’m seeing a lot of conflation of NFTs with digital art by people who seem clueless that institutions like the MoMA have already exhibited digital art for decades.

I think my problem with it is that crypto is larger than the art world, and doesn’t care about the quality of art at all. It’s irrelevant. How much is it worth, though?

The art world already exists within capitalism, of course (as I’ve been reminded by many crypto dude bros. I’m not sure if Kim is referring to me as a dude bro, but yeah, I did check my follows on Twitter to see who was more into crypto than art, then loudly unfollowed a handful of people. But I’m pretty sure no one gives a fuck what I think, not on Twitter, especially not in the art world). But I think NFTs/crypto is different. Because from the very beginning, crypto envelops the artist into the currency. You have to mint it. That’s complicated. You have to have a crypto wallet and all that shit. it’s not that hard, but it takes time to figure out what it’s worth. Then boom! You convince some rich prick to buy your ugly digital art, for which the artist receives ETH. Now the artist has ETH while the rich prick has the art. I imagine the former artist getting way more interested in ETH at this point, making some money, and trading it around, because that’s what it’s for! And of course they will want to spend some of that ETH on some crappy art made by an online friend of theirs that was also conned into the game. Now you’ve got two artists with ETH. It’s more interesting than the art they were making - way more! Only now, their Twitter bio leads off with #NFTartist instead of #artist

Bad post, on my part, but they can’t all be winners.

I guess - imagine trading your art for 400 six flags bux. Or wait, don’t imagine that

Except, all the people that buy your art live in six flags

And it’s helloween, you know it’s fucking helloween

lol back in the day artists just traded their work for drugs, booze and/or a place to crash ...

There's also a particular attitude I hate in the NFT world of people who don't seem to have prior interest in or knowledge of art or the art business showing up and saying "this is going to revolutionize art!" It reminds me a lot of when tech discovered music (MP3s, then streaming) and constantly lectured everyone about how great all these new developments were for musicians while having no actual clue about music or the existing economics of music. Just kind of theorizing from reason about why this is obviously good for art and then unquestioningly believing one's own bullshit.

bet there’s a Kevin Roose NYT article that is now a NFT. It’s up past 100K with a few minutes to go

xp like I saw a tweet that said something like "this is the art museum of the future!" And it was just a gallery with some displays of short digital animations up on the walls. Like do these people not realize that there were already shows exactly like that before NFTs became a thing?

They don’t. NFTs aren’t digital art or any art, as we’ve all mentioned I think. This week it’s beeple, but it’s coming to other sectors quick. Hopefully that means it’ll blow up in everyone’s face soon, but I’m feeling more of a social media dread. The inevitable, you know it’s bad, and you know it’s going to be very popular

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/595180/pet-rock-history

There's also a particular attitude I hate in the NFT world of people who don't seem to have prior interest in or knowledge of art or the art business showing up and saying "this is going to revolutionize art!" It reminds me a lot of when tech discovered music (MP3s, then streaming) and constantly lectured everyone about how great all these new developments were for musicians while having no actual clue about music or the existing economics of music. Just kind of theorizing from reason about why this is obviously good for art and then unquestioningly believing one's own bullshit.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Thursday, March 25, 2021 12:35 PM (forty-five minutes ago)

what's funny about this is the tech people went from "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE" to "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE MADE ARTIFICIALLY SCARCE & FINANCIALIZED" in under two decades

i think a bunch of people that i thought "didn't care about politics" were really just "libertarians"

Karl Malone, no, not calling you a dude bro. Unless you are secretly Android Jones or something.

hahaha, nope!

i ope android jones lurks on this thread though :)

it's weird/interesting because i was in college classes discussing marx and post-structuralism with a couple of the early rhizome people ...

...For Ms. Jin, the auction was an experiment to explore a new frontier of the attention economy. As a venture capitalist, Ms. Jin focuses her investments on businesses in the creator space, which is loosely defined as individuals whose influence and fame originates from online platforms. She’s a deep believer in the power of technology and the internet to empower younger generations and build careers — she described the allure of influencing to me recently as “monetizing individuality.”

