Art After NFTs | 6th Cohort

let's do it welcome everyone I wonder if I can ask I used to teach art history for many years and I want um if possible I would appreciate folks turning their cameras on if they're happy I tend to find it makes for a more inclusive experience for everyone but if you don't want to do that that's absolutely fine as well um I had one of the a more unsettling experiences of switching between teaching in a physical space to teaching um during the pandemic online and that really raised a lot of questions about how to make people feel engaged and when lecturing for upwards of an hour and I am planning on lecturing for an hour or so today and so I hope people are happy with that um I'll speak quite slowly but I also plan to take questions for the last half hour um or as long as you guys want so um yeah please um feel free to accumulate questions and I will look forward to addressing them and meeting you all um excursively at least after about an hour maybe 50 minutes I'll do my best um so welcome everyone I'm going to start if I may um my name is Alex estrog I run a magazine called right click save um I just want to confirm before I start that you can all see the screen um and that you can hear me and that you're not already asleep excellent thanks everyone okay so I think I don't know what my principal role is here I've noticed that you guys have been having talks from artists where you guys ask questions and so I suspect I'm supposed to actually come here and deliver something so I'm going to attempt to deliver everything um in one hour um but what that means is really I want to discuss um the perhaps the aesthetic side of art after nfts and also the iconographic side so the side to do with meaning um so form and meaning and of course you know this isn't you know any conversation about art after nfts in in many ways is a conversation about art and Technology as to previously perhaps quite separate discourses increasingly align of course you know a paintbrush is a technology and Technology I think originates from you know the Greek which tries to deal with the notion of of language as a structure so I think it's it's probably fair to say that if you're dealing with period right now the age of sort of the Golden Age maybe of generative art um you're dealing with the ascent of the coder of the linguist um to the level of the traditional fine artist that's a fascinating moment in history it's it's a really exciting time of course with the nft we're also living at the moment and when Art became transparently financialized historically since maybe the 17th century the notion of art as a separate autonomous realm uh set apart from the gritty reality of her everyday life but also maybe Mass popular culture um has been very compelling and it's basically buttressed the the market for traditional fine art for 300 or so years and so we have to acknowledge that what is going on around us is kind of amazing and surprising and it's not just one of those moments where you can say this is something fundamentally different and this is very different what's going on right now and on the other hand of course as I'm going to go into some detail on one of the things that the nft also does is it it reminds us that a lot of artists who work with code for example or generative artists computational artists have been working for 60 plus years already so one of the interesting things about the nft maybe one of the most interesting things um away from the market side for a moment is the fact that it unlocks a lot of histories that were in a sense encrypted by you know the traditional white Western Canon and so for all these reasons I think you know art after nfts is um a fascinating moment from my perspective I used to teach art history at secondary schools which is a period um I think in someone's life as a student where they're really trying to kind of guzzle all the information they can and it's not quite the same as a university when you want to specialize and so from my perspective what is lovely about you know art after nfts is it it does allow one to deal in art and Technology politics you know Society um and so forth that everything together at once the question is can you create a compelling discourse can you hold together ideas um in a way which is legible not only to someone who is technically proficient a coder perhaps or an engineer or a fine artist and but a lay person as well and I think what we're experiencing right now is this kind of rather sort of difficult flirtation between one on the one hand a kind of crypto art World web 3 and the Contemporary Art World um which is something else I would just say this sort of coming to the end of my introduction that one of the fascinating things I think maybe the most Salient thing I can say today is the idea that we often talk about this sort of digital ecosystem as being web3 right and you you occasionally hear people say I'm a web 3 artist or I'm an artist working in web 3. you certainly hear artists say oh I don't know anything about that right so what's fascinating about that from my perspective is that no one ever said I'm a web 2 artist you know okay maybe maybe someone might have said I'm a Tumblr artist but the idea that we can now acknowledge I think just based on the basic language that we use generally and that there is a kind of fundamental merging of the shall we say the world of creative production especially creative digital production and um so the tech industry but certainly the kind of maybe it is that that that world of um Tech Market so I think you know Evelyn do you mind just muting um thank you um so I would say all those reasons yeah I think it's an interesting moment and um I I'm just going to sort of introduce kind of where I come from and what I do this is the magazine right click save we started it 15 months ago um no worries at all um and the principal rationale was from my perspective was to create a critical conversation a space for critical conversations about art after nfts which didn't kind of patronize either the nft artist the digital artist um The Collector community on which those digital artists rely on and and in many respects is the collect the collective of artists themselves and one thing we'll talk about is how you know in many respects web 3 brings together the role of the artist and the role of the collector into one kind of hybrid creative entrepreneur and I would even argue that that you know it might be fair to say that to succeed as an artist in web 3 a prerequisite is that you are a collector you collect your peers work you are supporting them probably not only you know morally um but actually in in Practical tangible terms so I do think that we are dealing with a different kind of um yeah digital market for art um and I think you know as as uh Kenny schachter's new game uh kind of bears out there is a kind of battle for the soul of the art world going on and but I think perhaps the more dare I say interesting way of approaching the question is is to say that actually what we're really experiencing is an expansion