Good morning! Hello! How’s it going? Three days till Christmas. My last day of work this year. The Matrix is coming out today and I am excited for it. The rooster is crowing. I am wearing a yellow shirt. Jane was in a much better mood yesterday, and that was nice, though she then proceeded to spend about 40% of the day being mean and/or whining and/or shouting “no!” at us about everything. I would pay good money, hold some sort of voodoo ritual, if I could make it so my daughter did not knee-jerk say No No No No No for hours on end. It really is soul-crushing when she gets that way. But I suppose it is better than when she’s just…. sad.
Programming note: I will be posting intermittently over the holiday. Maybe not at all! Maybe every day! I don’t know! I want to, you know, relax. Thank you for your patience.
Finished a book the other day, a little sci-fi number called Skyward Inn, recomended to me by the reading champion Alice Marwick. It was good but it was very disturbing and weird and made me very unfomfortable and I don’t think I’ve read anything like it, and I think I would have loved it when I was younger and I really thought art should defy convention all the time and disturb people and be difficult. I’ve mostly lost interest in that belief, mainly because art is difficult in the same ways all the time, and life is already difficult, but that’s just a personal choice, I suppose. I still respect difficult art, I just… don’t want to consume too much of it. Those who know me might chuckle at this, as some might consider Lingua Ignota or Merzbow or some such thing difficult, but I don’t, especially. I consider Skyward Inn difficult, and I am quite shaken by that little book. If that sort of thing appeals to you, I strongly recomemend it.
Then we have NFTs, which everyone is getting worked up over. Kind of fascinating how divisive little electronic receipts have become. I, myself, do not feel super strongly about NFTs, because I view them primarily as a small piece of enabling technology, with the various cultures around them as secondary. It is like having strong views about oil paints or FM synthesis, which of course people have and it is right and proper that people have, but it is not the way I view art.
And I am always loathe to write something about controverseys that I don’t particularly care about, because I believe that, even when you are a lunatic who is publicly writing 400,000 words a year, you should choose the topics you wade in on and get argumentative about.
But (you knew it was gonna be a but next), I do think there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in “the culture” around NFTs. First, viewed while wearing my work hat, as an 30-year ad man, it is very interesting that NFTs represent the first real break in my “crypto is web1” heuristic. We are saying major backlash against NFTs from certain segments of the population. Brands are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Since web1, let’s give em credit, brands have gotten a lot better about keeping up with technological consumer trends. Some brands took a full-on decade to actually get around to making a website. That doesn’t happen anymore. Almost every brand still alive has a robust technical capability, and stays abreast of trends. So it makes perfect sense for them to stay on top of crypto, and of course they are more than capable.
But what we see this time around is people freaking out when a brand decides they are going to embrace the hot new tech. People get so mad. They yell at the brands, berate them, and tell them they are embracing a scam. It’s really quite a unique thing. So we have all these brands who are getting shit for really quite benign marketing moves. Discord, Kickstarter, gaming companies, many others. I mean, imagine a bunch of customers getting really pissed off in 1996 when a brand says “hey we are going to make a website!” Or, in the case of Kickstarter: “hello we are changing the enabling technology behind our database.” Not a thing you’d ordinarily think was going to set off a consumer backlash. Very weird.
(Also, some brands seem immune. Taco Bell got off scot-free, and the AMC thing is an entirely different beast. I suspect because AMC is a mostly interchangeable brand for the average consumer, who doesn’t care where they see movies, so they’re mostly oblivious and indifferent to AMCs robust crypto strategy. The discontent is evident of brand loyalty, perhaps).
The obvious solution here, I think, is for these brands to stop putting out press releases, and just do their NFTs in secret, in Discord communities. The critics would never even know and they would accomplish their marketing goals to their appropriate target. This seems to be the trend in NFTs anyway: away from big public launches towards weird, impossible-to-get-to Discord-only NFTs drops where you have to mint against the contract: impenetrable to outsiders. Seems like if a brand is really interested, that’s a win-win for them. Prove their chops to the in-crowd, keep the critics oblivious.
People really think NFTs are a scam. Of course, there’s no denying that there is a giant, crazed, speculative component to the market: people buying them as a speculative investment, and people selling them to get rich quick. Sure. Yes. This whole part of the market is mostly distasteful. But so? That is not the entire NFT ecosystem, and people’s ire is waaaay out of proportion to their offence. Why were people not this pissed off about Beanie Babies? Or the proliferation of colored vinyl variants in the 21st century or 3-part CD singles in the 90’s? We all rolled our eyes at this stuff, but if a rock band wanted to put out 10 different colored vinyl versions of a record, and some fan wanted to buy all ten and flip em on Discogs, we didn’t, like, take profound moral umbrage about it and write off the entire record industry.
And we have people like Brian Eno who says dumb things like “there’s nothing new here” which is… maybe true and maybe not but is completely moot? Since when does an artistic medium have to be “new” to have something to offer? And then he needlessly complexifies the issue with a red herring about money, pretty rich (pun intended) from the producer of five Coldplay albums. As if money and art intermingling is some new, dirty problem unique to NFTs.
Kind of a weird thing to say, as his completely ignorant comment about proof of work and environmental devestation. That one’s a real headscratcher, since the dude did enough work to learn about Proof of Work, but not enough to know that NFTs are almost exclusively on Proof of Stake chains, or chains moving to Proof of Stake imminently, and something like Polygon, a popular NFT chain is, well, essentially completely environmentally benign.Man. Having heroes is hard. The environmental thing is a red-herring. I understand why people stick with this, and lord knows I did for a long, long time. But it’s intellectually dishonest if you take the time to dig.
