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Chasing Provenance by Charlotte Kent

Royalties, digital certificates, provenance. This is the language of modern smart contracts, and it’s being used to rewrite the rules of the art market as we know it.

The past few years of news stories, documentaries and court cases about forgeries and looted art have brought the importance of provenance to a wider audience. The purpose of provenance is not only to assure art audiences that the work was produced by the artist but also that the collector is the rightful owner. Blockchain technology offers to lessen the confusion surrounding authenticity by providing an immutable ledger to record the artwork’s history. It also enables visual artists to share in the profit of their works, sparking fresh debate about resale royalties.

The blockchain ledger can record information, but smart contracts are what enable resale royalties. Smart contracts — code that is executed automatically when certain conditions are met — were initially proposed in 1994 by Nick Szabo as a way of merging e-commerce and contract law using computer protocols that eliminated the need for human intervention. Fast-forward to 2018, and the arrival of ERC-721 on the Ethereum blockchain made possible a unique digital certificate of ownership for a virtual object.

Since digital objects can be posted and reposted, shared and right-click-saved online, the advent of ERC-721 revolutionized the potential of digital art to participate in the art world’s market of scarcity, with the smart contract specifying the sale terms. Blockchain’s record-keeping has also presented a way to publicly disclose a work’s ownership and transaction history. By extension, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have presented a radical opportunity, but the technology is not fail-proof and frequently reintroduces the need for social and legal contracts, which is precisely what the artist Nancy Baker Cahill showed in her work Contract Killers (2021).

Blockchain’s New Contract

Contract Killers is an augmented-reality work that shows the disintegration of a handshake in front of three symbolic institutions: City Hall in Los Angeles, to represent the failures of civic agreements; the city’s Hall of Justice, to acknowledge judicial miscarriages; and a pile of money, to indicate the “gross inequities of late-stage capitalism.” A fourth hot-pink handshake in front of a gray wall represents the breakdown of social contracts.

The project uses blockchain not only to sell the individual works as NFTs but also to address the rhetoric about disintermediation and transparency surrounding the technology. Accompanying her own smart contract, Baker Cahill included a legal agreement ”intended to be readable and understandable by non-lawyer, NFT purchasers, so that there is no confusion as to intent, application, and scope of the terms.” This is just one of the ways Baker Cahill’s Contract Killers seeks to inject equity and openness into the opaque art market.

Blockchain’s claims to transparency are obviated by the fact that many NFT collectors can’t read code any more than they can understand a legal contract. To be clear: Smart contracts are neither smart nor contracts. They are neither as clearly automated as the word “smart” would suggest, nor are they legally binding contracts. For example, when an NFT is sold on a different platform than the one where it was minted, the automatic royalty doesn’t necessarily work. The claim that “code is law” is common in the blockchain; though it has been espoused since software became common at the turn of the century, the court cases that will determine to what degree that applies are just now emerging.

Though artists, collectors and dealers all want to cultivate trust and a sense of stewardship, articulating precise expectations around what stewardship entails has been rare. Blockchain smart contracts address the power imbalance where artists are expected to accept contracts, not produce them. Patrons in 15th-century Florence produced contracts stating in precise terms what they were funding; even the eccentric English surrealist Edward James had contractual agreements with the artists he supported, like René Magritte and Salvador Dalí.

Now, as artists design a smart contract, they are in a position to stipulate their own expectations, such as a percentage of future sales or a resale timeline. In so doing, they can circumvent the speculative transaction of “flipping,” where a work is bought and typically resold for profit at auction, spiking an artist’s market value in the short term and crippling their long-term growth. Still, smart contracts are dependent on social agreements.

And Baker Cahill’s point is that social dynamics cannot be coded. Blockchain’s premise of a trustless system dangerously ignores the ongoing realities of social relations that are integral to the art market. People buy art as an investment but also because they like it. Collectors frequently want to follow and engage the artist. Such relationships can be supported by legal agreements, but those depend on trust in society and its systems. Contract Killers cleverly uses blockchain to halt overexcited solutionism and insist on repairing our current systems, too.

A Matter of Trust

An artwork’s provenance is partly established by verifying that it came from the artist’s studio or was handled by the artist. Verified provenance not only authenticates an artwork by establishing a historical record of past owners, but increases the work’s value by ensuring authenticity through a careful legacy. As the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) says in their Provenance Guide: “The object itself is the most important primary resource and a valuable source of provenance information.” Blockchain’s record of every transaction provides a provenance history, but how can that be ensured when the smart contract comes from the platform? How can the blockchain record be tied to a physical artifact?

The sculptor Hamzat Raheem has an answer. He deployed his own smart contract so that the NFTs he created could act as certificates of title clearly originating from him, just as his marble and plaster sculptures come from his studio, thereby ensuring a clear provenance. He tackles the matter in his project Creative Archaeology (2022), where collectors dig in soil to find one of his sculptures. These are embedded with a near-field communication (NFC) chip. When scanned on a mobile device, the chip activates a private webpage where the finder communicates their wallet address to the artist. Raheem can then send the smart contract that acts as the Certificate of Authenticated Title, developed with intellectual property and arts lawyer Megan Noh. The contract declares that the physical sculpture and certificate, represented by the NFT, must remain united. Transferring one without including the other mutilates the work, according to the contract.

Baker Cahill, Raheem and many other artists are using blockchain and smart contracts to inscribe a new set of social values around collecting art while including legacy practices like legal contracts to support their effort. The royalty approach itself is less important than establishing a relationship of mutual care between artist and collector. And the visual artifact becomes the object representing the importance of that trusting connection.

Media art is often celebrated for its interactivity, and these experimentations with smart contracts reveal blockchain’s ability to alter social relations. Since smart contracts are about encoding events between two parties, these artists push beyond the prescribed contracts of established platforms to explore the potential this technology offers for real social change.

Some galleries have been supportive of the creative prospects inherent to NFTs, especially those representing digital artists. For example, Bitforms Gallery and Postmasters worked with the white-label platform Monegraph to create their own NFT platforms with modifiable smart contracts. The gallerist Magda Sawon of Postmasters has been selling groundbreaking media art as well as physical works for 38 years, and she has recognized that artists are mobilizing blockchain for their creative practice. She and her partner launched PostmastersBC to support artists and collectors, who unlike Raheem may still be new to the technology and need support. The gallery educates the community on blockchain technology as a part of any creative or collecting endeavor.Many in the NFT space have disparaged galleries and curators as gatekeeping intermediaries in sale transactions, but gallerists argue that NFT platforms also charge commissions and “provide spectacularly limited service in maintenance of artwork and career management,” as Sawon decried in an emailed statement. Without that support, artists must marshal their own trajectory while remaining at the mercy of platform protocols.

When a group of crypto artists insisted in 2020 that NFT platforms establish and normalize 10% royalties on resales, the technology’s automation made it an easy ask; though the debate resurfaced when the trading platform Sudoswap didn’t include resale royalties, leading to loud objections by artists who’d already fought this fight. Reflecting on the Contract Killers project a year later, amid the sparring around royalties, Baker Cahill said, “Even standard protocols like that require baseline social agreements. That presumes centralized thought, which is counter to the idolatry of decentralization in the NFT ecosystem.” As the technology develops and expands its reach, differing views around the role of consensus are sure to occur. The flexibility of smart contracts is their creative potential, but their mobilization across cultures will reveal cracks in current social contracts.

Beyond Resale Royalties

The future of blockchain is evolving alongside the artists pushing its boundaries, most notoriously surrounding resale royalties. While actors, writers, graphic designers, and even software engineers have royalty norms in their industries, visual artists have long been disregarded. Blockchain came along and made possible what social and legal efforts had not.

Now artists are presented with a panoply of alternative funding practices beyond royalties. As companies like Masterworks buy art and fractionalize ownership across investors, market regulations and tax obligations appear; Masterworks files paperwork with the SEC before selling shares, an example of how established regulations expand and adapt to new systems. Artists using blockchain have been exploring these avenues since the technology appeared, and they exemplify the most interesting opportunities for long-term profit sharing in an artist’s work.

Simon de la Rouviere’s This Artwork Is Always On Sale (2019) operates according to a novel tax concept, the Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax (COST) model. COST was conceived by Glen Weyl and Eric Posner in their book, Radical Markets (2018), as an alternative way to conceive of ownership while also enforcing a perpetual payment structure. De la Rouviere took this concept as an opportunity for digital artists to disrupt market practice. The owner of an object — the authors originally provided a case study in real estate — must always list their asking price, and the seller cannot refuse to sell at that price. The set price then becomes the basis for dividend disbursements overtime, which might be paid to an artist for a creative object. De la Rouviere minted and auctioned the conceptual work on March 21, 2019, with a patronage rate of 5%. A new version was created in 2020, and the artist has posted about how others can create their own version. Fractionalized ownership is receiving renewed interest as an opportunity for groups to pool funds and purchase costly goods, like high-end art. The artist Eve Sussman experimented with this formula in 89 Seconds Atomized (2018), a blockchain project based on her short film 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2004), itself inspired by Velásquez’s Las Meninas (1656).

Sussman produced 2,304 NFTs, each corresponding to an “atom” of the 10-minute media work. Though she retained 804 atoms, a full screening requires that all owners agree to contribute their atom at a specified time. Where Masterworks uses this model as an investment fund, artists can pool smaller collectors to support large-scale, or high-priced, projects.

In February 2015, the artist Sarah Meyohas launched Bitchcoin, another model for group support. In her white paper, she explains that each Bitchcoin represents a 5-by-5-inch segment of one of her works. In the original launch, that meant photographs from her Speculations series, which were placed in a bank vault. Possession of 25 Bitchcoins, for a total price of $2,500, provided control over the 625 square inches of one photograph. The owner could then choose to access the physical photograph, or redeem the value for a future print, thereby encouraging collectors to become long-term investors in Meyohas’s work. Predating the launch of Ethereum (and its ability to automate aspects of shared ownership) by five months, Bitchcoin was an early exploration of how artists could finance their practice. The project’s legacy status has contributed to widespread respect for Meyohas, with a new release of Bitchcoins auctioned at Phillips in 2021, fetching up to 10 times the original price per unit.

Bitchcoin represents an early form of what is now described as a social token. Particularly in the music and sports industries, social tokens enable celebrities to tap the support of their fans in order to distance themselves from the demands or limitations imposed by their representation. Creatives promise token owners access to certain events and opportunities, with the coin value increasing alongside the artist’s success. In visual art, these typically operate under the guise of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that can act as trusts, LLCs and community projects; in the United States, the state of Wyoming allowed DAOs to register as LLCs as of July 1, 2021. With all members contributing to a shared wallet, a DAO becomes self-governing and self-regulating, automating the administration of the group. The encoded rules regarding member votes can mechanize certain functions, such as bidding on an artwork. Most DAOs have very active chat rooms where members participate in vigorous debate about any given issue.

“As the career path of Jonas Lund improves and his market value increases, so does the value of a Jonas Lund Token, thus allowing shareholders to profit through dividends and potential sales of the tokens,” states the website of Jonas Lund Token (JLT). JLT is a DAO with 100,000 tokens distributed among parties with voting rights and shared responsibility for the projects that Jonas Lund produces. An advisory board’s vested interest in the artist’s success provides strategy guidance, but all potential projects are presented to token holders, who discuss and vote on what work Lund will produce.

Blockchain is a technology in progress, not a monolithic structure, and artists can exploit its flexibility to remind audiences of its manifold prospects. Blockchain and smart contracts aren’t just impacting the digital sphere, but the breadth of the entire art market. “The idea of smart contracts may be giving artists in the legacy art world confidence to demand the inclusion of resale limitation rights in IRL transactions of physical works,” wrote Yayoi Shionori, arts lawyer and representative for the Chris Burden estate, reflecting on the impact of this emergent technology.

Certainly blockchain offers an opportunity to ensure provenance and reassure owners of the origin and authenticity of the works they purchase. But confidence in one’s artistic value, and the tools to claim it as well? That gift to an artist is beyond measure.

Source: https://www.hugeinc.com/hugemoves/chasing-provenance/

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archiveofprolbems · 3 years ago

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On Damien Hirst’s ‘The Currency’ Referendum Part One by Julia Friedman & David Hawkes, November 2021

Damien Hirst, “The Currency,” 2016-2021, 7721. THAT LOW WIND BRINGS YOU SO MUCH STRESS. Detail. Enamel paint, handmade paper, watermark, microdot, hologram, pencil, 7 9/10 × 11 4/5 in (20 × 30 cm). Image: HENI.

Although crypto art is a relatively new phenomenon, the correlation between art and money has been a fashionable topic at least since the late 1930s when Clement Greenberg pointed out the avant-garde’s attachment to the market ‘by an umbilical cord of gold.’ Art and money are both systems of symbolic value, and their convergence seems a foregone conclusion in our age of the image. However, the union of art and money embodied by the NFTs is forced, and far from equal. The NFT does not blend aesthetic value and financial value into a harmonious alliance; it devours the first form of value to feed the second. Taken to its logical conclusion, an art market dominated by NFTs would be a predatory, Darwinian environment in which original works are hunted to physical destruction by their own financialized representations.

Perhaps that is what piqued the interest of the English artist Damien Hirst, whose work shows a long-standing fascination with predators and predation. Hirst came onto the scene as one of the YBAs in the early 90s, shocking the public with a sculpture of a shark preserved in formaldehyde. His latest and most ambitious project: 'The Currency' is a conceptual, participatory artwork that functions as a controlled experiment about choices, the foremost of which is between the aura of a physical work and the semiotic gravitas of a blockchain representation. This past July, he has offered 10,000 unique NFTs for sale at $2,000 each. Each NFT corresponds to a unique painting on handmade paper, numbered, titled, and signed. The buyers will have until 3pm BST on July 27, 2022 to decide whether they want to keep the NFT or exchange it for the material painting. If they choose the original, the NFT is erased. If they choose the NFT, the painting will be publicly destroyed by the Damien Hirst Studio, following a farewell showing of the doomed works.

Damien Hirst, Instagram, July 22, 2021.