of the domain of art that to me seems unquestionable and the fact that we use a word like web3 to talk basically about the the kind of cutting edge of artistic production I think tells you all you need to know about this kind of interesting merging of art and technology and I would just say finally like I'm going to go into discussion about sort of shows you the Aesthetics of crypto art and stuff like that but I think it is just worth pointing out that um at its best I think because of the close proximity between uh digital art and technology and what that means in practice is that and I've seen this and I can give examples of this and or I say good artists or perhaps the artists who are particularly interested in playing with or critiquing technology can often shape the tech industry towards more Progressive Futures it's generally The Habit not always but it's generally the habit of artists to try and kind of work out what the problems of Technology are and therefore in the process to establish perhaps more socially Progressive Solutions so I do very much see that close proximity between art and Tech as being at its best not always at its you know it can be a speculative market like any other but at its best it is I think a a driving force uh behind a more Progressive vision of the world one example I'll give of that um is uh wonderful artist called Stephanie Dinkins who has been working with small data sets for many years and how um Big Data exploits communities of color and you know basically um those who aren't in the majority um all over the world and uh or rather you know the global majority and and what's very striking is that you know she's been working on finding ways to use small data in a progressive way for the last 10 years and you know in the last year Andrew Eng leading computer scientist says we don't need more big data we need better small data so that there is so there are some examples um of artists who are I think pushing the tech industry towards more Progressive operations and of course that is I think the principle guiding logic but that we want to celebrate at right click save and not necessarily the idea of a new art world as another kind of insulated environment of course we in a sense and you guys if you're on the VCA residency you are of course participating in in a kind of community um but I want to try and frame this as an inclusive project not as a class another elitist exclusive um kind of Tech solutionist Paradigm which I I don't think will take us anywhere new um but that's the that's that's the principle we live by anyway so we have a podcast right click radio and we do events um really enjoyed working with them Nicole and vertical crypto art and on femgen back in December 23 uh female generative artists in Miami um it was kind of a hectic week because I jetted off then to Shibuya in Tokyo um which was very extravagant in the extreme and and we hosted um these fine folk um which was just emerged after the lockdown in Tokyo um Tokyo really only Japan only really opened up in October of last year so um this was a really interesting event because it kind of unlocked a load of folk who previously had only ever interacted online and I as anyone who's been aware of bright moments last week or two weeks ago um you know that that community of Japanese particularly generative artists is incredibly fertile not least because um there's a very long history of media arts interest in Japan and so I think what I'm trying to get at here is that you know there is a global um context and that hopefully will become more clear but I think it's probably worth um saying for the first time and I will repeat this that um you know in a sense um crypto art is a movement for kind of global inclusivity and one of the things that of course one comes across a lot in web 3 is this idea of a kind of community of Outsider digital artists who thanks to the nft can make careers for themselves in a way they couldn't previously when they might have had to rely on a gallery a mediator etc etc of course it's more complicated than that in some ways because as capitalism always does the the the forms of mediation have changed the galleries have changed form the platforms through which we passed are you know and and by which we are gated in and out um have reappeared I suppose the question for us is you know what are the conditions under which we can maintain a more horizontal art World maybe a more affordable art World in which more digital Outsiders dare I say can be included and so you right click save is very much sort of trying to celebrate that we we don't really want to just celebrate the history of digital art um which is wonderful um but we we really our primary focus is on acknowledging the community of um you know Global uh globally located um artists who haven't been able to make a living um until the nft um we do collaborative exhibitions right now the pixel generation is our new um show and auction at unit London unit London is quite an interesting gallery and generally not taken very seriously by the Contemporary Art World um but um funnily enough is actually the only Contemporary Art Gallery as far as I'm concerned which listens to the artists of web3 on their terms and doesn't try to impose kind of traditional Contemporary Art World narratives onto web3 and I think it is important obviously I think about this all the time as an editor um but there is certain language that the Contemporary Art world is comfortable with and certain language and that people in web3 are using and it's funny that those two don't always align so for example when the pompadude buys 17 nfts um or is gifted 17 nfts and they're described primarily as blockchain art rather than nfts and ft still provokes you know resistance even though as a technology it is it is clearly fundamental to web3 um so I think what we're dealing with right now and maybe a battle that I'm trying to fight myself is this idea that really you know right click save is a listening exercise it's about listening to the artists what language are they using what are their priorities what are your priorities and rather than saying oh this is how what's going on right now fits in relation to 90s netars or post-internet art or which frankly both of those movements in a sense were a reaction against or an attempt to canonize digital art within an art World surrounding so I think you know it is important to stress that we're dealing with an expanding art world and what I like about a show like the pixel generation from my perspective and is it's given us a bit of latitude to include you know pixel artists who are basically graphic designers who weren't considered fine artists by the art world and we've managed to kind of bring together we pull together a really interesting medley of you know all brilliant artists but frankly Misfits so I think that that says kind of everything you need to know about um I think what you know our values are but I think the idea that we are trying to still kind of maybe ensure that the the best of crypto are the best of web 3 um isn't