But the more time she spent with influencers and creators, the more she realized an unsettling truth: Creating a living on the internet is almost always precarious and lopsided. Those at the very top are showered with riches and fame, but even those with large followings struggle at the whim of online platforms and algorithms. In an excellent December article for Harvard Business Review, she detailed her findings at length, arguing that there is no creator middle class and offering solutions to build one.

Back to the $25,000 GIF. The moving image Ms. Jin put up for auction was an illustration of her Harvard Business Review article. Her hope was that turning it into an NFT would be a bit of performance art and that the process would gin up conversation about the article but also about new ways for creators to make money and control the ownership of their work.

She expected it to fetch a modest price. But overnight, a bidding war took place. Eventually, a cryptocurrency investor and founder of Collab.Land named James Young — who helped build the popular game Farmville and a cryptocurrency-powered adult entertainment network called SpankChain — won the NFT.

Mr. Young says he bought the NFT in part to prove a point. He wanted to use the purchase to signal that cryptocurrency and NFTs in general could be a solution to the problems Ms. Jin outlined in her article. “In college I read Marshall McLuhan and how the medium is the message and thought, ‘What if I communicated via this transaction?’” he said in a recent podcast about the purchase. So he paid up.

“It made me come to this conclusion of, I don’t know, YOLO, let me just try this,” he said. Ms. Jin was stunned and humbled by the final bid. “It’s so exciting,” she told me. “He wanted to start a conversation with me. He was drawn to the image because of what it represented and it started a real relationship. For him, buying it was a form of activism.”

If all this makes you want to roll your eyes out of your skull, I would like you to know you’re not alone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/opinion/what-are-nfts.html

a thread:

I’m now the owner of one of the first Music Copyright NFTs (terms and conditions apply). It was a very painless process!

— Mint Royale (@MintRoyale) March 23, 2021

honestly, i didn't copy my "this NFT thing leads to black mirror" from anyone, except the tv show black mirror, but i'm glad that someone who is more powerful and persuasive than me is spreading the message:

Recently, my colleague Taylor Lorenz profiled a few companies that were looking to find new ways to help digital content creators and influencers make money online. Among the new ventures was a platform called NewNew, which wants to build a “human stock market,” where fans can vote to control mundane decisions in a creator’s day-to-day life. Other ideas included custom influencer cryptocurrencies (in essence, tokens that can be used only to purchase items directly from the influencer), paying for fan interactions and using NFTs to give fans shares of ownership in YouTube videos and other content.

A quote from NewNew’s founder and chief executive, Courtne Smith, gave me pause. She told Ms. Lorenz, “We’re building an economy of attention where you purchase moments in other people’s lives, and we take it a step further by allowing and enabling people to control those moments.”

Human stock markets! Controlling an influencer’s every life choice! That feels like the logical end point of the attention economy — the part where The Machines win for good.

Anil Dash, the C.E.O. of the programming company Glitch and a veteran of the tech industry, went a bit further, calling NFTs a scam. That’s noteworthy because Mr. Dash accidentally helped invent the concept. Back in 2014, while onstage at a tech conference, he bought a GIF from artist Kevin McCoy and published the transfer of ownership on the blockchain as a quirky experiment in ownership, making him one of the first people to participate in the cryptoart market. But Mr. Dash argues that what’s taking place today isn’t empowering or sustainable, but exploitative.

“If you were going to say, ‘Let’s let creators own their work and profit from it in perpetuity,’ the system you’d design would be the opposite of this,” he told me recently. “Instead, they designed an environmental catastrophe in which the only way you can participate is to have already bought into hyperinflated prices on a completely contrived market.” He compared the NFT market and its exorbitant prices to expensive condos in cities like Manhattan bought by billionaires that sit empty. “It’s just a store of value,” he said.

What seems inevitable is that all of this will push us to re-evaluate how we assign value to attention. This is why people like Mr. Dash are worried about the creep of NFT speculation under the guise of celebrating and empowering creators.

“The gig economy is coming for absolutely everyone and everything,” he told me. “The end game of that is the GoFundMe link posted beneath a viral tweet so they can pay for their health care. Being an influencer sounds fun until it’s ‘keep producing viral content to literally stay alive.’ That’s the machine we’re headed toward.”