Hirst insists that ‘The Currency’ is a democratic (albeit within an arbitrarily circumscribed demos) and open experiment to test the persistent notion that money and art are interchangeable. This notion has been on the artist’s mind at least since the start of his career. Now he is investigating it, enabled by new technology whose disruptive potential in the art ecosystem recalls Dada’s challenge to the physical conception of art a century earlier. But the new paradigm shift takes place in a new environment, against the background of a fully consumer-oriented society, in which consumerism has been firmly incorporated into art by Andy Warhol, who provided his collectors with their preferred colors in Marilyn Monroe silkscreens, and their preferred flavors of Campbell soup.

With brilliant simplicity ‘The Currency’ condenses a hundred and fifty years of art historical arguments over whether art should be ‘messy’ or ‘clean,’ as well as the relationship between art and money, the roles of ownership and collecting, and many other weighty issues into a single referendum—an art-world version of Brexit. The choice will not be made on aesthetic grounds alone. Considerable monetary motivation is involved, since the NFT is likely to acquire value more rapidly than the original, and so the project will also test whether people value art more than money. Hirst’s experiment should help to determine if a realm of aesthetic experience can be separated from financial value, or whether art and money are at last identical.

Are they? Hirst seems to hint that they are. Each physical painting is carefully protected from counterfeiting, not only by being numbered and titled, but also stamped with a bespoke watermark logo, a microdot, and a hologram, just like paper money. A video of a dialogue between Hirst and Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England, reveals a surprising degree of agreement between the artist and the economist as to the close relation between their respective spheres. Hirst and Carney concur that money is magic, and that financial value is produced by ‘alchemy.’ They both think of money as an autonomous, self-reproducing sign.

Damien Hirst, Instagram, July 16, 2021.

Carney cites Karl Marx as saying that money ‘represents infinite wants,’ which is exactly what one would expect Carney himself to believe: value is produced by desire. But Marx actually said that money represents labor-power. Like Carney, Hirst seems to miss this point, which is strange given that he also quotes the late anthropologist David Graeber. Graeber explored the concept of ‘labor-power’ in depth, showing that it means ‘the human capacity for action,’ or human subjective activity considered in the abstract. The ethical problem with money’s independent power lies in the fact that it is an objectified representation of human life itself.

This ethical critique is absent from Hirst’s project. He lacks a labor theory of value in either economics or aesthetics. He complained to Stephen Fry that prospective buyers often question him about the value of the materials in his diamond-encrusted skull (‘For the Love of God’, 2007), whereas they would never raise the same question regarding the Mona Lisa. Hirst is oblivious to the idea that a work’s value might derive from the quality (or indeed the quantity) of artistic labor involved in its production. And like Carney, he accepts the neoclassical theory that financial value is derived from market forces, and that it represents alienated subjective experiences like ‘confidence’ and ‘trust.’

The theory of value espoused in ‘The Currency’ contrasts sharply with the one expressed in Marcel Duchamp’s ‘assisted readymade’ sculptures. These early works consisted of a manufactured component customized by the artist. The 1914 Bicycle Wheel was a kitchen stool with an overturned bicycle wheel attached to it, thus raising the question of exactly whose labor went into the work. Hirst’s project is an ‘assisted readymade’ in reverse. Its departure point is analogue, but it is actualized via technology: the hand-made paintings have been digitized and analyzed, to provide the potential collectors with high resolution image files and information to place individual works within the series. The irony of ‘The Currency’ is that the physical artwork is threatened by its own NFT—a technology—while its only path to self-preservation also runs through technology. The poison is also the antidote.

While ‘The Currency’ is ostensibly based on free choice, the collectors are limited by the manner of distribution imposed on them by the artist. The work can only be acquired via an application process open for a period of one week. This system was set up to avoid hoarding, and to preserve the authenticity of the referendum by maximizing the number of ‘voters.’ The alternative ‘first come, first served’ model would have favored the most interested buyers, those poised to apply as soon as the subscription was released. This method of ‘allocation’ is closer to an equitable distribution. Each successful applicant is allotted a specific, but randomly chosen work or works. But that is where the randomness ends.

Once revealed to the lucky applicants (demand exceeded supply six-fold), the artworks are allowed to establish their uniqueness. As they receive their high-resolution image, the collectors learn the title of the work. These are AI generated from Hirst’s favorite song lyrics. The title and a set of other unique characteristics including overlaps, drips, texture, density, and weight determine the placement of the work in the series. Each of these categories is ranked by a machine learning algorithm and contextualized within the entire body of work. Similar analysis is made of each piece’s color palette, title, and even the title’s word count (they range between one and eleven words). The collector can see the number and title penciled in on the recto, along with Hirst’s signature, the watermark, the hologram, and the dot. The recto also reveals the degree of bleed, which is not consistent across colors. At this point, the fact the works are not an edition of an image that repeats 10,000 times, but rather a series of unique small-format (20cm x 30cm) paintings becomes impossible to ignore.

Each of the 10,000 works is available for examination online, and collectors are encouraged to ‘compare the rarities in [the] gallery.’ This suggestion to look closely at individual works, and to contextualize them in relation to each other, is a foray into the art historical concept of the ‘series,’ perhaps best known from the work of Monet. Monet’s paintings of his favored motifs—haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, poplar alleys—have a twofold function. They are autonomous, self-contained images, but they are also fragments of the artist’s extended perception of the same motif.

Damien Hirst, “The Currency,” HENI, gallery. Image: HENI.

By urging the viewers to ‘compare rarities in the gallery,’ Hirst revisits the tradition of the ‘series,’ whereby each work is constructed by its context within the whole. He essentially tricks the collectors into very close looking, requiring minute examination of digitized paintings. The technical ability to zoom in to a degree far exceeding he capacity of the naked (or bespectacled) eye takes focus to levels unavailable to connoisseurs of Claude Monet’s work—even those few who were lucky enough to see the entire series at his dealer’s gallery before the individual paintings were sold off and forever separated. And because it is digitized, and 'The Currency' will remain an intact series in perpetuity, regardless of the fate of the individual works.

As Hirst explains in his July 16th interview with Cointelegraph, some initial ambiguity over the uniqueness of individual works was baked into the project from the outset. The aim was to level the playing field for art and money, by removing the “X” factor of the aura. But as soon as the originality of the paintings is established both visually (through zooming in), and statistically (through the information generated by the machine learning algorithm), the objects assert themselves as unique. An alchemical reaction has taken place, and it cannot be reversed.

At this point, the collectors encounter their first true choice: to bond or not to bond with that specific artwork, still only visible to them on the backlit screen, but with the pending promise of an actual, physical encounter. That is, if they ‘swipe right’ and choose the actual painting. What will determine that choice? Sentiment or Luddism will doubtless encourage some collectors to go for the physical paintings. Conversely, those who see no difference between paintings and their encryptions in the blockchain will probably elect to keep their NFTs, and the corresponding paintings will be destroyed. With gleeful perversity, Hirst plans to exhibit the paintings that were not ‘traded’ for their NFTs before they are destroyed, giving the owners a last chance to commune with them, and time for the implications of their destruction to sink in—rather like those seafood restaurants that let customers select their dinner from a tank of live fish.

What makes the project especially intriguing, is that while Hirst’s experiment tackles such hefty moral issues as trust and greed, the vote is not a straightforward ethical choice—it is as much about aesthetics. In the discussions of Western art over the past hundred and fifty years tastes have been divided between those who prefer ‘messy’ art that incorporates chance, painterly gesture and the subconscious, and supporters of ‘clean’ art that is restricted and refined to effect minimalistic visual outcomes. Such movements as Impressionism, Fauvism, Abstract Expressionism, Painterly Abstraction and Art Informel favored the ‘messy’ school, while Geometric Abstraction, Minimalism, Op-Art and Hard-Edge Abstraction tended towards the ‘clean.’

Damien Hirst, “The Currency,” Above: Overlaps. Below: Density. Image: HENI.

One of the benefits of ‘The Currency’ project will be a vote on this issue. Although they may look similar at first glance, upon AI examination aided by high resolution optics each of Hirst’s 10,000 dot paintings falls somewhere along the historical spectrum of messy-to-clean. And it is the personal preference of the collector regarding such factors as the density of the marks, their overlap, the texture of the paint, its bleed through hand-made paper, the presence or absence of drips, that determine whether a given painting can save itself from destruction by producing a taste-based emotional attachment in the collector.

We are now in the second phase of the project—the redemption—when the owners of NFT tenders can exchange them for physical art. Once the painting is collected (in person, or via a shipping courier), its NFT is destroyed. This process cannot be reversed. We will not know how the experiment ends until late July 2022, but by looking at the exchange and sales information three and a half months after the allocation, we can see that the vast range of secondary market prices (anywhere between $3,700 and $175,371) is driven by the unique characteristics of the works as they were digitally conveyed to the collectors. The discrepancy in resale price betrays individual collectors’ preferences for clean or messy, more-or-less marked edges, long or short titles, and even for certain words. Therefore, although this project is made possible by new technology, its fate will be determined by the irreducibly, inimitably human factor of taste making ‘The Currency’ referendum only the latest iteration of an old dispute. WM __________________________

Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian, writer and curator. After receiving her Ph.D. in Art History from Brown University in 2005, she has researched and taught in the US, UK and Japan. Her work appeared in Artforum, The New Criterion, Quillette and Atheneum Review. www.juliafriedman.org

David Hawkes is Professor of English Literature at Arizona State University. His work has appeared in The Nation, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Criterion, In These Times and numerous scholarly journals. He is the author of seven books, most recently The Reign of Anti-logos: Performance in Postmodernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Source: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/-currency-referendum/5209

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archiveofprolbems · 3 years ago

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On Damien Hirst’s ‘The Currency’ Referendum Part Two by By Julia Friedman & David Hawkes, August 2022

The result of ‘The Currency’ vote is in: 5,149 paintings to 4,851 NFTs. The majority of NFT holders opted to exchange their non-fungible tokens for authentic, original, material paintings, and artworld commentators showed restrained elation. Even the Discord discussion board, on which participants in the project reveal the motives behind their choices, is full of testimonials fetishizing the artworks’ materiality. A typical exclamation is: ‘Am so excited I can’t wait to see and smell the paint.’

While it is tempting to read the result as a definitive endorsement of the Benjaminian ‘aura’, it was hardly a ‘resounding preference for traditional art’ as Artnet’s Caroline Goldstein optimistically claims. Until the last few hours before the deadline, the NFTs were in the lead—662 votes against them were cast on the very last day. Was it peer pressure that shifted the balance, causing the eleventh-hour flip in favor of physical paintings? Or was it a visceral recoil against the idea of annihilating unique works of art? The precedents of ‘BurntBanksy,’ and other experiments in which artworks were destroyed in order to increase the value of the correlating NFTs, resulted in public condemnation of this blatant preference for money over aesthetics. Those who purchased ‘The Currency’ were not immune to veneration of the aura; their collective decision was not made on financial grounds alone. This follows from the fact that while NFTs in general lost a great deal of value by June of 2022, this did not produce a wave of selling among the holders of ‘The Currency.’ Hirst’s NFTs sustained a stable marketplace unaffected by fluctuations in the value of other non-fungible tokens. The true value of these works must therefore reside elsewhere, beyond the reach of digital trends.

Much like the Brexit referendum to which Hirst’s project alludes, his poll seems to raise more questions than it answers. The intriguing provocation of ‘The Currency’ lies in its suggestion that art and money could be one. The pricing of the paintings becomes part of the artwork: NFTs originally sold for $2,000 each are now placed for resale on Heni for anywhere between $8,000 and $200,000, with one offered up for an irrational $30,000,000. This disparity echoes Yves Klein’s 1957 “Monochrome Propositions. Blue Period” exhibition in Milan, where Klein presented eleven ostensibly identical paintings for sale at different prices that were supposed to correspond to the subjective significance they held for the individual buyer. The holders of Hirst’s ‘currency’ similarly translate the monetary value of the NFTs into the experience of participating in the project. As one buyer commented on the Discord message-board:

"I have never been about stuff or financial returns on this…. To me this is about being part of a huge project that has been created by one of the biggest living artists. That alone is enough for me. The exhibition and all the other stuff, that in itself is absolutely huge to me. I will never forget these experiences."

Ostensibly, the question posited by ‘The Currency’ is whether the artworld is driven by financial or aesthetic considerations. However, participants and observers alike seem to be undermining the principle of that question by finding aesthetic pleasure in financial transactions. In postmodernity, everything can be translated into financial terms—personal relationships quite as much as aesthetic experiences. Advocates of NFTs often refer to themselves as a ‘community,’ not just out of sentiment, but from a hard-headed calculation that a sense of community also has financial value. The purchasers of ‘The Currency’ create its social value as well as its commercial worth. This is among the project’s main selling-points. As Hirst puts it: ‘The whole project is an artwork, and anyone who buys ‘The Currency’ will participate in this work.’

Screenshot of the Marketplace on Heni with NFTs at highest prices.

Therefore, although a slim majority of Hirst’s buyers chose to retain their paintings and destroy their NFTs, this cannot be taken to indicate that they value art over money. Perhaps they prefer physical art to the disembodied kind. But physical art has long ceased to refer to the real world. The rise of modernism produced a dramatic efflorescence of ever-more abstract art, ultimately arriving at pure conceptualism. At the same time, financial value departed the physical body of bullion, and even banknotes, finally manifesting itself in the entirely imaginary form of ‘derivatives.’ Art and money have both been moving towards abstraction since the late nineteenth century. Hirst’s project suggests that abstraction facilitates the union of art and money which become indistinguishable to the degree that they become immaterial. Another word for ‘immaterial’ is ‘spiritual,’ and the discussion on the Discord board often takes a quasi-theological tone:

"I think traditional art is weighed more about the art and slightly less about money. NFTs seem (in the majority) to flip that. I think that's what makes me uncomfortable and opens the door to a lot of demons for people."

The ethical problem exposed by Hirst’s project is not that people prefer money to art. It is that art and money become the same thing if treated interchangeably. The second phase of ‘The Currency’—the ‘redemption,’ in which the owners of NFTs could exchange their inscription on the blockchain for physical Tenders—was presented as performative, even ritualistic, and it drove this point home.