sacrificed on the altar of the art World um and that's you know by celebrating you know for example someone like Kim azendorf who invented pixel sorting um you are invariably you're celebrating generative artists you're celebrating glitch artists who who tend to use pixel sorting and you're celebrating pixel artists who previously didn't really weren't really acknowledged a serious artist by the um traditional art world so you know that that gesture is very right click save um in you know it'll be interesting to see how the art world comes to knowledge or ignores these artists you guys um but I think you know that that's kind of where we are and uh we're kind of in an interesting moment um trying to kind of bridge crypto and Contemporary Art worlds um but you know if we're not careful it we are liable to use the language of the art World rather than the language of the artists who actually are participating in web3 and I think that's a mistake um and that is something that we try and guard against and he try perhaps rather grandiosely right click save to um airspace for Young Scholars um to publish their research prior to being peer reviewed so we have a number of kind of Scholars around the world who maybe not with their primary research but with their areas of Interest personal interest will publish something for us um maybe to get ahead of the curve maybe to publish something in a context in which it isn't going to be um you know remain within an ivory Tower etc etc so you know it maybe that's that's kind of my fantasy but I think it is important that because in a way right click save is all about celebrating Outsider artists it's important that we ensure that you know the most rigorous scholarship or at least um writing um is what we publish and so that's the kind of balance that we try and keep to a slide I just put up um at the beginning of any lecture really just to kind of um get everybody on board okay so um as the principle there is really um that digital art was the proof of concept for nfts um you know it could have been music um it could have been books a bit like Amazon and web 2 um but for whatever reason probably because there was a kind of um starving market for digital art um the nft was kind of kind of salvific potential there so digital art was the proof of concept for nfts but anyone watching will have seen the rise of blockchain poetry over the last year with artists like Sasha Styles um and other digital Commodities and being sold as or with nfts so if I'm talking about um R in general I usually try and divide it into form and meaning and so I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of do a quick whip through Aesthetics on the one hand and then um iconography or meaning on the other hand so hopefully at the end of this lecture you'll feel like you know you've got much as you can sort of digest in one hour guys as I as I said before if you have any um questions um have half an hour at the end are Newman is suggesting that the cameras are affecting streaming if anyone wants to turn the cameras off to speed things up that's fine no worries okay we've got Aesthetics um which is dealing with sense perception I guess you could say um and we've got histories or iconography that's dealing with meaning I'm going to start with Aesthetics so one of my I shouldn't say this but one of my favorite writers that we Commission and is Brian fry who's a very irreverent um writer lawyer um who's a big proponent plagiarism and I encourage you all to follow him on Twitter if you if you're interested in that debate around mentality and ownership and originality um and what um what Brian said in his first essay for us was the following the conventional Art Market works the same way as the nft market sure if you buy a painting or sculpture you get the painting or sculpture but that's irrelevant the Art Market doesn't value the object you own it values what the object represents what you're really buying is an entry on the artist's catalog resume thanks Emily um so um I think that's that's a kind of irreverent thinking that we we wanted to start with at the outset um that was from Brian's first essay for us making sense of the 40 billion dollar nft market that was early 2022 before the the uh crypto crash the latest crypto winter started um and I think you know that take is very very helpful and because it I think reminds the audience that actually um there's not such a big difference really and if you're dealing with digital art um to if you're dealing with um physical artifacts paintings on a wall display is still important and ultimately you know the truth is and if you hadn't bought an authenticated Andy Warhol you know you hadn't bought a valuable work of art and I was one of the things the blockchain does is it brings that provenance um it makes that provenance part of the fabric of the work um you know I think there is a question about how and whether display is essential to Art after the nft I think in many respects um display is now in a sense secondary to the transactibility of Art and I think you know as I said at the beginning art and money have always had a relationship since you know um maybe 18th century something like that but certainly since the kind of birth the kind of Canon of Fine Art in the 18th century um art and money have you know and kind of bound together but there has been an illusion of art as separate from money um and in many respects that's one of the things one of the reasons art remains so valuable because it's perceived as having a cultural value over and above you know the gritty reality of um everyday um markets um of course one of the things the nft did was to render that relationship between art and money transparent but one of the things it did and maybe came at the cost of was display and because I think it it made the transact ability of art the principle logic of the art world one of the best quotes I think and maybe the most important that I always think of is by a great kind of conceptual digital artist called Mitchell Chan and he said non-fungible tokens separate and artworks expressive or artistic form permits commodity for and in many ways that is I think one argument that supports the view that you've got display on the one hand and the commodity form the transactibility on the other hand and I'd like to suggest one of the things we could conclude from that and which I think is a very very um insightful reading is that one of the things that the nft does is it it kind of moves the needle away from art as a object display be displayed on a screen or displayed in real space to something that can be displayed on a phone but it has a kind of liquid quality and you know there was a statistic I suspect this isn't true now but there was a statistic in 2021 that at the average time an nft was held for by a collector was only 30 days now that suggests that actually art after the nft is liquid in a way that art traditional Fine Art um is not was not um so anyway that's that's the kind of one thing I think that it's really worth pointing out about after the nft