Monday, June 27, 2022
Back To Cointelegraph News
Cointelegraph Magazine
No Result
View All Result
  • Features
  • Columns
    • Journeys in Blockchain
    • Our Man In Shanghai
    • 6 Questions for…
    • Crypto City Guides
  • NFT Week
    • All About NFTs
    • William Shatner Interview
    • Japan’s NFT Head Start
    • Gen Z and the NFT
    • Play2Earn Economies
    • Beyond In-Game Assets
    • Investing in Blockchain Gaming
    • Blockchain To Billions
  • Art Week
    • Crypto Art Week Home Page
    • Immutable Trash & Censorship
    • Collectivism and Collaboration
    • Defying Obsolescence with Blockchain
    • Coldie: Creator, Collector, Curator
    • Journeys: Josie Bellini
  • Hodler’s
  • Podcasts
    • Fundamental Value with Joshua Frank
    • Nonfungible Podcast with Darren Kleine
  • About
    • About Cointelegraph Magazine
    • Cointelegraph News
    • Subscribe
    • Contact
Cointelegraph Magazine
  • Features
  • Columns
    • Journeys in Blockchain
    • Our Man In Shanghai
    • 6 Questions for…
    • Crypto City Guides
  • NFT Week
    • All About NFTs
    • William Shatner Interview
    • Japan’s NFT Head Start
    • Gen Z and the NFT
    • Play2Earn Economies
    • Beyond In-Game Assets
    • Investing in Blockchain Gaming
    • Blockchain To Billions
  • Art Week
    • Crypto Art Week Home Page
    • Immutable Trash & Censorship
    • Collectivism and Collaboration
    • Defying Obsolescence with Blockchain
    • Coldie: Creator, Collector, Curator
    • Journeys: Josie Bellini
  • Hodler’s
  • Podcasts
    • Fundamental Value with Joshua Frank
    • Nonfungible Podcast with Darren Kleine
  • About
    • About Cointelegraph Magazine
    • Cointelegraph News
    • Subscribe
    • Contact
No Result
View All Result
Cointelegraph Magazine
No Result
View All Result

NFTs: Overpriced crap or new art history?

"New chapters of art history are written by artists making new art. But this is a chapter being written by artists (and their advocates) making novel financial moves."

Eric Shaw by Eric Shaw
April 2, 2021
in Opinion
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on RedditShare on TelegramShare via Email

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.

With that proviso, here are two notes from the front lines.

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 is traceable to the creation of Colored Coins in 2012 — or to CryptoPunks in 2017 — even though the this market exploded just the other day.

 

Lissajou Optical Representation of Sound VibrationsA page from Jules Antoine Lissajous’s A Study of the Optical Representation of Sound Vibrations, 1957

 

But digital art (DA) itself 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 pictures.

 

Celsius

Risky business: Celsius crisis and the hated accredited investor laws

June 21, 2022
Soulbound Tokens

Soulbound Tokens: Social credit system or spark for global adoption?

June 16, 2022
Trouble with AMMs

The trouble with automated market makers

June 10, 2022
Working in paradise

Thailand’s crypto islands: Working in paradise, Part 1

June 8, 2022
Mimetics

You can now clone NFTs as ‘Mimics’: Here’s what that means

May 31, 2022

 

The first art piece fully recognized as computer-made, and hence, “digital,” was Oscillon 1 made in 1950 by the American computer scientist Ben Laposky (1914–2000). He called these pieces “Oscillons” or “Electrical Compositions.” They were Lissajous Figures of a complex type. A 1953 show of his work in Cherokee, Iowa designated them “electronic abstractions.”

 

Laposky Oscillon 45Ben Laposky, Oscillon 45, 1952

 

Laposky inspired other digital artists, producing the medium’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.

 

Frank Stella Untitled

Op Art: Frank-Stella, Untitled, 1966

 

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 now exist — from Zurich’s MuDa, to Tokyo’s Mori Museum of Digital Art, to the Center for Digital Art in LA.

NFT pics: Easy on the eyes, but not museum-ready

Beeple (Mike Winkelmann at beeple-crap.com — the man who created the $69 million Everydays) said we’re witnessing “The next chapter of art history.”

I differ.

New chapters of art history are written by artists making new art.

But this is a chapter being written by artists (and their advocates) making novel financial moves.

This is a new chapter in financial history.