To me there’s another way to think about the whole thing, which is about art, scarcity, collecting, supporting artists—all of that smushed up against an exploding number of collectors, a global market, and a level of scale that has never before been seen in the art market. To me, that is fascinating. What is a limited edition in a world with 1 million eager buyers. Fairly managing demand. What is a fair way to choose who “gets to” buy one? The ecosystem has tried a lot of things and is still experimenting: auctions, first-come-first-served, random drops, prove you’re enthusiasm/dedication/fandom/know-how. The experimentation is interesting, the problems are interesting. It can make for some stupid-ass shit, though. Like it’s very hard to believe that something in a run of ten thousand is a rare thing.
But why not? Photography does seem to be the most analagous medium, since photography has had to deal with issues of copies and copyright, multiple editions with multiple numbers of prints and the like for centuries now. Rarely is there a single print of a photograph. Rarely does one own the IP rights with the photograph. Sometimes the actual quality of the print effects the price of a photograph, but normally, what effects the price of a fine art photograph is the edition size, and how early the edition was in the life of the photo. If you own the first print ever made of an iconic photo, it is worth a lot more than the 1,000th print the photographer makes of the photo. But that 1,000th print might still be worth something, because it is a print made (or at least approved) and signed by the photographer. I have a signed Bert Stern photo of Marilyn. It is one of 125 printed in this run. It is a very late run, printed in the early 2,000s. It is “rare,” but not that “rare.” Is this wrong? Is this a scam? Occasionally you hear such rumblings in the art world, about a photographer later in life, living off of print dumping, but a) nothing like we hear in the NFT world, b) and even so, so what? Let’s assume the worst of Bert Stern, he was just pumping these out for the cash? Okay, well, I supported an artist who wanted money. I am still okay with that transaction, and if you’re not… fine?
And I wouldn’t be completely surprised to find out, in the end, there are 10,000 signed prints of this photo out there in the world. That seems a little high, but not inconceivable. I am okay with it. I still like my print. I have never looked up the value of my Bert Stern Marilyn, though I’d not be shocked at all that it was lower than I paid, like all of those Warhol prints in the 90’s. Or comics.
What should a photographer do if a million people want a print? Even ignoring NFTs. It’s an interesting question, one that, suddenly, is a pressing problem for some creators.
And, of course, it is a frothy, speculative market, it is tulip mania. That seems another common objection. And… yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. The “market”—I debate it’s a single market but let’s roll with it—is absurd. People are spending $800, $1,000 for a cartoon image of a rolling pin, sight unseen. It is gloriously ludicrous. People are making millions of dollars in single sales. I talked to a friend who’s deep in this world and he was talking about how he got “rugged” (i.e. ripped off) from a few of the hundreds of NFT sales he’s participated in. I was confused. How did he get ripped off? Did he not get the NFT he bought? No, no, he got them. Just… the people who made and sold them packed up shop and disappeared afterwards. Did they promise some sort of club? A game? Something that the NFT would work with? In some cases, yes, but in others, not really. But the buying market expected them to stick around and, when they didn’t, the value of the NFTs collapsed, and that sucked, because then he “had a loss.”
On the flipside, there are also some smart people just buying up all these “rugged NFTs”—ostensibly as a tax loss harvesting service, but I think there’s a longer game there. They believe that some of these, over time, will once again rise in value. Who’s to say, but that does make the market a more complex and interesting one.
I believe there’s some deep psychology going on. We fundamentally hate bubbles we’re not a part of. We have a primal fear of missing out, mingled with a just-as-primal fear of being scammed. Sometimes they seem completely impenetrable, like options trading or real-estate flipping or Discord diving, and we hate that we feel too dumb to participate even if we wanted to. And I feel all of that. I also felt a weird giddy thrill when my witch drawing doubled in value, so I get the other side. I think it’s completely resonable for us to not want anything to do with a speculative nightmare. I am the same way. But there is more to NFTs to that, and I’m not gonna throw the baby out with the bathwater.
To me, NFTs are a medium, and I don’t generally have emotional reactions against mediums. I mean, I guess if someone wanted to make art with cow viscera or art with burning oil, yes, I would have a problem. But a fairly honest evaluation of their merits fails to place NFTs into that class. It’s a bengin medium, Brian Eno’s misinformation not withstanding. I know a lot of people arent going to buy that from me, and I didn’t buy it for a long time.
And then there are the artists: a lot of artists making crap, some making interesting stuff, some making sublime stuff, some worthy of support. We don’t have to support them, but unless we’ve completely changed our moral structure, I don’t think anyone is fundamentally against supporting artists we respect. And I’ve seen this market profoudly change the lives of several artists. That is a thing.
There’s also, of course, the “membership card” angle to NFTs too. And the absurdity is just as clear: no one says “clubs are bullshit” they critique specific clubs.
Anyway, I was going to also write about the big lie that all writers foist upon the public, pretending they have diplomatic immunity from committing injury, but I guess I rambled on about NFTs for too long. I am sorry. I’ve violated my own cardinal rule here. I don’t actually care that much about NFTs one way or the other. Yet here I am writing all of these words about them. And now you will judge me for them, even, mayhaps, without reading them, because who wants to read this many words about NFTs, especially when you already think they’re dumb. I’ve used some of my cred on something about which is not really my bag. Though Jane and I are gonna make some NFTs. That’ll be fun.
But it’s almost time to pick up Jane, so now going back.
Spent some time yesterday working on this New Wave Obscurities playlist. About 80% of the bands on here are completely new to me: Celebrate the Nun, Cetu Javu, Glorious Din, Viscious Pink, Isolation Ward, Secession, Polyrock. I’ve known Red Flag, Kissing the Pink and Siglo XX since high school. But yeah, I went down some rabbit holes yesterday. Good stuff.
I can't think of a better sales pitch for Skyward Inn. Just purchased it. :-)