relates that question of display okay so um art and money have been or form an Aesthetics and have been um financialized I would say since the 18th century of course this is hyper financialized in the age of financial like capitalism um but I think the nft and by um you know registering the ownership of a collector on the blockchain transparently and does render that relationship between art and money transparent for the first time so what is crypto art you know crypto I I will say is a contested term and I think it's an interesting town it's not a term that I hear quite so much anymore um I usually hear web 3 these days or generative art or digital art and of course the decision to choose a particular phrase or word reflects something about the ideology or the background or the interests of a particular individual um but I am going to just give you a little bit of a a kind of walk through the history of crypto art as well as the Aesthetics um crypto art as defined by Jason Bailey are gnome the first collectron's super rare and also the CEO of club nft and right click save um disclaimer um regards crypto art as the movement a global movement indeed for radical inclusivity indeed he regards the nft as the first truly Global art movement um which I think is is um something I would support um but it does go to show that actually you know it is important for us to continue to support this Global Community um and not let old Metropolitan centers kind of return to dominance New York Paris London Etc probably the case in point for crypto r as a global movement for radical inclusivity is the story of oslinachi and self-describes as Africa's leading crypto artists from Nigeria and Aussie um built a a market um having been rejected by European Galleries and because he worked with Microsoft Word um anyone who's looked at ozinachi's work will will I think acknowledge that it is um breathtaking and and higher individual and very special and but it's clearly something um that the traditional art world was not willing to accept back in 2018 or so um thanks to super rare um ozin actually was able to make a market for his art regardless and in in it's very important to stress that the the um story of ozunachi and is I think a kind of guiding sort of um I don't say Parable but it it has a kind of intoxicating quality this idea that thanks to the nft um and a kind of Grassroots community of digital outside their artists and you don't need galleries you don't need mediators you don't need vertical structures hierarchies Etc um you don't need web 2 although it helps to have a following on Twitter um you need basically um the blockchain you need web3 and Technologies and when I think of web 3 Technologies I think principally of nfts blockchain and smart contracts okay so it wasn't actually really important figure um I think there is probably a legitimate question uh as to whether the conditions still exist for you know a thousand ozenachies um but certainly I would say that right click save is is principally dedicated to ensuring that is the future of the art world and not just um basically a new generation of Gatekeepers and vertical structures um Jason uh I don't know um kind of uh anonized or codified um crypto art um back in I think 20 early 2020 um which is obviously just before the kind of nft explosion the following year with the people sale in March 2021 and for Jason um crypto art is digitally native geographically agnostic Democratic and permissionless decentralized and often anonymous it is also mimetic and that it it kind of in a sense it leverages the meme um as a simple visual device um and commodifies that Meme um the fur arguably the first nft Marketplace the the kind of prototype nft Marketplace is one called rare Pepe wallet um which um think was the marketplace that had the first fifty thousand dollar sale of nnft um but in practice you know homo Pepe which was the was that was the kind of watershed moment for for nfts before the people sale um was really a meme with all that kind of viral kind of um appeal um that was sold um and I think you know you can see crypto art very much I think as a realist movement you know when I think of um you know memes I think in a way that they capture something fundamental and real about society that traditional art doesn't necessarily and the difference pre-nft and post nft was that we had a way of selling memes um and so on so I think that there is a probably a a useful kind of relationship um to to note down about um you know in a sense the nft is a way of unlocking the meme economy or commodifying the meme as an art form um for Jason uh crypto R is self-referential as its own kind of internal set of values and codes of course this code is itself um self-referential so it's very meta right now um you have a new class of crypto patrons having principle a kind of pro-artist or artist first Mantra and I think this is something we definitely try and stick to it right click save you'll you may notice that we um we no longer have a section called criticism and because I felt that criticism um by its very logic imposes a vertical structure hierarchy and bias frankly um onto the work of artists and it imposes language that artists don't necessarily use about their own work the reason we do so many interviews and round tables at right click save is not only because we want to celebrate a community we also want to listen um to the language that is being used and to allow shall we say the market for digital art right now in web 3 to be defined by the language the artists use themselves we believe the artist's language should be the terms by which their own work is evaluated which is why we we kind of moved away from criticism per se and we we we go big now on our community section of the website which is where you'll you'll list you'll hear people like uh Brian fry or Charlotte Kent who might once have been in the criticism section and finally dankness and Jason runs a podcast called dankness which I recommend everyone um has a Listen to Because crypto art is open to everyone judging it by traditional artistic standards kills what is great about it instead it's best to judge crypto art by dankness or potency of expression and creativity and I think the use of potency of expression there does kind of call to mind realism of the 19th century this idea of a kind of direct appeal to um an audience you know not a kind of elicist value system but if anything a kind of Grassroots um down to earth approach to art um back in 2021 uh just after the people sale in fact I I led a a study of um 22 2018 works on super rare which is all the works on super air at the time because um I alongside two others um wanted to establish the trends and priorities of crypto art the Aesthetics if you like so we published this text called in search of an Aesthetics of crypto art um to try and kind of bring some order and and what we did was we analyzed the tags that artists used and applied to their work um so because we felt like if you were if you're analyzing the language artists applied to the works they were producing