Fuck, the world has been grotesque this week. Look, donate here for Medical Aid for Palestine, by doing it through the website they can claim VAT as gift-aid.
I was going to put this in Short Stuff at the bottom, but the rest of this post turned out to be quite deflating and critical and I wanted to put something buoyant up at the top. I’ve been crunching through a series of videos about Messier objects. The Messier catalogue is a collection of 110 astronomical objects which are not comets compiled in the 1770s. Astronomers saw all these smudges of weird, annoying things through their telescopes in their search for comets or stars. They were largely disinterested in them and considered them nebulous to the hunt for comets – hence, nebulae.
Anyway, turns out a lot of them were deeply interesting because once telescopes got good enough they discovered they were things like other galaxies and, yes, nubulae. There was an episode where it was pointed out that our galaxy, and space more generally, is full of star-exhaust (imagine me saying this with a sort of ‘can you believe it’ aghast face). Literally! Like a sooty dust that clogs up the Milky Way and makes it hard to see. Without it, the night sky would be much, much brighter and we’d be able to see much further. Anyway, we can’t see it but we can hear it turns out. Sound 1, sight 0. Damn it.
You wouldn’t let us into your treehouse…
I really don’t want this blog to become a stream of NFT-bashing but it really is such a perverse and seemingly ass-backwards, burn-it-all-down sort of petty vengeful mode of change that I can’t help but stare at the grotesquery of it. I’m also just very, very sad about seeing interesting critical practitioners I’ve admired for years turn their feeds into a stream of hashtags, ‘drops’ and hype-baiting to make money. I want to understand why, I want to see what they see. So, I continue to seek out things that make the case for why it is genuinely a better way of working but they all tend to land on the same bitter recriminations of ‘mainstream’ or ‘bricks and mortar’ art or some way-off, vague cult-like hype about how the future will be this or that. Neither lines of reasoning tend to have much substance to them and seem to be pretty transparent bubble-inflation.
I read this because it was posted with a caption of something like ‘at last someone lays to bed the anti-NFT sentiment’ on a reputable site. Good! I thought, at last, help me get it. I want to get it! But hope turned to despair as it immediately fell into some of the classic paradoxical tropes of the arguments.
By the way, where was the outcry during the heyday of incessant art fair air travel, ie every year pre-pandemic since Art Cologne launched it all in 1967; and the destruction caused by single-use wooden shipping crates?
This is the bloodsucking monster argument again: Yes, the art world is a blood sucking monster, the solution is not to replace it with a different maybe less-bad blood-sucking monster that promises to be nicer in the future. By raising this argument you’re tacitly admitting that the criticisms are true. I was listening to a podcast (can’t remember which) where this was also positioned as; it’s like pleading in court that you should be let off an assault charge because manslaughter is worse and you didn’t do that. Remember the ‘if you hate capitalism so much, why do you have an iPhone’ retorts that came up around Occupy?
Also, lacing texts with your letter-to-the-editor gripes is never a good way to win people round. I could go through this argument by argument but I just don’t have the time for it all: ‘The art world isn’t keen on willfully adapting to change, especially when the upheaval entails a shift in the landscape of access and gatekeepers that control it.’ Isn’t this just new gatekeepers? All still based on social currency? This is another common paradox; that it’s about changing the financialisation and hyper-capitalism of the art world. But it always just seems to be about replicating the art world digitally with digitally-native collectors, galleries and speculation. It’s not any different, just a more unstable currency. It’s all more ‘You wouldn’t let us in your treehouse, so we built our own, rival treehouse‘ when what I want to read about NFT’s is ‘ you wouldn’t let us in your treehouse so we’re going to roam freely over the surrounding fields and valleys while you hide in there‘ which you know feels like the metaphorical appeal of working digitally. If you hate the art world so much (which is understandable) just ignore the art world. Many, many people continue to successfully ignore the art world all the time and still do interesting things. You can’t hunger for the fame and wealth you feel you’re owed at the same time as decrying a system which creates and replicates fame and wealth.
(Also, also, inviting Tracey Emin to exhibit somewhat undermines the credibility of a line of argument about challenging the art world.)
Ok, near the bottom there’s some interesting stuff. Yes, the possibility for new forms of access, audience and engagement are the same things that excite me about open source and creative commons work. Yes, the longevity of art as medium of cultural discourse could be changed if it’s not locked in galleries or collector’s beach houses at night. And, NFT’s themselves could become a metric of social sentiment that directly empowers political change. But just make those arguments. Even better; materialise those arguments in a way that people like me who are stupid and don’t have time to know enough about crypto can see and touch and imagine, don’t lead with the treehouses/blood-sucking monster. It’s music to the crypto bros and just inflames stupid markets.
Short Stuff
- Anyway, here’s a better examination of some of these paradoxes by Geraldine Juárez: The Ghostchain. She goes into some more of the ideas of assetization and the acceleration of capital through this new market.
- Wait are NFTs just loot boxes?
- Jay has done some interesting analysis here about what’s driving the argument, looking at some of the sales data previously looked at on this blog (She uses Kim Parker’s work showing 1.8% of sales are achieving asking price which often just about covers the cost of upload.) The conclusion seems to be that it is still predominantly creator-driven.
- You saw this. I know you did, I’ve had it advertised everywhere. It’s crazy. Amazing crazy.
- Contactless, rare-earth-element-less electric motor design. Don’t know if it’s up there with star exhaust for this week’s coolest thing but it’s pretty interesting.
- Justin sent me the results of this Ipsos poll which shows that for the first time since 1999, more people in the UK are cautious and austere than not. I’m not sure calling people who don’t intend to save money or think of the future ‘hedonistic’ is entirely accurate – the government seems to believe or fantasise that once we’re through Covid we’ll have some sort of explosion of consumerism and culture but it seems very unlikely.
- At the same time, Deutsche suggest an ‘Age of Disorder‘ marked by growing inequality, worsening international relations and shifting demographics. (I like that they use a two-thousand year time scale for their analysis. Gives it some depth.)
Ugh. What a time to be alive. Truly, an age of disorder. I wish I had some good news. Star exhaust is all I have. I love you, I miss you. I don’t really feel great about going inside pubs and will probably hold off for a while. Oh, wait! I got an amazing shirt yesterday. So cool. Can’t really wear it until it’s warmer ‘cos it’s short sleeved but I’m excited to take it on a test-run at some point. Ok, reiterating that I love you, this all sucks very, very much but you’re doing amazingly. Speak soon.