CyberTulipMania vs Trojan Horse
Commonplace Newsletter #58
I’ve always made it a policy here to avoid talking about fads, trends and popular topics. Being plugged into the zeitgeist and reacting to whatever is at the top of the news cycle seems a sure-fire way to create work that will be ephemeral and have zero staying power. If you want to be timeless, you have to keep a little distance from the present time and simply follow your own obsessions and inclinations. You allow intuition to lead you, no matter how out of step it is with what has currently captured peoples attention around the water cooler.
This is a good rule to keep in mind.
But all rules are there to be broken.
Last week Hyperion Magazine publishes a post of mine regarding some of the artistic possibilities that may result from the current NFT craze. I think there’s a lot more to be said on this.
And so now, in spite of my don’t-pander-to-the-zeitgeist rule, I am going to say it…
NewTulipMania.eth
As any carnival fortune teller will know, the key to successful prognostication is to keep things vague. So in broad strokes, then, I think that there are two possible ways that the present furore around NFTs will play out. Firstly, it may merely prove to be an asset bubble, a mimesis led tulip mania for the crypto age where a few become rich and many, many more lose their shirts. Wildly speculating on jpegs of pixelated punks, cartoon apes, rocks and other assorted and seemingly valueless forms of strangeness is a game of sharps and suckers.
This could well be the case. Ponzi schemes look great if you are so high in the clouds that you can only see the tip of the pyramid. History abounds with such examples from Tulip Mania to the Dot Com Bubble. Maybe we are simply due another one. Maybe too much time spent cooped up in doors, combined with ceaseless doom and gloom on the news has made many people collectively lose their minds and think that trading pictures of affectless cartoon apes smoking cigarettes is a viable means of building a raft to escape a sinking society.
Maybe. It’s possible.
Bit maybe all of the hype and bluster and eye-watering price tags are really a Trojan horse. Maybe the speculative bubble is merely the means by which groundbreaking, creative industry disrupting tech is able to sneak into the mainstream and completely upend both culture and how art as a business is conducted.
I think this is just as possible. And when it comes to my own creativity and my own livelihood this is what I am keen to bet a few cyber chips on.
TrojanHorse.jpeg
The first observation to make is this. Whether punks and bored apes and the like fit in with your aesthetic sensibility, they are (sold as) art and they are selling like hot cakes. People are now buying art. Being an art collector is, as I type these words, the coolest, most talked about, most envy inducing, most mimetically contagious activity in culture. (Perhaps not in the mainstream, but among the vanguard who later dictate what culture the masses will ‘spontaneously’ be interested in down the line).
This is a huge paradigm change, and it has occurred seemingly overnight.
And the energy this has freed up among artists of all stripes is palpable. After decades, lifetimes, of penury and discouragement creative people now have a shot of making big money. And as much as we can talk in earnest about mastery and the craft itself being it’s own reward, there is nothing more motivating than the promise of a big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
The implications of this change (if it sticks) are dizzying. If art is the asset class du jour then aesthetics matter again. How else do you judge which artists to support and invest in and collect? All of a sudden ephemeral qualities like taste, vibe, beauty become fundamentals. New critics and tastemakers- deep in the decentralised trenches- are needed to make sense of it all.
Art and culture can thrive in this context. People care. People want to invest both fiscally and emotionally. And so the overpriced jpegs- the tulips, so to speak- are a Trojan horse to a whole new world for creators.
SoaringTwenties.gif
Imagine it’s 1985. Imagine you’re in a punk band. You may have opened for the Minutemen or Husker Du when they came to town.
Now, imagine you have a time machine. Imagine you can travel to the year 2021.
Imagine your reaction at discovering that you can use ‘the internet’ to discover new music, connect with potential fans and showcase your demos to a theoretically near limitless audience. Imagine how you would react to learning that you can use platforms like bandcamp to create physical records and tapes to sell, let alone the baffling instant magic of digital downloads.
Now, imagine that this was only the beginning. Imagine if you could mint tokens that rewarded your loyal early fans and allowed them to participate in your future success. Imagine if you didn’t need to go hat in hand to record labels and bitterly accept whatever one-sided deal they offered you.
Imagine if these things called NFTs- which you learn stands for Non-Fungible Tokens- existed and they allowed you to, in theory, completely circumvent the old gatekeepers which back in 1985 lead to the ruin of many of your favourite artists.
Just imagine.
Now let’s turn this exercise in daydreaming to the fans perspective...
Imagine you like avant grade music, strange literary works, unusual art. Imagine you were obsessive enough to have a real taste for it, a real aesthetic sense. Imagine that you could spot artists who have potential, who you think provide something the world needs.
Now imagine rather than feeling the standard hipsters disillusioned disgust when some of these artists get big, that you could be rewarded for this foresight. Imagine if you could buy provably unique digital artefacts from them that you could sell on at a great profit as the artist grows. Imagine if the artist themselves, actually got a slice of that transaction.
Further, imagine if the artist had the means to allow you to participate in the business of their artistry as a stakeholder and not just as a fan. Imagine if your loyalty was recognised and actually rewarded as the artist grew.
This is what NFTs can allow to happen. This is why a Luddite such as me is deeply, deeply intrigued by them- as both creator and cultural consumer- and why I think the cyber tulip mania of today does not tell the whole story.
In the preceding paragraphs I used the word imagine 50,000 times for a reason. Because NFTs are leading to the unlocking of a whole lot of imagination from creators who have felt stifled by cultural conditions for far too long.
Creators have always dreamed of- not only a decent and sustainable living- but also of being able to really interact with and serve fans as equals. Art thrives in clubs and cliques, art thrives when the spirit in the air is one of collaboration and participation and striving together to really build something exciting.
For a long, long time these dreams- collaboration, community, currency- were the disconnected shards of a broken ecosystem. You could get a deal, but you’d be disconnected from your audience. You could build a community, but it was highly unlikely you would get paid. You could create great work but you would struggle to get enough people to care so that you didn’t have to spend your prime creative hours at a dayjob.
Now, it is of course still too soon to say. But in theory, the application of web3 developments like NFTs might well bring all of these dreams together. And if artists can create without compromise, and both build relationships and sustain themselves as they go, then the world starts to become a very different place.
It starts to become a renaissance. And if it takes preposterously priced pixelated jpegs to get that ball rolling then so be it.
Oh I won the competition!
But I have to disagree with the fella regarding Beethoven. He cast such a gigantic shadow over the central Europe that he's probably responsible for the trajectory of music up until very recently.