Here is how the process transpired. Having accessed the MetaMask digital wallet, where the allocated NFTs were stored, the owners were asked to ‘select […] NFTs you would like to exchange for the physical artwork.’ After choosing the work, and paying shipping costs, the owner was informed, in bold font: ‘In order the finalize the exchange process, you need to burn your NFT(s). If you do not do this, your artwork(s) will not be sent.’ Underneath was a window to check, along with an accompanying statement of consent: ‘I understand that burning my NFT(s) permanently destroys my NFT(s) and cannot be undone.’ Below that a button inscribed ‘Burn Using MetaMask’ promised to initiate the process with a single click. The following screen ‘BURNING NFT(S)’ confirmed that the process was under way.

Hirst clearly aimed to emphasize the irreversibility of the choice to burn digital tokens. Yet burning an NFT is never truly, literally destructive. It is just a commonly used turn of phrase. The project’s originality was the initial Sophie’s Choice, which stipulated that selecting one iteration of the image would automatically condemn the other to annihilation. While the owner is asked to ‘burn’ whichever iteration is rejected, the action is metaphorical in the case of NFTs, but undeniably, irrevocably physical in the case of the paintings. There is no fire and smoke when NFTs are burned: they are ‘re-homed,’ sent to a null address and thus made unusable. In dramatic contrast, the paintings condemned for destruction will first be placed on view at London’s Newport Street Gallery in early September, and then burned, as part of an exhibition, at a specified time of each day. The exhibition will culminate in a massive conflagration, in which the remaining artworks will meet a fiery end, as their creator looks on.

In a perfect poetic happenstance, the very last NFT (#8272) exchanged for a painting just before the deadline of 3:00 GMT on July 27, 2022, was titled “They fought for what they had.” It is as if the 10,000 physical paintings produced in 2016, four years before the NFT project was launched, struggled for their own survival like living creatures. Rather sadistically, Hirst made sure that ‘saving’ the physical paintings required taking action, since doing nothing would result in a default retention of the NFT(s). Doing nothing also constituted effective consent to the destruction of the NFT’s tangible equivalent, the painting. And this destruction is no discrete deletion at an uncertain time and place, but a spectacular extinction by public burning. Moreover, these executions are cruelly extended over a lengthy period, and the witnessing public will be implicated in the act.

The parallels with the public executions of yore are surely deliberate, and deliberately uncomfortable. Half a millennium ago, Savonarola’s Florence blazed with ‘bonfires of the vanities’ in which sinful art, books and commodities were burnt in public squares. By all accounts they were impressive events: iconoclasm has its own aesthetic. And in the 1930s the Nazis after exhibiting ‘degenerate art’ in Munich, incinerated it in the courtyard of the ‘Old Fire Station’ in Berlin. Ironically, while it was supposed to show the evils of modernism, the infamous Munich exhibition turned out to be the first 20th century blockbuster, with over two million attendees. ‘The Currency’ provocatively alludes to such precedents, unavoidably connecting the participants to the culling of 4,851 original artworks. This is not a decision to be made lightly.

Last second of the exchange period, screenshot.

Hirst’s own choice was to retain the 1,000 NFTs that belong to him personally. In an Instagram post following the announcement of the results, he presented his decision as both flippant and agonizing:

"I have been all over the fucking shop with my decision making…. I believe in art and art in all its forms but in the end I thought fuck it! this zone is so fucking exiting and the one I know least about and I love this NFT community it blows my mind…. I’m amazed at how this community breeds support and seems to care about shit so in the end I decided I have to keep all my 1000 currency as NFTs otherwise it wouldn’t carry on being a proper adventure for me and so I decided I need to show my 100 percent support and confidence in the NFT world (even though it means I will have to destroy the corresponding 1000 physical artworks). Eeeeeeeek! I still don’t know what I’m doing and I have no idea what the future holds, whether the NFTs or physicals are going to be more valuable or less. But that is art! The fun, part of the journey and maybe the point of the whole project. Even after one year, I feel the journey is just beginning. I have already learnt so much and it’s only been a year and I am so proud to have created something alive, something mad and provocative and been a passenger (along with all the other participants in the currency) and to help build a fantastic community on @heni. Long may it last and I can’t wait for the next twists and turns."

Hirst’s exuberant, rambling monologue describes his vacillation between paintings and NFTs, before exploding in the punk ‘fuck it!’ The artist’s choice is not coldly financial; as he explains, it reflects his support of the NFT community. Moreover, the very number of 10,000 NFTs/paintings that comprise this project is presumably a reference to the pioneering NFT known as ‘CryptoPunks,’ which consists of 10,000 unique collectable characters. Now CryptoPunks price had plunged, and the conversation around them fading, while ‘The Currency’ is not only healthy in terms of valuation, but continues to generate considerable interest. Perhaps Hirst’s vote for the NFTs is also a gracious gesture of a victor displaying his good sportsmanship.

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When digital NFTs first appeared in the artworld, it was frequently suggested that they threatened the existence of the objects they represented. ‘The Currency’ tested this hypothesis, creating a controlled experiment in which people had to make an irreversible choice between NFTs and physical art. As the experiment unfolded, however, the threat of annihilation hovering over the physical artworks seems to have reasserted the value of the ‘aura’—the unique, irreplicable significance possessed by original artworks. By bluntly stressing the process of extermination, Hirst once again directs our attention to the physical possibility of death. While he seems somewhat dismayed at the prospect of destroying his own work, Hirst understands that the destruction of art is itself a form of art. He claims to have created ‘something alive, something mad and provocative’ and excitedly anticipates future adventures: ‘I can’t wait for the next twists and turns.’ Like his canonical formaldehyde shark entitled ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,’ Hirst’s NFT project uses death to locate life. ‘The Currency’ is a memento mori, intended to help us appreciate life. Or is it? A more cynical reading of this project might concur with Leo Tolstoy that an awareness of death actually undermines the meaning of life. Either way, Hirst’s experiment will not end with the planned incinerations. The union of art and money contains possibilities, and dangers, that will continue to inform aesthetics and economics as long as those categories have meaning. WM

__________________________

Source: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/s-currency-referendum-part-two/5495

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archiveofprolbems · 3 years ago

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From An Interview with David Hammons

1. I CAN'T STAND ART ACTUALLY. I'VE NEVER, EVER LIKED ART, EVER. I NEVER TOOK IT IN SCHOOL. 2. WHEN I WAS IN CALIFORNIA, ARTISTS WOULD WORK FOR YEARS AND NEVER HAVE A SHOW. SO SHOWING HAS NEVER BEEN THAT IMPORTANT TO ME. WE USED TO CUSS PEOPLE OUT: PEOPLE WHO BOUGHT OUR WORK, DEALERS, ETC., BECAUSE THAT PART OF BEING AN ARTIST WAS ALWAYS A JOKE TO US. WHEN I CAME TO NEW YORK, I DIDN'T SEE ANY OF THAT. EVERYBODY WAS JUST GROVELING AND TOMMING, ANYTHING TO BE IN THE ROOM WITH SOMEBODY WITH SOME MONEY. THERE WERE NO BAD GUYS HERE; SO I SAID, "LET ME BE A BAD GUY," OR ATTEMPT TO BE A BAD GUY, OR PLAY WITH THE BAD AREAS AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS. 3. I WAS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHY BLACK PEOPLE WERE CALLED SPADES, AS OPPOSED TO CLUBS. BECAUSE I REMEMBER BEING CALLED A SPADE ONCE, AND I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT IT MEANT; NIGGER I KNEW BUT SPADE I STILL DON'T. SO I TOOK THE SHAPE, AND STARTED PAINTING IT. 4. I JUST LOVE THE HOUSES IN THE SOUTH, THE WAY THEY BUILT THEM. THAT NEGRITUDE ARCHITECTURE. I REALLY LOVE TO WATCH THE WAY BLACK PEOPLE MAKE THINGS, HOUSES OR MAGAZINE STANDS IN HARLEM, FOR INSTANCE. JUST THE WAY WE USE CARPENTRY. NOTHING FITS, BUT EVERYTHING WORKS. THE DOOR CLOSES, IT KEEPS THINGS FROM COMING THROUGH. BUT IT DOESN'T HAVE THAT NEATNESS ABOUT IT, THE WAY WHITE PEOPLE PUT THINGS TOGETHER; EVERYTHING IS A THIRTY-SECOND OF AN INCH OFF. 5. THAT'S WHY I LIKE DOING STUFF BETTER ON THE STREET, BECAUSE THE ART BECOMES JUST ONE OF THE OBJECTS THAT'S IN THE PATH OF YOUR EVERYDAY EXISTENCE. IT'S WHAT YOU MOVE THROUGH, AND IT DOESN'T HAVE ANY SENIORITY OVER ANYTHING ELSE. THOSE PIECES WERE ALL ABOUT MAKING SURE THAT THE BLACK VIEWER HAD A REFLECTION OF HIMSELF IN THE WORK. WHITE VIEWERS HAVE TO LOOK AT SOMEONE ELSE'S CULTURE IN THOSE PIECES AND SEE VERY LITTLE OF THEMSELVES IN IT. 6. ANYONE WHO DECIDES TO BE AN ARTIST SHOULD REALIZE THAT IT'S A POVERTY TRIP. TO GO INTO THIS PROFESSION IS LIKE GOING INTO THE MONASTERY OR SOMETHING; IT'S A VOW OF POVERTY I ALWAYS THOUGHT. TO BE AN ARTIST AND NOT EVEN TO DEAL WITH THAT POVERTY THING, THAT'S A WASTE OF TIME; OR TO BE AROUND PEOPLE COMPLAINING ABOUT THAT. MY KEY IS TO TAKE AS MUCH MONEY HOME AS POSSIBLE. ABANDON ANY ART FORM THAT COSTS TOO MUCH. INSIST THAT IT'S AS CHEAP AS POSSIBLE IS NUMBER ONE AND ALSO THAT IT'S AESTHETICALLY CORRECT. AFTER THAT ANYTHING GOES. AND THAT KEEPS EVERYTHING INTERESTING FOR ME. 7. I DON'T KNOW WHAT MY WORK IS. I HAVE TO WAIT TO HEAR THAT FROM SOMEONE. I WOULD LIKE TO BURN THE PIECE. I THINK THAT WOULD BE NICE VISUALLY. VIDEOTAPE THE BURNING OF IT. AND SHOOT SOME SLIDES. THE SLIDES WOULD THEN BE A PIECE IN ITSELF. I'M GETTING INTO THAT NOW: THE SLIDES ARE THE ART PIECES AND THE ART PIECES DON'T EXIST. 8. IF YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE THEN IT'S EASY TO MAKE ART. MOST PEOPLE ARE REALLY CONCERNED ABOUT THEIR IMAGE. ARTISTS HAVE ALLOWED THEMSELVES TO BE BOXED IN BY SAYING "YES" ALL THE TIME BECAUSE THEY WANT TO BE SEEN, AND THEY SHOULD BE SAYING "NO." I DO MY STREET ART MAINLY TO KEEP ROOTED IN THAT "WHO I AM." BECAUSE THE ONLY THING THAT'S REALLY GOING ON IS IN THE STREET; THAT'S WHERE SOMETHING IS REALLY HAPPENING. IT ISN'T HAPPENING IN THESE GALLERIES. 9. DOING THINGS IN THE STREET IS MORE POWERFUL THAN ART I THINK. BECAUSE ART HAS GOTTEN SO....I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK ART IS ABOUT NOW. IT DOESN'T DO ANYTHING. LIKE MALCOLM X SAID, IT'S LIKE NOVOCAINE. IT USED TO WAKE YOU UP BUT NOW IT PUTS YOU TO SLEEP. I THINK THAT ART NOW IS PUTTING PEOPLE TO SLEEP. THERE'S SO MUCH OF IT AROUND IN THIS TOWN THAT IT DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING. THAT'S WHY THE ARTIST HAS TO BE VERY CAREFUL WHAT HE SHOWS AND WHEN HE SHOWS NOW. BECAUSE THE PEOPLE AREN'T REALLY LOOKING AT ART, THEY'RE LOOKING AT EACH OTHER AND EACH OTHER'S CLOTHES AND EACH OTHER'S HAIRCUTS. 10. THE ART AUDIENCE IS THE WORST AUDIENCE IN THE WORLD. IT'S OVERLY EDUCATED, IT'S CONSERVATIVE, IT'S OUT TO CRITICIZE NOT TO UNDERSTAND, AND IT NEVER HAS ANY FUN. WHY SHOULD I SPEND MY TIME PLAYING TO THAT AUDIENCE? DAVID HAMMONS 1986

Source: https://stuartmiddleton.blogspot.com/2014/12/from-interview-with-david-hammons-1.html

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archiveofprolbems · 3 years ago

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The AI that creates any picture you want

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Beginning in January 2021, advances in AI research have produced a plethora of deep-learning models capable of generating original images from simple text prompts, effectively extending the human imagination. Researchers at OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and others have developed text-to-image tools that they have not yet released to the public, and similar models have proliferated online in the open-source arena and at smaller companies like Midjourney.

These tools represent a massive cultural shift because they remove the requirement for technical labor from the process of image-making. Instead, they select for creative ideation, skillful use of language, and curatorial taste. The ultimate consequences are difficult to predict, but — like the invention of the camera, and the digital camera thereafter — these algorithms herald a new, democratized form of expression that will commence another explosion in the volume of imagery produced by humans. But, like other automated systems trained on historical data and internet images, they also come with risks that have not been resolved.