 

Manzoni Artist's ShitPiero Manzoni, Artist’s Shit, 1961

 

It’s true, Damien Hirst and others have performed financial acts as aesthetic ones. Artists have sold air, shit, and invisibility 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, it’s not showcased as an artistic performance.

Heaps of new market fluidity are is being leveraged, but no fresh aesthetic concepts is are shaping the action.

As of this writing, the overwhelming majority of images moving into NFT collections for slag-heaps of Ethereum are more akin to 1950s paperback covers than digital art productions that have migrated to museums and marquee galleries for years.

 

Beeple Infinity and Beyond

Beeple, Infinity and Beyond, 2015

 

Though it’s main inspiration is anime, computer games, and comic books, this NFT-drop will surely persist in the field of cultural reference for decades, and, I will confess, there IS an art-historical development here, but I don’t think it’s the one Beeple is thinking of.

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.

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).

 

KAWS Small LiesKAWS, Small Lies, 2020

 

It’s true, this could be a new eruption of low-brow taste (as folks have said of the emergence of 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 historical artists will be joining marquee first-adopters like Kenny Scharf 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 the month, blockchain money will begin to chase higher-grade art commodities, just as it now chases CryptoKitties, video snippets, and original tweets.

ShareTweetShareShareSend
Eric Shaw

Eric Shaw

Eric Shaw is a freelance writer and academic based in Dallas, Texas specializing in art, Asia, politics, and religion. A former Religious Studies and Art History professor, he has danced professionally and was an exhibiting painter for 20 years. He's taught in major universities and a dozen countries and maintains an abiding interest in yoga, athletic practice, and new scientific and cultural developments.

Related Posts

Powers On… When will we learn from recent history to protect our crypto and ourselves?

Powers On… When will we learn from recent history to protect our crypto and ourselves?

by Marc Powers
May 26, 2022

What the recent collapse of TerraUSD and LUNA demonstrated was already made clear by the collapse of a money market fund in 2008. What should we learn from these lessons?

Powers On… It’s been a wonderful life (week): SEC Commissioner Peirce, Bitcoin 2022 and more

Powers On… It’s been a wonderful life (week): SEC Commissioner Peirce, Bitcoin 2022 and more

by Marc Powers
April 21, 2022

In one important week this month, SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce spoke at my “Blockchain & the Law” class at Florida International University College of Law and I attended the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami.

In Georgia, crypto is a crucial tool for refugees escaping the war

In Georgia, crypto is a crucial tool for refugees escaping the war

by Aaron Wood
April 20, 2022

Crypto, like most other new tech praised upon its creation as apolitical or neutral, becomes political in the hands of the people who use it and regulate it.

ABOUT US

Cointelegraph Magazine is a new publication that goes beyond the daily news and delves much more deeply into the stories, trends, and personalities that inspire cryptocurrency and blockchain conversations around the world.

We are people-centric, delving into *why* the true believers of blockchain feel they can change the world (and why they think it needs to be changed).

Through long-form features, thoughtful analysis, and a little humor and satire, we illustrate how the implementation of this technology is affecting the lives of countless people — today, right now, not at some distant point in the future.

Terms / Privacy

Follow us

EXPLORE MAGAZINE

  • Features
  • Journeys
  • Immersive Features
  • Hodler’s Digest
  • 6 Questions for…
  • Podcasts
  • Art Week
  • NFT Week
  • Cointelegraph News

SUBSCRIBE NOW


By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
  • Immersive
  • Features
  • Hodler’s
  • About
  • Contact

© 2020/2021 Cointelegraph Magazine. All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Features
  • Columns
    • Journeys
    • Our Man In Shanghai
    • 6 Questions for…
    • Crypto City Guides
  • NFT Week
    • All About NFTs
    • William Shatner Interview
    • Japan’s NFT Head Start
    • Gen Z and the NFT
    • Play2Earn Game Economies
    • Beyond In-Game Assets
    • Investing in Blockchain Gaming
    • Blockchain To Billions
  • Crypto Art Week
  • Hodler’s Digest
  • Podcasts
    • Fundamental Value with Joshua Frank
    • Nonfungible Podcast with Darren Kleine
  • About
    • About Cointelegraph Magazine
    • Contact
    • Subscribe
  • Cointelegraph News

© 2020/2021 Cointelegraph Magazine. All Rights Reserved.