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Digital Art Comes of Age

There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Incredible digital artworks such as this from Clement Morin now have a place in the art trading world

“This is ridiculous. Why would anybody pay so much for something they can just save to their hard drive?” I asked myself when I first heard that the Nyan Cat gif sold for over half a million dollars. Furthermore, this “ownership” did not entitle the buyer any kind of exclusive rights with which they could use the property. It was ownership in name and nothing else – backed up by the security of cryptocurrency to ensure a means of proof. They’ve been deemed Non-fungible tokens (NFTs or “Nifty’s”). In other words, they are exclusive and can not be replaced by a copy. The purchased item is deemed unique.

So what was the point, I wondered? Is this just rich people flexing? Or trolls having a laugh? It seemed absurd. Seems like a scam.

Then I thought some more.

Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup Cans (themselves a copy of an existing image) hang proudly in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. They are valued in the millions. The original soup can labels are worthless. Furthermore, the artworks are easily reproducible, and MoMA wouldn’t pursue a cease and desist should you decide to try. Your reproduction would likely be considered almost as worthless as the original can of soup. The original works have value because we as a society agree, in our collective imagination, that they should.

Say a photographer sells a limited run of 100 prints for thousands of dollars a piece, and they display a high resolution image of the photo on their website. You could just as easily save it and print it yourself. But it’s not the same, is it? Nobody would deem it as having the same value, even if you managed to attain the same level of print quality, because it’s not “authentic”.

Really, how is digital ownership any different? Hell, a crypto-secured artwork makes more sense to me than cryptocurrencies on their own, which is essentially the same thing – but instead of art it’s imaginary currency – gambling with an enormous carbon footprint (to produce nothing).

And money itself is a fantasy concept. It only works because as a culture we’ve all agreed that it has value.

13 years of making digital art every single day paid off for Mike Winkelmann (Beeple)

Even the biggest cynic surely can’t go past this reaction video above of Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) as he watches a grid of thirteen years of digital artworks climb to $69 million. For over 5000 days this Bill Gates doppelganger has pumped out a new artwork, not for financial gain – but out of love, and as a personal challenge. It’s endearing to see it rewarded. His joy inspires me to get back into making my own (unpaid) digital art again.

Obviously, there’s going to be people who get burned as with any new technology. People will exploit it. Celebrities will endorse random trash much as they do as with crypto. Some will get caught up in the excitement and lose out, trolls will escalate the price of complete crap (no different to traditional art), but many artists will gain from this – and largely artists who have, as yet, not had a market.

The cynic in me wonders if the true artists will get buried by the scammers. At some point, society may again deem these to be worthless, thanks to oversaturation – and if it no longer lives in the collective imagination of society, we’re back to square one.

Could we find a better way than carbon-intensive blockchain to secure them though?

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Ear Candy 2021.03 – Have The Rolling Stones Killed

Uh, yeah, how you get closer to love?
How you lemonade all your sadness when you openin’ up?
How you make excuses for billionaires, you broke on the bus?

Noname, Rainforest
The original FUF had one of my favourite album covers of all time, and Tom Fec has already won best album artwork of the year for this year’s sequel

Shit yeah new Tobacco! With a throwback Tobacco sound too. I’ve been looping his dirty beats for the last week and have deemed it worthy to share the title of his 2008 debut. No individual track meets the heights of a Hairy Candy or Gross Magik, but all contribute a unique flavour to the whole. I think most of all I was longing for more tripped out vocals. This release is mostly an instrumental affair, but it makes up for the lack of lyrics with distinctive and fresh sounds.

My favourite discovery for the month was Mica Levi, who brings some incredibly unique experimental soundscapes on Blue Alibi.

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The Crown Doesn’t Fit

Why does Harry get to leave but we don’t?

Anyone who knows me knows that I loathe the royal family. I distinctly remember as a child when I discovered that Kings and Queens were real things that still existed in the real world, and I was gobsmacked. Santa Claus made more sense – at least he was magical, not just a regular human elevated for being born. It’s absurd that such an institution should still exist at all – but it’s beyond ridiculous that it should exist in Australia.

As such, I generally avoid them as best I can. I skipped past The Queen’s Gambit for months, thinking it was another Crown or royal period drama. I also feel great discomfort at grown-arse adults who seem to idolise them. They are not above politics as many usually claim; they are unaccountable celebrities who use weddings and babies as marketing material to hold onto their power and wealth – and protect themselves from the law (*cough* Prince Andrew).

But schadenfreude got the better of me and I had to pay some attention to the latest drama. Now, I couldn’t stomach the interview itself, but I saw some clips. Gross phrases such as “speak your truth” (vomit) and unnecessary trips to the thesaurus with “falsehoods” (“lies” wasn’t good enough?) were enough to put me off watching the whole thing, but I got the gist – a heavy dose of high-school level gossip from rich people complaining about their privilege while an overrated (junk-science promoting) interviewer acts surprised at everything as though it hadn’t already been discussed prior.

What?!? That institution which has discriminated based on gender, wealth and religion forever is also racist? What a revelation!

The stuffy old antiquated English system expects you to be seen and not heard, and used as a prop for the media? And repress your feelings?! What a surprise!

A truer bombshell might have been the absence of these things. It doesn’t make them any less wrong, but the apparent surprise reveals how well the tabloid marketing works.

The media are picking sides to create more drama, but let’s be real – everyone involved is horrible, entitled, and narcissistic. Once upon a time, elite, entitled celebrities were able to demand, and receive the kind of glorification which would make an ancient Pharaoh envious. Back in the day the media and celebrities had a symbiotic relationship where they both lived in the same bubble and the rest of us had to just tolerate it. Those days peaked in the 1990s. The age of celebrity is dead – it was one of the benefits of the internet. The pandemic has only encouraged the democratisation of media. You only have to look at US late night talk show hosts working from home amid the pandemic and how amateur their efforts looked alongside long-time YouTubers. This doesn’t mean celebrity is gone or that it doesn’t still come with benefits – but it does mean that you no longer get a free pass simply for being famous. Ask Gal Gadot and her imagination.

Sitting on millions of dollars from Spotify and Netflix as you complain about not getting free security? It’s enormously out of touch.

The elevation of one individual for no reason other than their being “famous” or born into wealth has always been wrong – but it is abhorrent in 2021. It goes against the grain of the egalitarian values on which modern Australian society is (meant to be) built.

The royal family are effectively no different to the Kardashian-Jenners (although it could be argued they earned their wealth to a greater extent than the Windsors). Would you sit them at the top of your system of government and society?

I believe that the main element keeping this institution together is the Queen, and it further unravel upon her death in the next decade. In any case, Australia should have removed this anachronism a long time ago. There is absolutely no argument for keeping a foreign, unelected individual at the top of our societal and governmental chain. Especially when that individual doesn’t understand our culture or feel our pain or celebrate our successes. An individual from a country which slaughtered thousands of Australians in the late 18th Century.

Yes, a lot of good came as well, but that river stopped flowing a long time ago. There is nothing gained from keeping an unaccountable family which protects themselves from the rule of law – and is considered to be doing their best work when they are doing nothing.

We can, and should, do better.

I have no shortage of ideas on what “better” could look like. It starts with Constitutional recognition of Australia’s First Nations, and a number of other issues (distrust of politicians, corruption scrutiny for example) could be addressed in the process. But I’ll save that for another day.