The video above is a primer on how we got here, how this technology works, and some of the implications. And for an extended discussion about what this means for human artists, designers, and illustrators, check out this bonus video: https://youtu.be/sFBfrZ-N3G4

Midjourney: https://www.midjourney.com/

List of free AI Art tools: https://pharmapsychotic.com/tools.html

Sources:

https://medium.com/artists-and-machine-intelligence/a-journey-through-multiple-dimensions-and-transformations-in-space-the-final-frontier-d8435d81ca51

https://jxmo.notion.site/The-Weird-and-Wonderful-World-of-AI-Art-b9615a2e7278435b98380ff81ae1cf09

https://va2rosa.medium.com/copyright-storm-authorship-in-the-age-of-ai-baba554aa617

https://arnicas.substack.com/p/titaa-28-visual-poetry-humans-and?s=r

https://tedunderwood.com/2021/10/21/latent-spaces-of-culture/

https://ml.berkeley.edu/blog/posts/clip-art/

https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.02793

https://multimodal.art/

https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/

https://openai.com/blog/clip/

https://openai.com/dall-e-2/

https://laion.ai/laion-5b-a-new-era-of-open-large-scale-multi-modal-datasets/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01963

Source: https://youtu.be/SVcsDDABEkM

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archiveofprolbems · 3 years ago

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WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID. It’s not just a phase. By Jonathan Haidt Illustrations by Nicolás Ortega

Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: "Turris Babel," Coenraet Decker, 1679.

What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said:

Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.

The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?

The Rise of the Modern Tower

there is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales. We see this trend in biological evolution, in the series of “major transitions” through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships. We see it in cultural evolution too, as Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions, driven by rising population density plus new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress. (Those wars of religion, he argued, made possible the transition to modern nation-states with better-informed citizens.) President Bill Clinton praised Nonzero’s optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future thanks to continued technological advance.

The early internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms, message boards, and email, exemplified the Nonzero thesis, as did the first wave of social-media platforms, which launched around 2003. Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable. By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform, with more than 100 million monthly users, on its way to roughly 3 billion today. In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?

The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement. That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel. We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,” and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by language. For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.

In February 2012, as he prepared to take Facebook public, Mark Zuckerberg reflected on those extraordinary times and set forth his plans. “Today, our society has reached another tipping point,” he wrote in a letter to investors. Facebook hoped “to rewire the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to share,” it would help them to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”

In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point. It has not worked out as he expected.

Things Fall Apart

historically, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow. But what is it that holds together large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States and India, or, for that matter, modern Britain and France?

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009.

In their early incarnations, platforms such as Myspace and Facebook were relatively harmless. They allowed users to create pages on which to post photos, family updates, and links to the mostly static pages of their friends and favorite bands. In this way, early social media can be seen as just another step in the long progression of technological improvements—from the Postal Service through the telephone to email and texting—that helped people achieve the eternal goal of maintaining their social ties.

But gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.

Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.

Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.

Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.

Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: Belshazzar’s Feast, John Martin, 1820.

By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.

It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.

The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare. Many authors quote his comments in “Federalist No. 10” on the innate human proclivity toward “faction,” by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with “mutual animosity” that they are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”

But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”

Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? How about Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird for tweeting about getting his COVID vaccine?

It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust. An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires, but a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side. The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).

Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. A working paper that offers the most comprehensive review of the research, led by the social scientists Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, concludes that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.

When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children. History curricula have often caused political controversy, but Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country. The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further. One result is that young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.

The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached. He noted that distributed networks “can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” He described the nihilism of the many protest movements of 2011 that organized mostly online and that, like Occupy Wall Street, demanded the destruction of existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or an organization that could bring it about.

Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. In a comment to Vox that recalls the first post-Babel diaspora, he said:

The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile. It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another.

Mark Zuckerberg may not have wished for any of that. But by rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth—with a naive conception of human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions, and no concern for external costs imposed on society—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.

I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening” on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right. Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.

The many analysts, including me, who had argued that Trump could not win the general election were relying on pre-Babel intuitions, which said that scandals such as the Access Hollywood tape (in which Trump boasted about committing sexual assault) are fatal to a presidential campaign. But after Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.

Politics After Babel

“politics is the art of the possible,” the German statesman Otto von Bismarck said in 1867. In a post-Babel democracy, not much may be possible.

Of course, the American culture war and the decline of cross-party cooperation predates social media’s arrival. The mid-20th century was a time of unusually low polarization in Congress, which began reverting back to historical levels in the 1970s and ’80s. The ideological distance between the two parties began increasing faster in the 1990s. Fox News and the 1994 “Republican Revolution” converted the GOP into a more combative party. For example, House Speaker Newt Gingrich discouraged new Republican members of Congress from moving their families to Washington, D.C., where they were likely to form social ties with Democrats and their families.

So cross-party relationships were already strained before 2009. But the enhanced virality of social media thereafter made it more hazardous to be seen fraternizing with the enemy or even failing to attack the enemy with sufficient vigor. On the right, the term RINO (Republican in Name Only) was superseded in 2015 by the more contemptuous term cuckservative, popularized on Twitter by Trump supporters. On the left, social media launched callout culture in the years after 2012, with transformative effects on university life and later on politics and culture throughout the English-speaking world.

What changed in the 2010s? Let’s revisit that Twitter engineer’s metaphor of handing a loaded gun to a 4-year-old. A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.

Social media has given voice to some people who had little previously, and it has made it easier to hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds, not just in politics but in business, the arts, academia, and elsewhere. Sexual harassers could have been called out in anonymous blog posts before Twitter, but it’s hard to imagine that the #MeToo movement would have been nearly so successful without the viral enhancement that the major platforms offered. However, the warped “accountability” of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways.

First, the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens. Research by the political scientists Alexander Bor and Michael Bang Petersen found that a small subset of people on social-media platforms are highly concerned with gaining status and are willing to use aggression to do so. They admit that in their online discussions they often curse, make fun of their opponents, and get blocked by other users or reported for inappropriate comments. Across eight studies, Bor and Petersen found that being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims. Even a small number of jerks were able to dominate discussion forums, Bor and Petersen found, because nonjerks are easily turned off from online discussions of politics. Additional research finds that women and Black people are harassed disproportionately, so the digital public square is less welcoming to their voices.

Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: Venus and Cupid, Pierre-Maximilien Delafontaine, by 1860.

Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority. The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.

These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society. What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes. This uniformity of opinion, the study’s authors speculate, is likely a result of thought-policing on social media: “Those who express sympathy for the views of opposing groups may experience backlash from their own cohort.” In other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team. In this way, social media makes a political system based on compromise grind to a halt.

Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process. Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West, with no accountability for vigilantes. A successful attack attracts a barrage of likes and follow-on strikes. Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences, including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide. When our public square is governed by mob dynamics unrestrained by due process, we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.

Structural Stupidity

since the tower fell, debates of all kinds have grown more and more confused. The most pervasive obstacle to good thinking is confirmation bias, which refers to the human tendency to search only for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs. Even before the advent of social media, search engines were supercharging confirmation bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theories, such as that the Earth is flat and that the U.S. government staged the 9/11 attacks. But social media made things much worse.

The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument. John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that,” and he urged us to seek out conflicting views “from persons who actually believe them.” People who think differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain. People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider, almost as if they are shooting darts into their own brain.

In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutions for generating knowledge from the interactions of biased and cognitively flawed individuals. English law developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both sides of a case to an impartial jury. Newspapers full of lies evolved into professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by fact-checking. Universities evolved from cloistered medieval institutions into research powerhouses, creating a structure in which scholars put forth evidence-backed claims with the knowledge that other scholars around the world would be motivated to gain prestige by finding contrary evidence.

Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history, linking together the world’s best universities, private companies that turned scientific advances into life-changing consumer products, and government agencies that supported scientific research and led the collaboration that put people on the moon.

But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.” So what happens when an institution is not well maintained and internal disagreement ceases, either because its people have become ideologically uniform or because they have become afraid to dissent?

This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (national, state, and local), and it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight. The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a drawn-out investigation by the institution. Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.

But when an institution punishes internal dissent, it shoots darts into its own brain.

The stupefying process plays out differently on the right and the left because their activist wings subscribe to different narratives with different sacred values. The “Hidden Tribes” study tells us that the “devoted conservatives” score highest on beliefs related to authoritarianism. They share a narrative in which America is eternally under threat from enemies outside and subversives within; they see life as a battle between patriots and traitors. According to the political scientist Karen Stenner, whose work the “Hidden Tribes” study drew upon, they are psychologically different from the larger group of “traditional conservatives” (19 percent of the population), who emphasize order, decorum, and slow rather than radical change.

Only within the devoted conservatives’ narratives do Donald Trump’s speeches make sense, from his campaign’s ominous opening diatribe about Mexican “rapists” to his warning on January 6, 2021: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

The traditional punishment for treason is death, hence the battle cry on January 6: “Hang Mike Pence.” Right-wing death threats, many delivered by anonymous accounts, are proving effective in cowing traditional conservatives, for example in driving out local election officials who failed to “stop the steal.” The wave of threats delivered to dissenting Republican members of Congress has similarly pushed many of the remaining moderates to quit or go silent, giving us a party ever more divorced from the conservative tradition, constitutional responsibility, and reality. We now have a Republican Party that describes a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol as “legitimate political discourse,” supported—or at least not contradicted—by an array of right-wing think tanks and media organizations.

The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress. “Pizzagate,” QAnon, the belief that vaccines contain microchips, the conviction that Donald Trump won reelection—it’s hard to imagine any of these ideas or belief systems reaching the levels that they have without Facebook and Twitter.

Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: Vanity, Nicolas Régnier, c. 1626.

The Democrats have also been hit hard by structural stupidity, though in a different way. In the Democratic Party, the struggle between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and ongoing, and often the moderates win. The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood, art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers’ unions and teaching colleges that shape K–12 education. And in many of those institutions, dissent has been stifled: When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.

Liberals in the late 20th century shared a belief that the sociologist Christian Smith called the “liberal progress” narrative, in which America used to be horrifically unjust and repressive, but, thanks to the struggles of activists and heroes, has made (and continues to make) progress toward realizing the noble promise of its founding. This story easily supports liberal patriotism, and it was the animating narrative of Barack Obama’s presidency. It is also the view of the “traditional liberals” in the “Hidden Tribes” study (11 percent of the population), who have strong humanitarian values, are older than average, and are largely the people leading America’s cultural and intellectual institutions.

But when the newly viralized social-media platforms gave everyone a dart gun, it was younger progressive activists who did the most shooting, and they aimed a disproportionate number of their darts at these older liberal leaders. Confused and fearful, the leaders rarely challenged the activists or their nonliberal narrative in which life at every institution is an eternal battle among identity groups over a zero-sum pie, and the people on top got there by oppressing the people on the bottom. This new narrative is rigidly egalitarian––focused on equality of outcomes, not of rights or opportunities. It is unconcerned with individual rights.

The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group. The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death.

You can see the stupefaction process most clearly when a person on the left merely points to research that questions or contradicts a favored belief among progressive activists. Someone on Twitter will find a way to associate the dissenter with racism, and others will pile on. For example, in the first week of protests after the killing of George Floyd, some of which included violence, the progressive policy analyst David Shor, then employed by Civis Analytics, tweeted a link to a study showing that violent protests back in the 1960s led to electoral setbacks for the Democrats in nearby counties. Shor was clearly trying to be helpful, but in the ensuing outrage he was accused of “anti-Blackness” and was soon dismissed from his job. (Civis Analytics has denied that the tweet led to Shor’s firing.)

The Shor case became famous, but anyone on Twitter had already seen dozens of examples teaching the basic lesson: Don’t question your own side’s beliefs, policies, or actions. And when traditional liberals go silent, as so many did in the summer of 2020, the progressive activists’ more radical narrative takes over as the governing narrative of an organization. This is why so many epistemic institutions seemed to “go woke” in rapid succession that year and the next, beginning with a wave of controversies and resignations at The New York Times and other newspapers, and continuing on to social-justice pronouncements by groups of doctors and medical associations (one publication by the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges, for instance, advised medical professionals to refer to neighborhoods and communities as “oppressed” or “systematically divested” instead of “vulnerable” or “poor”), and the hurried transformation of curricula at New York City’s most expensive private schools.

Tragically, we see stupefaction playing out on both sides in the COVID wars. The right has been so committed to minimizing the risks of COVID that it has turned the disease into one that preferentially kills Republicans. The progressive left is so committed to maximizing the dangers of COVID that it often embraces an equally maximalist, one-size-fits-all strategy for vaccines, masks, and social distancing—even as they pertain to children. Such policies are not as deadly as spreading fears and lies about vaccines, but many of them have been devastating for the mental health and education of children, who desperately need to play with one another and go to school; we have little clear evidence that school closures and masks for young children reduce deaths from COVID. Most notably for the story I’m telling here, progressive parents who argued against school closures were frequently savaged on social media and met with the ubiquitous leftist accusations of racism and white supremacy. Others in blue cities learned to keep quiet.

American politics is getting ever more ridiculous and dysfunctional not because Americans are getting less intelligent. The problem is structural. Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy.

It’s Going to Get Much Worse

in a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry. But back then, in 2018, there was an upper limit to the amount of shit available, because all of it had to be created by a person (other than some low-quality stuff produced by bots).

Now, however, artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3 is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence. In a year or two, when the program is upgraded to GPT-4, it will become far more capable. In a 2020 essay titled “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite,” Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, explained that spreading falsehoods—whether through text, images, or deep-fake videos—will quickly become inconceivably easy. (She co-wrote the essay with GPT-3.)

American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too. In a haunting 2018 essay titled “The Digital Maginot Line,” DiResta described the state of affairs bluntly. “We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality,” she wrote. The Soviets used to have to send over agents or cultivate Americans willing to do their bidding. But social media made it cheap and easy for Russia’s Internet Research Agency to invent fake events or distort real ones to stoke rage on both the left and the right, often over race. Later research showed that an intensive campaign began on Twitter in 2013 but soon spread to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, among other platforms. One of the major goals was to polarize the American public and spread distrust—to split us apart at the exact weak point that Madison had identified.

We now know that it’s not just the Russians attacking American democracy. Before the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, China had mostly focused on domestic platforms such as WeChat. But now China is discovering how much it can do with Twitter and Facebook, for so little money, in its escalating conflict with the U.S. Given China’s own advances in AI, we can expect it to become more skillful over the next few years at further dividing America and further uniting China.

In the 20th century, America’s shared identity as the country leading the fight to make the world safe for democracy was a strong force that helped keep the culture and the polity together. In the 21st century, America’s tech companies have rewired the world and created products that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared understanding, and destroyers of the modern tower.