you could get a better insight into perhaps the aesthetic priorities and so you can see from this slide guys um futuristic retro and sci-fi themes were frequently explored and highly coveted by collectors and 3D art is the most viewed with higher selling points perhaps reflecting a medium specific to crypto art in general number of views highly correlates with price the hype machine is real and at the time we did find that artists who had big followings on Instagram tended to sell for more on super rare as in the traditional art World nfts tagged with drawings that tend to sell for Less which is utterly bizarre of course because a digital drawing isn't the same as a physical drawing and finally the average color palette of nfts tends towards purple reinforcing an Aesthetics rooted in Tech Nostalgia um I think that is something that has has only kind of hardened in my uh my view over the last couple of years and this pixel generation show that we've done recently I think does reinforce this fascination with early digital Technologies um I think partly because the thing about the pixel is it calls attention to the essentially artificial nature of digital culture of course the thing about a kind of seamless you know 4K screen is it really conceals the ideological kind of structure um through which you analyze images so I think you know one of the things that I find interesting about crypto art in general um is its interest and it's perhaps Fascination even fetish for um early digital Technologies from the 80s 90s Etc and not least and not surprisingly because the generation who is collecting crypto art probably grew up with um you know maybe what you might call the Golden Age of video games all right so we we did a bit of co-occurrence network analysis in this study and we took a [Music] um we analyzed different uh tags and you can see them visualized on the left here and what you can see is you know some tags tend to sort of group together and and the indeed the um ethereum max season coin Maxes tend to have their own um tags um which you can see visible on the right and at the time there was quite a lot of tags which involved sort of Bitcoin and ethereum law um funny enough we found that actually you know artists who call attention to Ethan and Bitcoin actually don't sell more than anyone else um so I think by 2021 we concluded that actually the hype around you know the the actual blockchain as a technology had kind of died down the most common tags for 3D abstract animation surreal GIF and illustration um most expensive were sci-fi space 2D surreal and nude most popular colors were red and black of the top 50 tags 30 bore no relation to traditional Fine Art terminology but five of the top ten did and what we inferred from that was crypto art is a hybrid of analog and digital media so I think that's probably quite a helpful slide folks because what it tells us is that you know particularly that fourth bullet point you know of the top 50 tags 30 bare nothing relation to traditional Fine Art terminology but obviously 20 do um and then you know of the top five uh you've got things like you know surreal abstract um 3D Etc so you know this is not necessarily The Emperor's New Clothes but it's certainly a hybrid um community of artists and that makes sense I think because a lot of the artists in the crypto art World probably didn't go or weren't trained by traditional Fine Art institutions um in fact they might be self-taught you know in their bedrooms um but thanks to the nft someone like ozinachi but also artists like Carlos marcial or Sarah Zucker have made careers for themselves without needing to rely on traditional Galleries and so you know that's the trio that Jason tends to use to describe crypto show up and I wasn't actually Carlos marcial and Sarah Zucker but there are undeniably others and I would I would probably say that if anyone wants to go back to kind of the Glory Days of crypto art mocker collection the Museum of crypto art is probably your best Port of Call now this is this is I think uh hopefully useful but also problematic slide um crypto art you know I think there are some people who say um they don't believe crypto R exists there are people who say that crypto art should be spelled crypto are one word um which are the generally the ogs in the crypto space um I'm not terribly um wedded to a particular definition I think it is probably fair to say that you know the two fundamental things about crypto art are digital art and the nft so when we're talking about crypto we're like we're really not talking about tokenizing physical objects um but we're also probably not talking about digital art which isn't tokenized so I do think you know I don't want to kind of be too dogmatic about it but I think the nft and digital are natively digital artifact are probably the essential components of crypto art which obviously allows for a whole swathe of different subcategories I would also say having said that and I do think it is important to be flexible in one's definitions particularly since we're tracking developments as they're emerging who am I to say that this is crypto art and this is not crypto art or this is nftr and this is not nftr um and if just as a little aside nftr is a term which is absolutely loathed by many um but I will say this nft art is interesting um I think is a cultural phenomenon there's a lot of people use it um and um when nfts emerged I noticed I had a friend who was a digital illustrator who was quite a successful digital illustrator who started calling himself an NFC artist because clearly for him to be an nft artist was a way of adding value to his market and I think it is really important you know what one notices about people who don't like the notion of the nft art or the nft artist is it's really aware of excluding and kind of producing an elitist discourse if anything nft art as a concept or crypto art I do think that they're pretty much one and the same um is a way to actually say you know I'm an artist even if you weren't considered an artist by the art world of course pixel art is a good example of that to be a pixel artist you probably weren't trained by a fine art establishment and you probably were self-taught um and you probably used you know Adobe Illustrator which is clearly not the kind of primary medium for traditional fine artists nevertheless it is one of the principal um you know digital art media today and you know two of the artists e-boy and uh Chen who does the crypto citizens for bright moments both use Adobe Illustrator and they're happy to admit it and so crypto R nftr the language is really interesting um but I would say in a really important not to be dogmatic um because generally people who are dogmatic are trying to exclude others um anyway so I would say you know you'll notice and that obviously we're talking about crypto art as a broad envelope um but also generally when people talk about crypto art they're often referring to basically um a JPEG which is you know tokenized on the blockchain so maybe any work of digital art that is tokenized that