Digital artists' post-bubble hopes for NFTs don't need a blockchain
using pgp for artificial digital scarcity. lol
The Artist Is the Void - Momus
"Extraction—of natural resources and of labor—is the defining American act, at home and at war. Inasmuch as art is for the statement of itself, earthworks such as Heizer’s extract for the sake of extraction. To me he is the most patriotic of artists. The effect of an earthwork is never big enough to critique its circumstances nor generative enough to counter the harmful effects of its creation. In this, the NFT producers have accomplished something great, and outdone the 1970s land artists. With minimal labor, no pretense of theory or contextualization, no aesthetic clarity, and no object to speak of, they have set off exponential extractions. It’s not new; it’s just worse." [...] "Art can’t fill the damage done by extraction and enshrining a site of extraction through installation, reframing it as a cultural space, is a softened blow rather than an elucidation. When art fills a void, it justifies the void."
To save the Arts we must kill the Artist
brilliant essay on nfts, arts, politics, economics: "This comparison isn't really rigorous at all so i won't spend more time on it, i just thought the concept of a bourgeois failson containment zoo was funny." also: "The artists have exactly as much depth of existence as everyone, but they had the time and means to develop tools to communicate it in specific ways, and access to specific platforms. Any attempt to naturalize these privileges into an intellectual, emotional, creative superiority of artists over the rest of the people is absolute garbage, and should be treated with the disdain it deserves."
Code Is LOL - Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
"libertarian systems are built specifically to exploit people based on imagined freedom"
Web3 is not Decentralisation — it’s a Ploy to put Crypto Bros in Charge | by Ross Stalker | Nov, 2021 | Medium
"Imagine if someone were to suggest that all web infrastructure should share the same database. That would rightly be seen as an absurd idea — but that’s what Web3 advocates are essentially suggesting. A blockchain is a distributed append-only database, spread across multiple nodes, but it is still one single database. In the name of decentralisation, Web3 advocates in fact seek to create a new form of centralisation around the blockchain."
The Tinkerbell Griftopia
"We see crypto as a mob of misguided fools repeating the ecological disaster of Easter Island on a global scale for the sole purpose of selling man-child themed Neopets."
The Nihilism and Exploitation of the NFT Industry - by Ed Z - Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
"As a capital extraction mechanism, the crypto aspect is brilliant - it’s a natural connection to a speciously valuable industry full of frothy capital and desperation."
Storming the Ivory Tower: The NFT Rube Goldberg Machine, or, Why is NFT Art So Lazy?
"The turn towards process is also a good thing; everyone should have the opportunity to create art. From that perspective, it's true that Suum Cuique Labs infringe nothing with these pieces. From an art perspective, though, that's sort of beside the point. They cynically take advantage of open culture to enclose it again, aspiring to use blockchain to create Supercopyright with ludicrously high buy-in. And more to the point perhaps, this free ganking is a tacit acknowledgement that the artists they got were simply not good enough to achieve anything other than a bad copy of a dead black artist's style."
Storming the Ivory Tower: The NFT's Aura, or, Why Is NFT Art So Ugly?
'The product being labored over for the contemporary artist of social media is not "the work of art" but "the gestalt experience of art-posting".'