Democracy After Babel

we can never return to the way things were in the pre-digital age. The norms, institutions, and forms of political participation that developed during the long era of mass communication are not going to work well now that technology has made everything so much faster and more multidirectional, and when bypassing professional gatekeepers is so easy. And yet American democracy is now operating outside the bounds of sustainability. If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.

What changes are needed? Redesigning democracy for the digital age is far beyond my abilities, but I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era. We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.

Harden Democratic Institutions

Political polarization is likely to increase for the foreseeable future. Thus, whatever else we do, we must reform key institutions so that they can continue to function even if levels of anger, misinformation, and violence increase far above those we have today.

For instance, the legislative branch was designed to require compromise, yet Congress, social media, and partisan cable news channels have co-evolved such that any legislator who reaches across the aisle may face outrage within hours from the extreme wing of her party, damaging her fundraising prospects and raising her risk of being primaried in the next election cycle.

Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district. One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting. A version of this voting system has already been implemented in Alaska, and it seems to have given Senator Lisa Murkowski more latitude to oppose former President Trump, whose favored candidate would be a threat to Murkowski in a closed Republican primary but is not in an open one.

A second way to harden democratic institutions is to reduce the power of either political party to game the system in its favor, for example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials who will supervise elections. These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way. Research on procedural justice shows that when people perceive that a process is fair, they are more likely to accept the legitimacy of a decision that goes against their interests. Just think of the damage already done to the Supreme Court’s legitimacy by the Senate’s Republican leadership when it blocked consideration of Merrick Garland for a seat that opened up nine months before the 2016 election, and then rushed through the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. A widely discussed reform would end this political gamesmanship by having justices serve staggered 18-year terms so that each president makes one appointment every two years.

Reform Social Media

A democracy cannot survive if its public squares are places where people fear speaking up and where no stable consensus can be reached. Social media’s empowerment of the far left, the far right, domestic trolls, and foreign agents is creating a system that looks less like democracy and more like rule by the most aggressive.

Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: The Arch Heretics, Gustave Doré, c. 1861.

But it is within our power to reduce social media’s ability to dissolve trust and foment structural stupidity. Reforms should limit the platforms’ amplification of the aggressive fringes while giving more voice to what More in Common calls “the exhausted majority.”

Those who oppose regulation of social media generally focus on the legitimate concern that government-mandated content restrictions will, in practice, devolve into censorship. But the main problem with social media is not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and influence that was not possible before 2009. The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen advocates for simple changes to the architecture of the platforms, rather than for massive and ultimately futile efforts to police all content. For example, she has suggested modifying the “Share” function on Facebook so that after any content has been shared twice, the third person in the chain must take the time to copy and paste the content into a new post. Reforms like this are not censorship; they are viewpoint-neutral and content-neutral, and they work equally well in all languages. They don’t stop anyone from saying anything; they just slow the spread of content that is, on average, less likely to be true.

Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.

Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obligation to verify (perhaps through a third party or nonprofit) that you are a real human being, in a particular country, and are old enough to be using the platform. This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms. It would also likely reduce the frequency of death threats, rape threats, racist nastiness, and trolling more generally. Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable.

In any case, the growing evidence that social media is damaging democracy is sufficient to warrant greater oversight by a regulatory body, such as the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Trade Commission. One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.

Prepare the Next Generation

The members of Gen Z––those born in and after 1997––bear none of the blame for the mess we are in, but they are going to inherit it, and the preliminary signs are that older generations have prevented them from learning how to handle it.

Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults. Unsupervised free play is nature’s way of teaching young mammals the skills they’ll need as adults, which for humans include the ability to cooperate, make and enforce rules, compromise, adjudicate conflicts, and accept defeat. A brilliant 2015 essay by the economist Steven Horwitz argued that free play prepares children for the “art of association” that Alexis de Tocqueville said was the key to the vibrancy of American democracy; he also argued that its loss posed “a serious threat to liberal societies.” A generation prevented from learning these social skills, Horwitz warned, would habitually appeal to authorities to resolve disputes and would suffer from a “coarsening of social interaction” that would “create a world of more conflict and violence.”

And while social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms. Correlational and experimental studies back up the connection to depression and anxiety, as do reports from young people themselves, and from Facebook’s own research, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people. For example, university communities that could tolerate a range of speakers as recently as 2010 arguably began to lose that ability in subsequent years, as Gen Z began to arrive on campus. Attempts to disinvite visiting speakers rose. Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.

The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty. Congress should update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood (the age at which companies can collect personal information from children without parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while making little provision for effective enforcement. The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it.

More generally, to prepare the members of the next generation for post-Babel democracy, perhaps the most important thing we can do is let them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision. Every state should follow the lead of Utah, Oklahoma, and Texas and pass a version of the Free-Range Parenting Law that helps assure parents that they will not be investigated for neglect if their 8- or 9-year-old children are spotted playing in a park. With such laws in place, schools, educators, and public-health authorities should then encourage parents to let their kids walk to school and play in groups outside, just as more kids used to do.

Hope After Babel

the story i have told is bleak, and there is little evidence to suggest that America will return to some semblance of normalcy and stability in the next five or 10 years. Which side is going to become conciliatory? What is the likelihood that Congress will enact major reforms that strengthen democratic institutions or detoxify social media?

Yet when we look away from our dysfunctional federal government, disconnect from social media, and talk with our neighbors directly, things seem more hopeful. Most Americans in the More in Common report are members of the “exhausted majority,” which is tired of the fighting and is willing to listen to the other side and compromise. Most Americans now see that social media is having a negative impact on the country, and are becoming more aware of its damaging effects on children.

Will we do anything about it?

When Tocqueville toured the United States in the 1830s, he was impressed by the American habit of forming voluntary associations to fix local problems, rather than waiting for kings or nobles to act, as Europeans would do. That habit is still with us today. In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide, including BridgeUSA, Braver Angels (on whose board I serve), and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us. We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.

What would it be like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? We know. It is a time of confusion and loss. But it is also a time to reflect, listen, and build.

This article appears in the May 2022 print edition with the headline “After Babel.”

Read more of Jonathan Haidt’s writing in The Atlantic on social media and society:

The Dark Psychology of Social Networks

How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus

Facebook’s Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/

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archiveofprolbems · 3 years ago

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Rhythmus 23 (1923) - Hans Richter

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Hans Richter was convinced that he invented abstract cinema with Rhythmus 21. He didn’t, but he was an important early figure who quickly became one of the biggest names among the avant-garde, producing an impressive body of work that continuously pushed the boundaries of cinema for more than 40 years. Richter believed that film appealed more to the sense of sight than painting could, and he used his roots as a Cubist painter to explode the rectangle of the film frame.

The first in Richter’s series of animated “rhythm” shorts, Rhythmus 21 plays with form and depth, as squares and rectangles pulse and change size in comparison both to one another and to the film frame itself. Animated completely by hand, the work sets the stage for Richter’s subsequent explorations of the time-based medium of film—and for the burgeoning field of experimental animation and the artists who would come after him, such as Len Lye, Oskar Fischinger, and John and Faith Hubley. Additionally, Richter’s creative, radical use of light, shadow, and shape were a markedly different viewing experience for 1910s and ’20s audiences accustomed to seeing newsreels, serials, and narrative films, and whose exposure to animation would likely have been limited to nickelodeons and cartoons based on comic strips, like Gertie the Dinosaur. Richter embraced the Dadaist ethos of collaboration and worked with many Dada artists—most famously with Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, and Man Ray in Dreams That Money Can Buy—while inspiring younger experimental filmmakers like Shirley Clarke.

Watch other films:

Ballet mécanique (1924) https://youtu.be/FMZxu9l0E3E

Anémic Cinéma (1926) https://youtu.be/qi3Zgx0Jh9k

Source: https://youtu.be/239pHUy0FGc

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archiveofprolbems · 3 years ago

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Lichtspiel Opus I (1921) - Walther Ruttmann

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Source: https://youtu.be/aHZdDmYFZN0

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archiveofprolbems · 3 years ago

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Opus 3 (1924) - Walther Ruttmann

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Source: https://youtu.be/KTDIvDsQ0Uc

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archiveofprolbems · 3 years ago

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What exactly is Vaporwave AESTHETICS!?

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What is Vaporwave? Vaporwave is a music genre, it's an aesthetic, it's an experience. It makes you nostalgic for a time and place that… never actually existed.

It's the feeling of going on midnight bus rides alone to absolutely nowhere and watching lights and street signs flash by, the feeling of being so tired your eyes wont stay open and every sound blends together into a perfect harmony as you fall asleep, the feeling of faint deja vu listening to old 80's music, the feeling of that melancholic nostalgia when you visit an old place. It’s watching the sunrise on the city as you catch the smell of the early morning air.

It's as if Japan, the 1990s, retrowave, and smooth jazz had a beautiful a e s t h e t i c baby.

Music used: Blank Banshee - B:/ Start Up Macintosh Plus - リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー Saint Pepsi - Mac Tonight t e l e p a t h - テレパシー能力者 - 永遠に生きる Martin Klem - Blind Paradise Blank Banshee - Ammonia Clouds ECO VIRTUAL - Morning Haze 식료품groceries - Aisle 1 (Earth Tones, Rectangles, and Fake Plants) ECO VIRTUAL - Nimbostratus HOME - Resonance

Clips used: history of japan by Bill Wurtz Top 10 Country GDP Ranking History (1960-2017) by WawamuStats Back to the Future III (1990) is a property of Universal Pictures. Quote starting at 6:40 is by anon 46769565 on 4chan https://i.imgur.com/2984vga.jpg Quote at 7:20 was somewhat inspired by a comment by long cat on HOME - Resonance.

Source: https://youtu.be/9LQNeLwVaK8

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archiveofprolbems · 3 years ago

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Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art by Anton Vidokle

“Perhaps contemporary art is an art to survive our contemporaneity as an artist.”

—Boris Groys

Since the early days of modernism, artists have faced a peculiar dilemma with regard to the economy surrounding their work. By breaking from older artistic formations such as medieval artisan guilds, bohemian artists of the nineteenth century distanced themselves from the vulgar sphere of day-to-day commerce in favor of an idealized conception of art and authorship. While on the one hand this allowed for a certain rejection of normative bourgeois life, it also required that artists entrust their livelihoods to middlemen—to private agents or state organizations. One result was that some of the most influential modernist artists, from Paul Gauguin to Mondrian and Rodchenko, died in abject poverty, not because their work was unpopular but because the economy produced by the circulation and distribution of their work was entirely controlled by others, whether under capitalist or communist regimes.(1) While a concern with labor and fair compensation in the arts, exemplified by such recent initiatives as W.A.G.E. or earlier efforts such as the Art Workers Coalition, has been an important part of artistic discourse, so far it has focused primarily on public critique as a means to shame and reform institutions into developing a more fair system of compensation for “content providers.”(2) It seems to me that we need to move beyond the critique of art institutions if we want to improve the relationship between artists and the economy surrounding their work.

Here I am not particularly interested in the power relations between artists and the art market, a cyclical conversation that seems to dominate much of art writing today. Historically, art and artists have existed both with and without a market. Important art was produced in socialist countries for most of the twentieth century, in the absence of an art market. Much of art production today occurs in places without a market for art, or in countries where a capitalist market system is not the dominant form of social and cultural organization. Art can clearly exist without a market, but artists fundamentally rely upon a certain economy in order to live and make art in the first place. Furthermore, it’s important to note that “economy” and “market” are not synonymous terms: a market is just one facet of the economic sphere, coexisting with many other forms of exchange, from barter, debt, and favors to a gift economy.

The term “political economy” is more or less synonymous with “economy” in our contemporary lexicon: both designate the distribution of goods and services under a certain political regime—be it capitalist, feudal, or communist—along with all the regulations, laws, and conventions governing such distribution. According to Aristotle, however, “economy” is the way to arrange things within a household (“oikos” means “house”), and “politics” is the way to arrange things between households—between “polites” or citizens, within the polis. So political economy combines both things. At some point in the late nineteenth century, the adjective “political” was dropped in English-language writing, and we ended up with simply “economy.” In one of the first studies of the economy of art—a book called Political Economy of Art published in 1857—the critic John Ruskin laments the confusion regarding the interpretation of the word “economy,” emphasizing that economy does not automatically imply money, frugality, or expenditures, but rather taking care of a household and managing labor. This would later becomes an important point in Hannah Arendt's analysis of work and labor in the Human Condition.(3)

William Powhida, Untitled, 2012. Graphite on paper.

Ruskin’s book is based on two lectures he gave on July 10 and 13, 1857, in Manchester—a city whose labor conditions had been central to the work of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx just a few years earlier (a fact of which Ruskin claimed to have no knowledge, citing only some writings of John Adams he had read long before). The lectures and the book look at the value of artistic work through a framework of education, collecting, patronage, accessibility to the public, and artistic genius. Ruskin argues for a childlike, innocent position for the artist, who should not get involved in the business of art. Ruskin believes that it is the patron (be it the state or a private collector) who is the patriarchal head of the household of art and whose responsibility it is to find and train artistic geniuses, to tell them what to do. Ruskin wants the prices for art to be low, preferably pegged to the actual time spent by an artist on the production of a specific work. In other words, Ruskin wants art production to be a form of wage labor.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket), circa 1875. Oil on panel. Detroit Institute of Art.

In 1878, the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler took Ruskin to court for libel. Ruskin had written a rather positive review of an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery—a privately owned space exhibiting works that had been rejected by the Royal Academy. Ruskin singled out Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, accusing the artist of charging too high a price for what Ruskin thought was a hastily made painting:

For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.(4)

Whistler was outraged and sued Ruskin for a thousand pounds and the costs of the trial. The trial became a public spectacle, the first of its kind. It also became a public seminar on art. Whistler's case was based on his argument that a painting is about nothing but itself; Ruskin’s case was based on his belief that art should have moral value. The court heard arguments about the duties of art critics and the role of labor in art. Ruskin was too ill to attend the trial and was represented by lawyers who asked Whistler how long it had taken him to make the painting. Whistler replied that it was completed in a day or two.