isn't a pfp uh an example of generative art an example of AI or ml um will be classed as crypto are it's kind of everything else it's the other bucket and of course because it's miscellaneous um I love it even more um but you can see that there are hierarchies within this kind of um overall crypto art envelope already and probably the the most um you know uh elitist class of works are the the third bullet point down Works which treat web3 Technologies as a medium in themselves blockchain nfts and smart contracts um and there are lots of really interesting artists um who use and take the technology itself as a medium as a kind of conceptual frame Mitchell Chow would say as one Simon Denny um Sarah friend that you know there are lots of really really good artists those artists in the kind of third bullet point category tend to be the ones most celebrated by the Contemporary Art world because um not through any doing of the artists themselves necessarily because the Contemporary Art World likes clever art it likes art produced by people who are intelligent and dare I say probably white um and who were trained in Fine Arts institutions and who understand solar wit and of course that the principle you know reason that crypto art exists is to celebrate everyone else and so I do think that there is it's really important to stress that there is yeah there is a politics to this um this kind of um sub-categorization which I think we do need to acknowledge of course with generative art is particularly fascinating we did a text um last year maybe the text I'm most proud of um called when the artists met the algorist um which was an interview I hosted with lots of gen of artists working today and a man called Roman buroshko um who is sometimes described as an algorist and Roman's fascinating very old man now um but I really pinned him down and because I wanted to to be able to say that all of the work that was going on or at least the majority of it in the 1960s 70s and 80s was generative art because generative art is what we use now it's the term that's most popular right now and back then they tended to use computer art computational art um algorithmic art these are all very important um terms by the way um but it's it's important to stress that when we talk about generative art now we are also talking about the legacy of Roman viroshko viramalanar Manfred more and you know I've made a big effort to ensure that you know as many as those artists who are still alive we're going to cover so we've covered Manfred um Vera we've covered um Frieda Naka um before he died sadly last year so you know this is a really important um I think generative art moment but generative art has a you know has a very long history and yeah Emily thanks for for posing that little um curveball um I would say you know one of the most interesting texts about New Media um is um one I forget the name of the text actually by a writer called Edward shanken um and basically what Edward shanken said was and I I'm I'm actually saying that this goes up to the nft and basically 30 years Contemporary Art and New Media art kind of self-segregated in their own Corners in their own markets and New Media artists would congregate every year at um Oz Electronica in Lintz or in Berlin and contemporary artists would tend to stay in the traditional art World um it probably is fair to say that traditional contemporary artists regard technology more critically generally um whereas New Media artists I think have tended to sort of fetishize the technology and trying to push the technology as far as it goes and I think you know for all the problems of Contemporary Art I think I would probably historically take contemporary art over New Media art only because I think Contemporary Art tends to kind of Technologies and work out how they can be bent to more socially Progressive means whereas New Media has tended to kind of fetishize the technology itself for its own sake and I think therein lies probably fascism um or an accelerationist approach to Art um and a more extractive approach and then finally you know I think probably the biggest market right now even is what's commonly called AI art but what um one of the leading generative artists Marcel shitlit calls NL art and warning us that it's really machine learning art rather than AI per se AI is a rather rather larger envelope um so um anyway hopefully you find this slide helpful folks because I think you know it's not always easy to track developments as they're going it's easy to look back in hindsight but I'm just giving you my perspective watching the space trying to listen as much as possible from right click save's perspective these are kind of the different Trends but as I said you know there is a politics there there is a hierarchy um but of course you know the market has its own Privileges and and generally I would say that right now you know Works which treat web3 Technologies as a medium are probably no more valued by the market and than generative art and they might be more valued by the Contemporary Art world but that's probably another question okay and I want to just I think give you a quick run through before I finish of some of the um histories um that we have been covering up right click save um okay folks come back okay um I think one of the things that you know the NFC or art on after the nft has allowed um is a load of narratives and histories to emerge um that otherwise were largely ignored by I think a very very developed Contemporary Art World which doesn't like certain narratives doesn't like to admit that it is a neocolonial project etc etc and so from my perspective you know right click save has allowed us I think to uncover at least um you know hopefully guide some of these discussions towards a more Progressive model of the art world you can see that these are just some of the what I call encrypted histories or crypto histories we've covered over the last year you know you know we dealt with Simon Denny and Gile todovski and wonderful project which um called.com Seance which um looks back at failed web one companies through the lens of web3 so I think you know that reinforces you know the technostalgia of web3 and I think there's still a an ongoing question about whether nfts will unite the art World um I think the technology is a barrier and but for Jonas Lund who is one of the few artists celebrated by both contemporary and crypto art worlds and therefore you know really holds the keys to the kingdom art is whatever the art world says is Art and by extension good art is whatever the art world says is good and relevant art but as the art World expands to include the vast community of previously ignored digital creators so must the vernacular of art or the language of art assimilate the language of New Media says Joe Lawson tangrid so I think you know the question is you know can you create a compelling and convincing and real art world without necessarily falling victim to those old Tendencies and those old value systems and that's clearly you know the daily problem we've we try and address at the