Imagine All the Beeple (Cont)

 

Ever since I've become interested in the blockchain around 2014--and more recently the "NFTs"--I find myself more "engaged" with the "new" digital art on a daily basis--just because you can't avoid it.

There are few that are actually interesting. But most of them seem like graphics that I would have used on my first website in 1998. None seem to be compelling enough to inspire me--as would a visit to a photography gallery, or the European art galleries in the Art Institute, or at the annual art Expos.

As I've said before, modern and contemporary art sometimes has to leave the art out in order to seem relevant. It sounds crazy and counterintuitive, but you don't want to leave too much in because it might make it seem less cool. But as an artist, I've always found it kind of boring to not have some degree of difficulty or rigor in my work to make it interesting. Ambient music can sometimes seem like noodling around and is one of the reasons I've gone back to playing traditional instruments or weaving them into more ambient works. (Leaving the music in)

Lots of the NFTs seem like "noodling" and I wonder if they have a philosophy that supports them. This is why I've always liked to read interviews. In my early days as a musician, reading interviews with all the players I admired was central to how my skills developed and how I thought about composition.

But I wonder how interesting Beeple is in talking about the creative process, philosophy, and life in general? What we get is similar to a dead-pan interview with Warhol: “Uh yes...Uh, no…”--not an interview with Barnett Newman or Robert Motherwell. 

"I honestly, like, I never thought I could sell my work...Kind of late September, early October, people kept hitting me on being like, 'Oh, you got to look at this NFT thing.'

"If everybody wants it, well, then it has value.”

This is similar to Warhol’s "Coke is a Coke" philosophy, but now it’s turned upside down: pop art isn’t the social unifier as it was it the 60s. It’s not that we’re all going to start making digital art (as if it stopped since Adobe Photoshop in 1987), and sell it for what Warhol's were selling for in that year.

“A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."

No amount of money is necessarily going to get you a better NFT, and it won’t matter because sometimes it’s no more interesting than a fungible can of Coke, and that can of Coke could be worth millions. What matters is that it avoided the traditional definitions of art Just Because.

Also, this morning: My Bitcoin Experience Taught Me It’s A Fraud