Lawyer: The labor of two days, is that for which you asked two hundred guineas? Whistler: No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.(5)

Whistler won the case but received only a symbolic settlement: a quarter of a penny. Ruskin's friends covered his legal expenses; Whistler went bankrupt covering his own.

Ruskin did not single-handedly invent positions and notions popularized through his book and lectures on the economy of art; rather, he articulated existing Victorian attitudes regarding the role of artists and culture, which themselves reflected the British and Dutch art systems of the time, emphasizing a certain element of commerce in art. A somewhat different system of cultural organization existed in France, where in 1648 a royal decree established a government-funded Art Academy. The Academy removed painting and sculpture from the control of artistic guilds, which emphasized craft, and instead created a centralized institution that treated visual art more like the liberal arts, such as literature. While poets and writers like Baudelaire were often compensated per line of text for publishing their work (Baudelaire’s rate apparently was 0.15 francs per line), as far as I know, no one in France proposed subjecting them to wage labor.

Early modernist poets like Baudelaire were extremely influential in shaping the attitudes of artists towards commerce and business. Implicit in the way of life of “bohemian” artists and writers in the Latin Quarter was a rejection of bourgeois professional and commercial pursuits, as was a rejection of industrialization and emergent capitalism. Baudelaire was actually rather critical of the bohemians, being very much a radical dandy, an aristocrat who despised the squalor of bohemian life. Nevertheless, he spent much of his life in this milieu and immortalized it in his work: “In murky corners of old cities where everything—horror too—is magical, I study, servile to my moods, the odd and charming refuse of humanity.”(6) Despite the marginality and political insignificance of bohemia, its cultural impact was absolutely enormous. It remains ever-present, a specter that reappears in various times and places.

Andy Warhol’s Factory is fascinating in this respect: both a murky, magical corner for misfits and eccentrics, and simultaneously the workplace of the first self-proclaimed Business Artist. Warhol’s artistic position is very interesting insofar as it combined stances that were thought to be diametrically opposed: he was at once a dandy, a bohemian, but also someone who did not disguise his interest in business and commerce. His interest in business did not only extend to sale of his artwork; he also pursued the publication of a commercial magazine, film production, a television show—what amounted to his own media industry. To my mind, Warhol’s position was much more honest and productive than that of artists who pretend that the artist can or should stay innocent by delegating (or appearing to delegate) business-related activity to gallerists or other agents, and who maintain that this is the only condition in which critical or culturally significant art can be produced. By turning his art into a kind of a business, Warhol managed to achieve independence, though not independence from the art market.

A hundred of Andy Warhol's 610 Time Capsules shelved. Courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

But since his time, Warhol’s economic independence seems to have been misunderstood. The independence that came from his bridging of the bohemian sphere and the sphere of day-to-day commerce has been converted into a vast proliferation of so-called artistic practices that treat art as a profession. But art is not a profession. What does being professional actually mean under the current conditions of de-skilling in art? We should probably be less concerned with being full-time, art-school-trained, professional artists, writers, or curators—less concerned with measuring our artistic worth in these ways. Since most of us are not expected to perfect any specific techniques or master any craft—unlike athletes or classical musicians, for example—and given that we are no longer tied to working in specific mediums, perhaps it’s fine to be a part-time artist? After all, what is the expertise of a contemporary artist? Perhaps a certain type of passionate hobbyism, a committed amateurism, is okay: after all, we still live in a reality largely shaped by talented amateurs of the nineteenth century, like Thomas Edison and so many others.(7) I think it’s perfectly acceptable to work in some other capacity in the arts, or in an entirely different field, and also to make art: sometimes this situation actually produces much more significant work than the “professional art” we see at art fairs and biennials. Ilya Kabakov supported himself for decades by being a children’s book illustrator. Marcel Duchamp worked as a librarian and later sold Brancusi's work to make a living, while refusing to be dependent on sales of his own work.

It interesting to note that this emphasis on professionalization emerged simultaneously with the disappearance of bohemia, which is usually described as a shared creative space that allowed for fluid communication between poets, artists, dancers, writers, musicians, and so forth. The notion of bohemia as something to aspire to went out the window a few decades ago; it vanished at the same time as the visual art sphere was becoming more segregated from other fields of art. “Bohemian” has become a primarily derogatory term that seems to imply a kind of uncommitted, naive dilettantism, but within the history of art it has a greater significance. According to T.J. Clark, bohemia refers to a movement by a group of artists, writers, and poets who apparently renounced the normative bourgeois society, a move that, unlike the gestures of the avant-garde, was not a calculated temporary tactic intended only so that one could return to the salon of art in a more advantageous position, but a more permanent departure.(8) The bohemian artist would absolutely reject the notion of professionalism in the arts—this was something for lawyers, accountants, and bankers, not artists.(9)

Image from catalog Marcel Duchamp Graphics, Kyoto Shoin, 1991.

These days it’s becoming more and more difficult to imagine the production of significant art without a training system that educates future producers of art, its administrators and, to some extent, its consumers. However, until only a few decades ago, many if not most artists, curators, and critics, never attended masters programs or studied curatorship and critical writing in specialized training programs. The field of art is becoming professionalized in a very, very narrow way. There’s still the old problem that professionalization is really about a division of labor, and a division of labor produces alienation.(10) It’s a contradiction that a lot of people go into the arts because they want to be a little less alienated from what they do in life, even as what is increasingly imposed on artists, curators, writers—and it comes both from the market and public sector—is the professionalization and precarization of their activity.

The problem of professionalization is connected to the proliferation of MFA programs, which have become a prerequisite for young people entering the arts. In a sense, universities and academies have created a perfect economic feedback loop that perpetuates their own existence: most artists depend on having a teaching position. This is because, as Walid Raad recently pointed out, the average life-span of financial success in the art market (in places where there is such a thing)—a period during which a successful artist’s work is in active demand by collectors—is a mere four years.(11) How do you support yourself when your work does not sell anymore? You teach—and to qualify for a teaching position, you need an MFA degree. This means that most artists who aspire to a life-long practice have little choice but to enroll in MFA programs and often pay astronomical fees and go into debt in order to have a chance of teaching in the future or selling their work in the lucrative art market. But unlike other fields, such as law or medicine, where graduates can reasonably expect a job upon graduation, there are no guarantees that an artist with an MFA degree will find a teaching job. With recent shifts in hiring policies at most universities—towards part-time, untenured, adjunct labor—very few artists ever get a tenured, secure position. To me, this resembles a kind of pyramid scheme or institutional blackmail in which money is extracted using false promises, with the benefits going to very few—primarily the institutions themselves.(12)

I attended graduate school in the ‘90s. I did all of the coursework and the final exhibition, wrote the dissertation and submitted it. I thought I was all done, but then suddenly I found out that in order to get the degree itself, I needed to package my dissertation and photographs in a very specific type of a black plastic folder, which could only be purchased at one stationery store located in Manhattan near Canal Street. The secretary at the art department told me that the Chairman kept the folders in a closet in his office, and that the folders had to conform exactly to the dimensions of the closet’s irregular shelves. No other folders would be accepted. I was idealistic and thought that the Master of Fine Arts degree had something to do with the acquisition of knowledge … but it came down to a surreal formalism. I never got the folder or the degree!

It seems to me that MFA programs have become a tool of indoctrination that has had an unprecedented homogenizing effect on artistic practices worldwide, an effect that is now being replicated with curatorial and critical writing programs. At the center of the problem is the black plastic folder: at the school I attended, the folder itself became the goal of the program—both the framing and the ultimate content of graduate studies in art. A folder, identical to hundreds of other folders arranged on a shelf, became a tool to valuate and legitimize artistic practice through a forced standardization. My school was not very different from how most museums, art centers, and galleries operate today, whereby systemic and logistical needs often demand legibility according to predefined terms. In the process, the folder replaces art itself.

The market of art is not merely a bunch of dealers and cigar-smoking connoisseurs trading exquisite objects for money behind closed doors. Rather, it is a vast and complex international industry of overlapping institutions which jointly produce artworks’ economic value and support a wide range of activities and occupations including training, research, development, production, display, documentation, criticism, marketing, promotion, financing, historicizing, publishing, and so forth. The standardization of art greatly simplifies all of these transactions. For a few years now I have experienced a certain sense of déjà vu while walking through art fairs or biennials, a feeling that many other people have also commented on: that we have already seen all these works that are supposedly brand new. We are experiencing the impact of contemporary art as a globally traded commodity that is produced, displayed, and circulated by an industry of specially trained professionals. The folder that replaces the art has undergone only a slight modification: into an investment portfolio.

Image from the catalog Marcel Duchamp Graphics, Kyoto Shoin, 1991.Marcel Duchamp Graphics, Kyoto Shoin, 1991.

This is not a new observation: I think Marcel Duchamp already fully understood this danger a hundred year ago. There are, of course, so many aspects of his work that could be mentioned in this essay, from his Standard Stoppages to his peculiar refusal to make a living by selling his artworks. In a way, one can understand much of Duchamp’s work as a repeated act of offering the folder back to the art establishment: whether in the shape of a valise, a box, a collection of notes and photographs, a literal folder, or even an elaborate gesamkunstwerk like his Etant donné, containing all the indexical references to his work. However, the folders he provided contained a bomb: they were capable of bringing down the shelf they were stored on.

Today it would be rather futile to try to reconstitute bohemia—the free-flowing, organic creative space—because it never really existed within the constellation of institutions of art, the art market, and the art academy. If Warhol’s Factory was an entry into art that enabled a group of people of very different backgrounds to enter a certain kind of productive modality (both within and in spite of the surrounding economy), it was a space of free play that no longer exists. Instead, what we have now are MFA programs: a standardization not even of bohemia, but only its promise. Just to be clear: I am not advocating that artists should remain innocent, childlike amateurs; a certain mobilized dissidence wielded by young people engaging in specialized study in art structures can amount to something quite powerful. What I mean is that if one is really looking to produce a different kind of art, it is necessary to step through the standardization and professionalization it promises, and discover a way to access whatever may be on the other side—even if what one finds does not resemble art as we currently understand it.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian, What I Do For A Living/What I Really Do?, 2007. Binders with vynil letters.

This supposes that, somewhere close to the center of what we all know art to be, there is a kind of open, undefined quality. And this is something I feel to be increasingly difficult to develop and maintain both in art and other areas of life, when there are so many pressures in the market-driven economy to divide labor, to professionalize. As artists, curators, and writers, we are increasingly forced to market ourselves by developing a consistent product, a concise presentation, a statement that can be communicated in thirty seconds or less—and oftentimes this alone passes for professionalism. For emerging artists and curators there is an ever-increasing number of well-intentioned programs that essentially indoctrinate them into becoming content providers for an art system whose values and welfare are wholly defined by its own logic of supply and demand.

Being a professional should not be the only acceptable way for us to maintain our households, particularly when most interesting artists are perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three fields that are, unlike art, respected by society in terms of compensation and general usefulness. I feel that we have cornered ourselves by denying the full range of possibilities for developing our economies. In fact, the economic dimension of art is more often wholly suppressed under the specter of bohemia, condemning artists to a precarious and often alienating place in the day-to-day relations that hold other parts of society together. While artists like Warhol took some pleasure in operating a frontier economy that produced value and new economic protocols—much in the way a government might manage an economy—this is not the concern of most other artists, who would prefer to have a more straightforward connection to society without at the same time having their work regarded as mere craft. Unless hard-pressed by circumstances, we still think that the proper thing to do is to wait for a sponsor or a patron to solve our household problems and to legitimize our work. In fact, we don’t need their legitimacy. We are perfectly capable of being our own sponsors, which in most cases we already are when we do other kinds of work to support our art-work. This is something that should not be disavowed, but acknowledged openly. We must find the terms for articulating what kind of economy artists really want. This can be quite complicated, since not addressing this question implicitly reinforces the simplistic myth of the artist as an isolated and alienated genius. Without a captivating alternative, artists will always defer to this myth out of habit, in spite of how complex and interesting their real household economy may be. I suspect that if affirmed fully and radically, this condition could lead to a fluid, liberated state close to what Marx envisioned for humanity—the messianic promise at the heart of communism.(13) After all, we are never one thing at all times.

____________________

Notes

1. Gauguin died in a charity clinic on Tahiti, apparently due to poor treatment. He was broke and could not afford a proper hospital. While his work was selling relatively well in Paris, his dealer was not sending Gauguin’s share of the money. Rodchenko’s pension was stripped away after he was expelled from the artists’ union in the USSR. Mondrian died in poverty of pneumonia.

2. For the website of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), see →.

3. This point regarding Arendt is also discussed in my essay “Art without Work?”, e-flux journal 29 (November 2011). See →.

4. Quoted in James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). See →.

5. Ibid.

6. Charles Baudelaire, “The Little Old Women,” in Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard (New Hampshire: David R. Godine, 1982): 94.

7. This was recently pointed out to me by Shuddhabratha Sengupta.

8. T.J. Clark, The Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999): chapter 1.

9. Martha Rosler suggests that such attitudes toward professionalism were common among artists throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s as well.

10. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. See →.

11. This was part of Walid Raad’s lecture performance at documenta (13). He got the figures from Artist Pension Trust.

12. What I am describing here is the dominant US and UK art school model, but there are other problems, and also other potentials, with nation-state type academies or pure neoliberal non-degree commercial “schools,” like the ones tacked on to museums and art spaces.

13. “… in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845): chapter 1. See →.

Source: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/43/60205/art-without-market-art-without-education-political-economy-of-art/

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archiveofprolbems · 4 years ago

Text

Art “from” Latin America by Gerardo Mosquera

Latin America suffers from an inflation of national representations that contrasts with the disaster of its nation states. It is like a refuge on the symbolic plane, sacralized as a grandiose and uncontaminated space. In contrast to our critical reality, it is surprising the lack of healthy cynicism in the continent towards the nation and its founding myths. We have written our histories and constructed our countries, both real and imaginary, through the figure of the hero and in the manner of a Hollywood movie. And we continue to believe in these constructions, often geopolitical inventions, because the history we learn is a tale of good guys and bad guys. Even worse, we persist in identifying our emancipation and progress as linked to some new caudillo. We find it difficult to achieve civility, consensus, legality, patriotic construction, not so patriotic showmanship, populism, corruption, violence, nepotism and hurried “solutions”. The unavoidable task of critically rethinking our nations has had little chance against icons and mythologies based on nationalism and collective inferiority complexes.