magazine our curators necessary in web3 you know one of the things that you know was very popular was this idea at the beginning of nfts that now you didn't need galleries you didn't need curators you could just basically rig up a website and show some images of course you know very quickly um people perceived a a reduction in quality uh with that approach um and so you know increasingly I think maybe curation per se is is not celebrated in web 3 but certainly coordinating narratives and and perhaps um bringing together artists who who approach you know similar questions um has become I think a very popular strategy campaigners succeed as nft artists what was interesting about Annabella here um is that Annabella I think as far as I can tell digitizes paintings um some of the time she's not a self-identified generative artist and but what's really interesting about her is that she participates in the generative art community on FX hash and as a result her work has developed a market so there is absolutely she is a case study in as a painter who has made a career for herself in web3 in a sense by adapting to the native properties of that kind of gamified Market um engaging with her her collectors directly um you know um probably incentivizing them on some levels supporting her fellow artists Annabella understands how to play the game in web 3 I think perhaps probably better than other painters who are trying to break into this art world it probably helps that she is um highly literate with computer aided design and I think she also still works as an architect on the side or she did um so I think that kind of natively digital quality of Annabella coupled with the quality the directness of of her aesthetic um is what gives her such an such appeal beyond the traditional art world so really interesting uh case study there and these titles are all the titles of Articles we've published recently um and I think I'm gonna I'm gonna end at um on the hour with this I'm kind of maybe final provocation can we reconcile Fine Art and crypto art and and the reason I make this juxtaposition which I hope doesn't offend anyone and is because I think you know fundamentally um nfts are or at least crypto art is a kind of realist movement and if you look on the left here folks you'll see um Mane's famous uh horizontal um format nude figure of Olympia um which was a direct assault on the kind of Bourgeois Parisian audience a confrontation with the kind of elitist um expectations of you know the white male um spectator and what Mane did though was it wasn't just the subject itself or herself and or herself that were so direct um and uh politicized actually the way that um Olympia's flesh was flattened out with white was circumscribed by a black outline and these were not canonical approaches they were not approaches celebrated by the salon the French salon which was really the kind of metric for success in Fine Art back in 1863 um you know what Mane was doing was saying I can simplify this image and actually create something which is more real which is a direct appeal um to you know an everyday spectator and I'd like to suggest that by basically um commodifying the meme by celebrating you know the viral meme um as a visual economy in itself um crypto art is very much a realist movement you can have homo Pepe you can have this overt simplification of the of the of the in this case male form um and that be a very very valuable work of art because it somehow reveals something essential about the culture in which crypto art emerged which was the culture of Donald Trump which was a culture of 4chan which was a culture which tried to weaponize um you know Pepe um that little meme as a political um and reactionary right-wing uh gesture um but the the fascinating thing about anyone wants to read more what we've done we did an article on a called a short history of red Pepe and of um that actually a crypto artists attempted to rest control back um of Pepe from uh the kind of right-wing um alt-right um politicos so it just goes to show that actually crypto art in many ways kind of reflects the truest um understanding of visual digital visual culture today and as a result I'd like to suggest you know talking about crypto art is very much talking about art um and Fine Art and crypto art I think are one conversation and but sometimes it takes us to look back in time to see what was once Outsider Art challenging the status quo to realize that actually what we're looking at right now is is I think unquestionably the avant-garde um but I would just say folks just to conclude um I think whilst it is important to stress that crypto art is an avant-garde art movement um it is also in a sense a financial technology and I think it's important to conclude this conversation about art after the nft with the statement that we are not just talking about art now we are talking about an expanded um an expanding art World um and that I think has the potential to be more affordable more egalitarian and yes more democratic um but it is also at the same time highly neoliberal highly financialized and but as I said at the beginning I think as art and finances art and Technology become kind of um interlocked uh transparently um we are going to see the full spectrum of different political agendas um make an appearance and and I think um what we don't need is for people to continue to perpetuate the fraud that there is basically the Contemporary Art World which is the real art world and the crypto art World which should just shut up and and and listen and the reality is we're dealing now in an age of Art and Technology um coming together and I think the nft is a really interesting kind of um instantiation app so thanks for listening sorry I went a bit long um but hopefully you found that interesting and uh yeah happy to take questions so if you want to ask a question um you type in the chat I would personally love it if you have asked a question if you make an appearance but I understand if that doesn't work for connection reasons uh Emily um has a study of crypto art Aesthetics been done since 2021 would be interesting to see how that data's evolved um yes uh I agree with you um we do have uh one writer who writes for reckless save called Kyle Waters who you may have noticed was part of that original study he often writes about the data surrounding um crypto art and has done since 2021 so if anyone's interested in in how the data has evolved over time I very much recommend um Kyle Waters um who also works for a platform called um coin metrics so he's a data analyst um and we're lucky to have him writing for us so Emily that's my answer thank you Sun grazes yes you may ask a question thank you very much um apologies that we have no camera it's four o'clock in the morning here in Australia and honestly we're not looking at our best so um but I wanted to ask you um you you've made an interesting um statement that um displays secondary to transact ability and I understand where that comes from but I would argue a couple of things and one is that um you know you know in our