It’s been a heady few weeks for commerce and art.
Surely a revolution is afoot, and we’re too mired in the hot mess to see it right.
But with that proviso, here’s two notes from the front lines:
1.NFTs are Cutting-Edge, Digital Art Ain’t
Some folks say the non-fungible token (NFT) that allows a digital artwork to be possessed exclusively by a purchaser can be traced back to the creation of Colored Coins in 2012--or to CryptoPunks in 2017--despite the fact that the market exploded just the other day.
But digital art (DA) has an older pedigree.As early as 1857, the Frenchman, Jules Antoine Lissajous (1822 - 1880) published images of mathematically-designed “Lissajous Figures” by capturing lines created by sound harmonies with a camera. These figures had been identified 42 years earlier by the American, Nathaniel Bowditch (1773 -1838), it’s just that Bowditch didn’t render them as pics. The first artpiece fully recognized as computer-made, and hence, “digital,” was 1950’s Oscillon 1 by the American Computer scientist, Ben Laposky (1914 – 2000). He called his artworks “Oscillons" or “Electrical Compositions,” and they were usually Lissajous Figures of a complex type. A 1953 show of his work in Cherokee, Iowa designated them “electronic abstractions.” More artists entered the digital art space, producing it’s first major show in 1965, in Stuttgart, headlined by Frieder Nake (b. 1938) and the first museum show, “Cybernetic Serendipity,” at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts three years later.
DA’s emphasis on geometric abstraction piggy-backed on the world’s excitement for Pollock and the swarm of Abstract Expressionists roiling the cultural waters of that day. The optical gamesmanship and clean rendering of DA designs also lent momentum to early 1960s Op Art. DA’s entrancement with crisp linearity, geometry, and images categorized by number persists to this day.
Major digital art collections exist at the Whitney, MOMA, the Walker Art Center and other juggernauts of the art world, and over a dozen museums dedicated to digital art forms exist--from Zurich’s MuDa, to Tokyo’s Mori Museum of Digital Art, to the Center for Digital Art in LA.
2.NFT Pics: Easy on the Eyes, But not Museum-Ready
Beeple (Mike Winkelmann at beeple-crap.com) the man who made the $69 million-priced Everydays, said we’re witnessing the “the next chapter of art history.”
I differ.
New chapters of art history are written when artists make new art.
This is a chapter being written by artists (and their advocates) making novel financial moves.
This is a new chapter in financial history. It’s true, Damien Hurst and others have performed financial acts as aesthetic ones. Artists have sold air, shit, and inivisiblity as conceptual advancements, but that’s not what’s happening this month.
When this art is attached to an NFT and sold for piles of crypto, nobody showcases it as an artistic performance.
Though there’s lots of newness, there is no radically-new conceptuality behind this art’s creation.
As of this writing, the images moving into NFT collections for slag-heaps of Ethereum are more akin to 1950s paperback covers than the DA productions that have migrated to museums and marquee galleries for decades.
Beeple, Infinity and Beyond, 2015
Like the art of anime, computer games, and comic books, this NFT-drop will surely persist in the field of cultural reference, and, yes, there IS an art-history element to it, but not in the way we think of when Beeple uses the term. This moment is an A-bomb explosion in the larger fragmentation and recombination of kitsch and high art that’s been going on for one long, bloody D-Day since Andy Warhol’s first art show in 1962.
In the long view, we can point to Toulouse Lautrec (1864 -1901), Stuart Davis (1892 -1964), and handy Andy (1928 -1987) as the dudes who threw the first blow, but the master bomb-maker in today’s fractured landscape is certainly Brian Donnelly (b. 1974), better known as the comic-figure maker, KAWS (. . . with apologies to Takashi Murakami).
It’s true, this could be an eruption of low-brow taste (as folks have said about KAWs and Warhol), but I don’t think that’s the case.
There’s just a whole tuna school of new-money millionaires splashing around the planet who are used to Neuromancer-style imagery--and they’re buying whatever they like.
It’s no art revolution.
It’s no change in taste.
It’s just the emergence of some delightfully new destinations for loads of disposable income.
That said, I’m confident that a cultural counterweight of art-historical artists will join some other marquee first-adopters (Kenny Scharf, et. al.) in the NFT market any minute now.
At the rate things are evolving, I’ll bet my bottom Bitcoin that as these wild, explosive, and strangely historical weeks round out into a month, this new money will begin to chase higher-grade art commodities, just like it now chases CryptoKitties, video snippets, and original tweets.