In this context, Latin American culture has suffered from an identity neurosis that has not been completely cured, and of which this text itself is a part, albeit by opposition. However, already in the late 1970s, the critic Frederico Morais linked our obsession with identity to colonialism, and suggested a “plural, diverse, multifaceted” idea of the continent,[1] the fruit of its multiplicity of origin.

Even the very notion of Latin America has always been highly problematic: does it include the Chicanos, the Nuyoricans and the Dominican Yorks? Does it include the English-speaking and the Dutch-speaking Caribbean? Does it include the indigenous peoples who sometimes do not even speak European languages? If we recognize the latter as Latin American, why not the indigenous people north of the Rio Grande? Is what we call Latin America part of the “West” or the “Non-West”? Does it contradict both, highlighting the schematism of such notions? In any case, the United States, with more than 55 million inhabitants of “Hispanic” origin, is undoubtedly one of the most active Latin American countries. However, the idea of Latin America is not rejected, as some African intellectuals do with the notion of Africa, which they considered a colonial invention.[2] The self-awareness of belonging to a historical-cultural entity misnamed Latin America is maintained, but problematized. Nevertheless, Mudimbe’s “What is Africa?”[3] is becoming more and more valid every day when transferred to our area: what is Latin America? Among other things, an invention[4] that we can reinvent. Now we see ourselves a little more in the fragment, the juxtaposition and the collage, accepting our diversity and even our contradictions. The danger is to create, in the face of modernist totalizations, a postmodern cliché of Latin America as a realm of total heterogeneity.[5]

In general, we have been much less cynical than Africans about the idea of a continental identity. As early as 1965 the writer Chinua Achebe deemed identity notions about an African literature or an African culture as “scenographic elements that we have constructed at different times to help us stand on our feet. When we do, we won’t need them anymore.”[6]

The colonial era in Latin America ended before the great British and French colonial enterprises —of capitalist sign— took shape in the 19th century. In our continent, the colonizers settled, adopted native ways and mixed, making it impossible to clearly distinguish between the imposed colonial cultures, the indigenous cultures, and those of the Africans brought as slaves. In other words, the bipolar interaction between a traditional and a Western sphere, whose ambivalences have been discussed in postcolonial theory, does not prevail, as in Africa and Asia.[7] At the same time, in the Americas there are large indigenous communities that remain largely excluded from national projects based on narratives of miscegenation.

This cultural-historical process has greatly helped that the idea of Latin America as an integral notion could persistently survive criticism. Similar to what happens in the Arab world, with respect to cultural identity, macro-cohesive factors tend to prevail over diversity and conflict, even though differences are recognized and emphasized. Thus, despite the diversity of Latin America and the tendency towards balkanization in its history, the geographical, historical, economic, cultural, linguistic and religious affinities that constituted the region, and its ambivalent positioning vis-à-vis the West, have meant that we continue to identify ourselves as Latin Americans. It is a real consciousness that can lead us to solidarity as well as to provincialism.

The entity we call Latin America can continue to be useful as a much-needed resource of solidarity, and function as a strategic alliance that inclines us to unite in a “we,” a collective self. Now, segregation will only disappear through the universal circulation and appreciation of art created around the world, a process in which remarkable progress has been made in the last fifteen years.

Does the art created in Latin America possess an axiomatic identity? Today we are inclined to answer in the negative. This was not the case until recently. We Latin Americans had tended to construct totalizing narratives as a means of discoursing on a unity that would allow us to affirm our complex identity vis-à-vis Europe and North America. Notions such as the “cosmic race”, miscegenation, baroque, magical realism, etc., have been used in the past. This effort was the result of the diverse and contradictory panorama that we tried to summarize in order to position ourselves in the face of the hegemonic centrality.

After the postmodern opening, we have tended to see things in a more complex way, thinking ourselves more in the fragment and the multiplicity. The great plurality of the art created from Latin America, and its global framework, have made it more plausible to discuss it as art without labels, that is, as art in itself. It is not that we denied the formation and the context, or that art does not participate in the context, but this is also presented as a locus from where the international is constructed. As a result of the processes of internationalization of art, it now seems more fruitful to approach art first and go from it to the context, and not the other way around, as it was commonly done and sometimes still is.

To break with a reductive label is convenient for the Latin American art in order to emphasize its rich diversity, to get out of the comfortable exclusion of the ghetto, to be able to play hard in the international arena, and to break the hegemonic wall of the art hierarchized as “universal.” But the label can help in the transition to global action and recognition of the previously excluded, through the use of spaces and events organized by regional institutions that, nevertheless, have great power of international diffusion.

“Latin American art” has not always existed as such. It was “invented” by the Argentine-Colombian critic and writer Marta Traba —especially through her critical discourse— and the Cuban-American critic and curator José Gómez Sicre —especially through his practical work as head of the visual arts unit of the Organization of American States, within the policy of Pan-Americanism, updated as Inter-Americanism after World War II— in the 1950s and 1960s. Before them, individual, national or movement-centered approaches to art created in Latin America prevailed, without a true vision of the whole. This is the case of the exhibitions organized by Alfred H. Barr Jr. at MoMA in New York during the war. Traba and Gómez Sicre worked independently and initiated —from different positions— the “Latin Americanism” that would prevail in the sixties and seventies, largely under the influence of the Cuban Revolution, its confrontation with the United States and its encouragement of armed subversion in almost the entire continent.

Although without an explicit agenda, Traba approached Latin American art in a general and canonical way, and was the first critic to work with a knowledge of what was happening in the region’s major art scenes. Her work was fruitful in affirming a particular identity of Latin American art, legitimizing its own character against the stereotype of considering it simply as a derivative of European art, a widespread dismissive view at the time. But in doing so she emphasized too narrowly the expression of context and traditional culture, though without falling into folklorism. She did not realized how context could act in art in a non-explicit, internalized way. Nor did she considered that the artists of the continent could make valuable and original propositions within the prevailing hegemonic language, without strictly contextual modulations.

When in an old 1996 text I said that Latin American art was ceasing to be Latin American,[8] I was referring to two processes I observed in the continent. On the one hand, the overcoming of the identity neurosis among artists, critics and curators. On the other hand, Latin American art was beginning to be appreciated as art without labels. Instead of being required to declare the context, it was increasingly recognized as a participant in a general practice, which did not necessarily have to explicitly state the context, and which sometimes referred to art itself and facilitated a way out of the ghetto circuits.

Since the Conquest, Latin American culture has appropriated hegemonic tendencies to use them from the individual inventiveness of the artists and the complexity of their contexts. In the 1980s and 1990s, critics emphasized these “anthropophagic”[9] strategies of resignification, transformation and syncretism. But a Copernican volte-face was needed: to discuss how art in Latin America has enriched “international” trends within themselves, as part of a process of plural and interacting modernisms.

“To stop being Latin American” also referred to the problematic totalization that the term “Latin American art” entails. Some authors prefer to speak of “art in Latin America” as a de-emphasizing convention that seeks to underline, at the very level of language, its rejection of the dubious construction of an integral, emblematic Latin America and, beyond that, of any globalizing generalization. To stop being “Latin American art” means to move away from simplification in order to highlight the extraordinary variety of the continent’s symbolic production. Today, the statement that gives title to this article prevails.[10]

Contrary to Traba’s preaching, art has advanced further in this direction. Today it responds to our age of internationalization and global communication, with a tendency to participate in an international artistic metalanguage from its difference. The contents of culture and place, so dear to Traba, tend to function now in a more internal way, modulated by the subjectivities of the artists, who have come to the fore in many cases, to the detriment of prioritizing a more “objective” cultural and social documentation. Even more significant is the fact that one’s own culture, place and experience are reflected more in the particular way of creating artistic texts than by the expedient of representing specific contents, contexts and imagery.

Artists today tend more to participate “from here” in the dynamics of an “international artistic language,” expanding its capacity for dense and refined meaning in order to deal with the complexities of societies and cultures where multiplicity, hybridity, contrasts and chaos have introduced contradictions as well as subtleties. This is one of the changes with respect to the aforementioned totalizing paradigms that sought to achieve a characteristic Latin American language from the beginning. The new artists have broken with the connection between art and national or regional identity cards, previously so ubiquitous.

Rather than representing the contexts, these become a place of enunciation from which the works are constructed. Identities and physical, cultural and social environments are now more operated than shown, contradicting the expectations of exoticism. They are often concurrent identities and contexts in the construction of the “international” artistic metalanguage and in the discussion of contemporary “global” issues. Their interventions introduce anti-homogenizing differences that construct the global from positions of difference, underlining the emergence of new cultural subjects in the international arena.

_________________________

* This excerpt is included in Gerardo Mosquera: Arte desde América Latina (y otros pulsos globales), Ediciones Cátedra, Madrid, 2020, pp. 37-44.

[1] Frederico Morais: Las artes plásticas en la América Latina: del trance a lo transitorio, Casa de las Américas, Havana, 1990, pp. 4-5.

[2] Olu Oguibe: “In the Heart of Darkness”, Third Text, nº. 23, Summer 1993, pp. 3-8. However, Walter Mignolo, in his book The Idea of Latin America, 2006, proposes leaving behind an idea that he sees as the fruit of the nation-building mentality of 19th century Europe.

[3] Cf. V. Y. Mudimbe: The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, Indiana University Press, 1988.

[4] Cf. Edmundo O’Gorman: La invención de América, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico City, 1958.

[5] Mónica Amor: “Cartographies: Exploring the Limitations of a Curatorial Paradigm”, Gerardo Mosquera (ed.): Beyond the Fantastic. Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, MIT Press, 1996, pp. 247-257.

[6] Chinua Achebe: “The Novelist as Teacher” (1965), quoted by Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory. Contexts, Practices, Politics, Verso, London/New York, 1997, p. 179.

[7] Cf. Homi K. Bhabha: The Location of Culture, Routledge, London/New York, 1994.

[8] Gerardo Mosquera: “El arte latinoamericano deja de serlo”, ARCO Latino, n.º 1, 1996, pp. 7-10.

[9] In reference to Oswald de Andrade’s influential Manifiesto Antropófago, Revista de Antropofagia, year 1, n.º 1, May 1928.

[10] Gerardo Mosquera. “Good-bye identidad, welcome diferencia: del arte latinoamericano al arte desde América Latina,” in Rebeca León (comp.), Arte en América Latina y cultura global, Facultad de Artes, Universidad de Chile / Dolmen Ensayo, Santiago de Chile, 2002, pp. 123-137 and 123-137; “Del arte latinoamericano al arte desde América Latina,” Art Nexus, n.º 48, v. 2, April-June 2003, pp. 70-74; “From”, in Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash and Octavio Zaya (eds.): Créolité and Creolization, Ostfildern-Ruit, Documenta 11_Platform3, Museum Fridericianum and Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2003, pp. 145-148; “Against Latin American Art,” in Contemporary Art in Latin America, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2010, pp. 11-23; “From Latin American Art to Art from Latin America,” Héctor Olea, Mari Carmen Ramírez, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto (organizers), Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino?, Houston, Critical Documents of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, International Center for the Arts of the Americas, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2012, pp. 1123-1132.

Source: https://nocountrymagazine.com/art-from-latin-america/

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archiveofprolbems · 4 years ago

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What is an NFT?

“Non-fungible tokens” use cryptocurrencies’ blockchains to sell original versions of digital artefacts

“NON-FUNGIBLE TOKENS” (NFTs) leapt from the more obscure corners of the internet into the mainstream in March 2021 when Christies, a British auction house, sold a digital work of art for $69m. What it actually flogged was an NFT, a cryptocurrency chit that proves a buyer owns an intangible marker connected to a unique piece of digital art, music or other item. Much like René Magritte’s painting of a pipe that proclaims “this is not a pipe” an NFT is not the thing it represents. Tweets, videos of basketball dunks and even the source code to the world wide web have been sold as NFTs in recent months. From June to September they generated almost $11bn in sales, an eight-fold increase on the previous four months, according to DappRadar, a market tracker. What exactly is an NFT? And why are people spending tens of millions of dollars on them?

An NFT is a record on a cryptocurrency’s blockchain (an immutable ledger that can record more than just virtual coins) that represents pieces of digital media. Invented a few years ago, it can link not only to art but also to text, videos or bits of code. Promoters of NFTs claim that they solve a thorny problem with digital art: how to own an original. For creators who freely upload their work or sell it as identical copies, the concept of an original is difficult to pin down. Exclusivity is impossible to enforce when digital files can be shared freely on the internet. But collectors want the cachet that comes with having an exclusive claim on an artwork. This is where NFTs fit in.

To mint an NFT, the creator establishes a unique record of the artwork, generally on a website. Then the creator places the record on a blockchain, usually Ethereum’s, which requires a transaction fee known as gas. Possession of a private encryption key associated with the transaction proves ownership. This gives an artist or collector something to sell. An NFT may link to a version of the work, but rarely includes the rights to reproduce or distribute it. That differentiates it from a commercial licensing arrangement, too.

NFTs have myriad problems. They often change hands using cryptocurrencies, many of which currently have sky-high valuations, leading to fears of a bubble. Anyone can mint an NFT, since the systems involved are decentralised, although doing so with someone else’s work could be infringe their copyright. Some artists have already claimed misappropriation of their work. Most NFTs are simply links to images. Unless they have been issued in a certain way to ensure they are tamper-proof these can in theory be meddled with after the sale. The high electricity usage of blockchains—Bitcoin’s is greater than that of Chile—has prompted arguments over whether artists are contributing to climate change by embracing NFTs. And ownership may be difficult to prove in the long term, as web-based records may not last for ever.

Yet NFTs have some value beyond the cryptocurrency hype: artists struggle to make a living when their works can be easily replicated and pirated. NFTs will create new problems in an attempt to solve old ones, but for now many creators and collectors are too busy cashing in to care.