home now if you walk into somebody's home you you make a judgment on on their taste by what they've got on the wall um in our home now we have three screens and if you come around for a beer at a gaff then um you you will see not let's say five pieces of art hanging on the wall you will over the course of the evening see you know maybe a hundred that gradually cycle through and I would argue that um that the nft world has brought with it a um a way of displaying that hasn't really been there before because you're not just looking at jpegs you are looking at a representation of an nft that has value um and the and the second part of that is that web 3 comes with the metaverse and we have hugely enjoyed hanging the art that we've created into our own metaverse and we're and we're just in the process of talking about hanging what we have collected into the metaverse because in the same way it's a statement of who you are and your taste and all of the rest of it so I would just say that I think it it yes transact ability is the um is the thing that one notices most but actually a whole bunch of display options have come too um that means that things like generative art can happen and uh you know 3D that moves and and and those kind of things are interested in your thoughts on that yeah no I'm really reassured and and gratified to hear that you do display digital art on screens I think it takes quite a commitment and a love of digital art to do so I think I was making probably a a rather less interesting point um which was that in practice if you're buying an nft you're buying the certificate of authenticity on the blockchain first and foremost um and um probably you know 90 of nfts the actual digital asset associated with the nft is off chain and probably because it's too large and the blockchain's not very good at storing digital files really of any size um which is of course one of the principal reasons that this kind of Unchained generative art um art blocks FX hash Etc has become so popular is principally um the the uh the seed phrase or the hash um is all you need to generate that um set of outputs so I think yeah there's a kind of technical point where you know I think the reality of you know digital art relying on the nft as a as a kind of means of commodifying itself what that means in practice it's not saying that the display of digital art is is secondary necessarily um but I do think that it is no longer the essential component of that digital object in a sense um I do think that being said clearly you only have to look at the kind of broad spectrum of in of generative art that's emerged in in the last couple of years to see that um really a lot of generative artists want visual seduction they want to embrace you know almost kind of modernist you know color harmonies and balances and complexity and and of course emergent possibility that that comes when you deal with um autonomous systems but I think yeah display and the visual itself is clearly um fundamental to the market for digital art and the experience of digital art and but I do think you know as far as the nft is concerned um for me the nft continues the dematerialization of the art object and that you can see starting with perhaps you know conceptualism in the 1960s and so on so yeah I think maybe my point is a bit Technical and visual you know displays is very important and personally reassured that you you are committed to that um but I think yeah he's starting to watch anyway um I hope that was a satisfying answer um fascinating perspective thank you very much indeed I'll I'll see to numeral because she always has interesting questions thanks a lot see if my uh camera hi I'll turn my camera on um nice to see you thank you so much for this I feel like there's 50 questions inside of me that will come out at some point and I will write them down and maybe ask you um but I think the last slide that you showed with the menet and the rare Pepe wallet uh Homer Pepe is one of the most beautiful things I've seen in a slide in this residency so far and I love that you described crypto art as a realist movement I think that's so rich and the thing that I was thinking about from my personal practice perspective I'm a digital abstract artist I have a traditional painting background but I find that when I'm using procreate or Rebel um I'm using I am actually creating realist art because I'm creating something that looks like a drip that's not a drip there is any if there's been any discussion on RCA around the discussion of the realism of digital abstraction in reference to the tools that digital abstractors use okay so I've just put up this this little extra slide in answer to your question I think um it's really interesting what you say I think what was fascinating about this um seeing this um Tyler Hobbs output in a physical uh printed form and Tyler Hobbs is very uh public about the fact that as far as he's concerned the highest resolution display is still a print um that may not be the case you know in 10 years time but as far as he's concerned it is and I think what's really interesting and I hope I'm I'm kind of following your question appropriately um is that um if you go up close and look at a Tyler Hobbs print or that one in question and what was very striking was the fact that there were marks that had been produced I suppose digitally mediated by a natively digital artist um abstract forms um which simply were not conceivable um used in traditional media using paint um but somehow that natively digital um and also of course generative and emergent system had managed to provoke um a kind of uh haptic quality um that function very much as a kind of continuation of painting and one of the Striking things I think personally about not necessarily Tyler Hobbs himself but um you know generative art is in many ways I think it is renewing painting um whether painters want to admit it generally because in this case of course we're dealing with a print that's in a sense secondary and we are seeing painters succeed in web3 we are seeing generative artists printing their work in way you know on a large scale in a you know in a kind of London auction house in a way which which functions as a traditional painting and it registers as a a you know subject object relation a kind of canonical experience so um that I don't know if that's a helpful response but I do think that you know we're gonna we're dealing with kind of an expansion of paintings terms or you know um yeah the the production of physical outputs um thanks to the development of and the popularity and the market for generative art which by the way relies on the nft you know that there is another movement for for example holographic art which simply has not got a market and you know the simple reality is generative art like Tyler Hobbs without the nft would not have had a market so the nft has got as it were unlocked um this movement for generative art but frankly it's also unlocked the potential for a new phase of painting and whic

2023-06-01 01:52

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