Source: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2021/10/12/what-is-an-nft?utm_campaign=the-economist-today&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=2021-10-13&utm_content=article-link-7&etear=nl_today_7

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archiveofprolbems · 4 years ago

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Inflation: “Which Way This Time?” 1945 US Office Of Price Administration; Animated Cartoon

vimeo

Shows how disastrous inflation during and after World War II was prevented by government controls. Depicts the depressions and misery that post-war inflations have caused.'Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation Wikipedia license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Inflation is an increase in the general price level of goods and services in an economy over a period of time. When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation reflects a reduction in the purchasing power per unit of money – a loss of real value in the medium of exchange and unit of account within the economy. The opposite of inflation is deflation, a sustained decrease in the general price level of goods and services. The common measure of inflation is the inflation rate, the annualized percentage change in a general price index, usually the consumer price index, over time.

Economists generally believe that very high rates of inflation and hyperinflation are caused by an excessive growth of the money supply. Views on which factors determine low to moderate rates of inflation are more varied. Low or moderate inflation may be attributed to fluctuations in real demand for goods and services, or changes in available supplies such as during scarcities. However, the consensus view is that a long sustained period of inflation is caused by money supply growing faster than the rate of economic growth.

Inflation affects economies in various positive and negative ways. The negative effects of inflation include an increase in the opportunity cost of holding money, uncertainty over future inflation which may discourage investment and savings, and if inflation were rapid enough, shortages of goods as consumers begin hoarding out of concern that prices will increase in the future. Positive effects include reducing unemployment due to nominal wage rigidity, allowing the central bank more leeway in carrying out monetary policy, encouraging loans and investment instead of money hoarding, and avoiding the inefficiencies associated with deflation.

Today, most economists favor a low and steady rate of inflation. Low (as opposed to zero or negative) inflation reduces the severity of economic recessions by enabling the labor market to adjust more quickly in a downturn, and reduces the risk that a liquidity trap prevents monetary policy from stabilizing the economy. The task of keeping the rate of inflation low and stable is usually given to monetary authorities. Generally, these monetary authorities are the central banks that control monetary policy through the setting of interest rates, through open market operations, and through the setting of banking reserve requirements...

Source: https://vimeo.com/379452144

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archiveofprolbems · 4 years ago

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Digital Art NFTs: The Marriage Of Art & Money by Julia Friedman & David Hawkes

Over half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan identified a ‘moral panic’ that continues to roil Western culture today. In his now-canonical Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan discussed the mixture of fear and snobbery exhibited by ‘many highly literate people’ in response to the dramatic rise of ‘electric technology’— the telephone, the radio and above all, the dreaded television.

Since these new media ‘seem[ed] to favor the inclusive and participational spoken word over the specialist written word,’ McLuhan argued that they posed a threat to established hierarchies of culture and class. As he pointed out, elitist systems of cultural knowledge and power extend all the way back to ancient ‘temple bureaucracies’ and ‘priestly monopolies,’ and the cultural elites have always worked to keep their domains exclusive.

A strikingly McLuhanesque spasm of outrage followed Christie’s’ procured sale of a digital art non-fungible token, or NFT. Everydays: The First 5000 Days, an NFT created by the savvy operator known as Beeple, fetched an eye-watering $69 million at a recent auction. That kind of money always guarantees mainstream media attention which, of course, is part of the point. Another part is the furiously hostile response to that kind of money being splurged on such a radically innovative art form: so innovative that a large part of the cultural elite questioned its status as art in the first place.

It doesn’t help that Beeple’s content is resolutely demotic: puerile cartoons, defaced logos, ironic emojis, frat-boy fantasies. Writing in Spike magazine, Dean Kissick remarks that ‘the old gatekeepers have been losing their power for a while now,’ and he counts the entrance of NFTs into the artworld among the costs, denigrating Beeple’s ‘triumphant procession of popular things’ as a violation of art’s privileged autonomy. In the ‘collective-hallucinatory firmament’ of postmodern hyper-reality, artists no longer express ideas but rather present empty ‘images of images,’ which Kissick defiantly dismisses as ‘tired art, recycled pop, bad taste, political spectacle, and hyper-speculation.’ As J.J. Charlesworth observes in ArtReview: ‘What really seems to disconcert ‘our’ current artworld is the sense that a form of largely unregulated, DIY mass culture has spawned beyond the reach or control of cultural gatekeepers.’

The twentieth century was replete with artists questioning the relationship between art and money. Their difference from Beeple was that they were looking for ways to uncouple the pair, rather than fuse them.

Beeple (b. 1981), EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS. Minted on 16 February 2021. non-fungible token (jpg). 21,069 x 21,069 pixels (319,168,313 bytes). This work is unique.

It is tempting to see the cultural gatekeepers’ protests against digital art NFTs as the grousing of a critical establishment at its own loss of influence. The snobbery of the self-appointed elect was challenged decades ago by Marcel Duchamp, in what looks like a premonitory contribution to the current NFT discourse. In his 1957 paper ‘The Creative Act,’ Duchamp rejects the elitist exclusion of ‘bad’ art: ‘art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.’ Yet Duchamp also rejected the idea of equity in artistic value: ‘Millions of artists create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity.’ Three conclusions follow for our own day: (1) Everydays is indeed an artwork, (2) it has passed the approval of the spectators (buyers) by garnering such a high bid, (3) only posterity will determine its ultimate aesthetic value. Nowhere does Duchamp mention professional critics.

This omission is especially glaring since the late 1950s were the apex of critical influence on contemporary art. These were the years when a pair of New York critics—Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg—wielded an almost dictatorial influence. Such critics did not just evaluate already-existing art; their pronouncements determined the forms of future works. Because the relationship between artwork and art criticism has been mutually determining for most of the twentieth century, one of Beeple’s many transgressions is his deconstruction of the polarity between the two. The media response that his oeuvre evokes is not something external to it, but one of its most vital components. The outrage increases the price, and the price is not an addition to the art but its very essence. In the form of the NFT, the ancient opposition between art and money is finally abolished. So perhaps the consequent eruption of indignation and disbelief throughout the artworld is more than defensive elitism, and there are reasons other than snobbery to be suspicious of the NFT’s fusion of aesthetics with economics.

NFTs also represent the ultimate aestheticization of exchange-value—a process on which artists and art critics have meditated for most of the last century.

Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood, The Blind Man No. 2, 1917, “The Richard Mutt Case.”

Before the twentieth century it was a simple matter to own a piece of art. One simply bought it, took possession of it and, if one chose, locked it away in one’s cellar. Ownership gave exclusive rights to access the artwork (albeit not to its copyright). That changed in the age of mechanical reproduction, and by the twentieth century anyone could view the same image as the artwork’s owner photographed in a book or magazine. What ownership brought was now access to the original, the bearer of the mysterious, pseudo-scarce ‘aura’ described by Walter Benjamin.

The relationship between art and money has always been symbiotic. It has been equally true with papal patronage in sixteenth century, and with the interwar European avant-garde whose fortunes, according to Greenberg, were inexorably linked to the market ‘by an umbilical cord of gold.’ After all, art and money are basically similar phenomena: both are valuable and significant systems of symbols. The twentieth century was replete with artists questioning the relationship between art and money. Their difference from Beeple was that they were looking for ways to uncouple the pair, rather than fuse them. As early as 1914, Duchamp’s revolutionary concept of the ‘readymade’ had undermined the process of commodification that had engulfed the artworld. Along with his Dadaist allies, Duchamp succeeded in redefining the fine arts, moving away from the given of physical painting and sculpture and towards serialized, de-commodified, temporary or even traceless performances and manifestos.

By insisting that a fictitious ‘R. Mutt’ had the right to anoint a urinal as art because ‘whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it,’ Duchamp initiated what the late David Graeber called the ‘aesthetic validation of managerialism.’ A lowly plumbing fixture can be art, as long as someone (who did not even create it) calls it art. The task of validation, and the creation of value, later devolved from artists to curators, who could throw ordinary objects into the mix along with bona fide artworks, confident that no one could legitimately object. Today this function falls to auction houses which, in Graeber’s words, use ‘money as a sacral grace that baptizes ordinary objects magically, turning them into a higher value.’ That is exactly what happened to Beeple’s opus on March 11, 2021 when the sale closed at $69,346,250.

Subsequent movements like Fluxus and Conceptual Art continued Duchamp’s efforts to separate art from money. Their methods included relying on performance instead of painting or drawing, and using DIY kits instead of traditional cast or carved sculpture. They documented events with sets of instructions or certificates of authenticity, and these took the place of paintings and sculpture as the physical manifestations of art that was otherwise disembodied. The remarkable Piero Manzoni created works such as Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit, 1961), and advertised his ‘product’ by standing in a toilet with a tiny tin in his right hand and a coy smile on his face. Manzoni commented on the relations between art and money in Sculture vivendi (Living Sculptures, 1961), which consisted of living people ‘authenticated’ with different colored ink stamps designating various body parts, or the entire person, as an artwork. He incorporated cheeky pricing systems into his artworks: the price of the shit-tins corresponded to the price of gold, the color stamps on the living sculpture were priced by body part and so on. Manzoni documented his works with photographs, making the record part of the process, and proving their uniqueness, just as the blockchain records the uniqueness of the NFT today.

If aesthetics and economics are not merely analogous but actually identical, we must bid farewell to aesthetic experience itself.

Piero Manzoni (1933-1963), Merda d'artista, 1961. Tin can, printed paper and excrement, 48 × 65 × 65 mm, 0.1 kg.

Yves Klein (1928–1962), Performance Transfer of a "Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility" to Michael Blankfort, Pont au Double, Paris, February10, 1962. Photo : © Giancarlo Botti. © The Estate of Yves Klein c/o ADAGP, Paris

At around the same time, Yves Klein was inventing, performing and documenting his transgressive classic Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility. Performed on February 10th, 1962, it involved Klein throwing half of his payment into the river Seine. The work’s buyer then burned the receipt for the transaction. This performance presaged the NFT in several respects. The artwork included the physical destruction of the artist’s remuneration, provocatively suggesting an equivalence between the two processes. As Klein gnomically explained: ‘For each zone the exact weight of pure gold which is the material value correspondent to the immaterial acquired.’ To be authentic the event had to be witnessed—Klein specified by ‘an Art Museum Director, or an Art Gallery Expert, or an Art Critic’— in a manner that anticipates the authentication provided by an NFT’s imprint in a blockchain. Klein even included a provision to prevent resale: ‘The zone[s] having been transferred in this way are not any more transferable by their owner.’

Klein had first made his point about the arbitrary value of art in 1957, when he placed eleven identical paintings in Milan’s Galleria Apollinaire. These were to be purchased at various prices, according to what the buyer felt each was worth. Thirty-five years later, the British duo K Foundation performed an artwork by burning banknotes to the value of a million pounds sterling. By the twenty-first century, when Banksy’s $1.4 million Girl with Balloon dramatically shredded itself to pieces in front of a stunned audience at Sotheby’s, and Maurizio Cattelan taped a perishable fruit to the wall at Art Basel, the venerable system of exchanging enduring artworks for money had been thoroughly and irretrievably deconstructed in theory. It continued to flourish in practice, however, and it blooms anew in the parodic form of the NFT.

The confusion and scorn with which the general public has responded to the sale is no mere backwoods Luddism. It may be true, as the influential dealer and gallery owner Stefan Simchowitz recently pointed out in a Clubhouse chatroom, that NFTs are just another commercial platform based on a new technology. But they also represent the ultimate aestheticization of exchange-value—a process on which artists and art critics have meditated for most of the last century. NFTs are the apotheosis of the tendency described in Guy Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, whereby alienated human labor-power attains an autonomous, performative force by taking a symbolic form. Debord had nothing but scorn for the society of the spectacle, but it would surely be rash to dismiss his prophetic diatribe as cultural elitism.

The real ethical objection to the rise of NFTs involves the elimination of aesthetics itself as a discrete sphere of human experience.

NFTs’ dramatic entrance into the art market announces another stage in this process. It is not access to the artwork that has been sold: anyone with an internet connection can view the content, which has in any case been dismissed by Beeple himself as ‘trash.’ And there is no ‘original’ to which the owner might enjoy exclusive access. What the NFT’s purchaser has bought is not the image itself, or even the copyright to the image, but ownership of the image. Furthermore, this ownership is entirely conceptual or, if you prefer, financial. It does not consist in exclusive rights to view the image; it consists in exclusive rights to sell the image. Ownership of art has become identical with art per se, just as an artwork’s price has become part of its essence. Art has become money, it has turned into currency. The real ethical objection to the rise of NFTs involves the elimination of aesthetics itself as a discrete sphere of human experience.

This erosion of the border between aesthetics and economics is also visible in the financial sphere, where most value now takes the form of ‘derivatives,’ a hyper-symbolic mode of representation whose manipulation for profit looks more like artistic than economic activity as traditionally understood. Meanwhile, artists like Beeple assimilate the market dynamics which give their work value into their art itself. He is a true heir of Kaws, whose current retrospective at the Brooklyn museum was characterized by the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl as ‘a cheeky, infectious dumbing-down of taste’ where ‘blandness reigns.’ The content of Beeple’s work is unimportant. Its images are self-consciously banal, proudly lowbrow, deliberately jejune. But it is not images that Beeple is selling. They’re not even what he’s creating. What he’s creating, what he’s selling, is ownership: financial value. The advent of the NFT renders the distinction between art and money obsolete.

Does McLuhan’s dismissal of the mid-century cultural elite and their suspicion of the new media as a ‘moral panic’ apply to the widespread critical suspicion of NFTs in our own day? There is surely an element of elitism, and even envy, behind the cultural gatekeepers’ dismay at Beeple’s success. But that does not mean there are no reasonable or ethical objections to the NFT’s forced union of art and money. If aesthetics and economics are not merely analogous but actually identical, we must bid farewell to aesthetic experience itself. Art will no longer be even theoretically autonomous of the market. There will be no sphere of experience that can meaningfully be separated from finance. The prospect of Beeple’s $69 million will undoubtedly encourage many to tie the knot (as evidenced by the upcoming Sotheby’s and Phillips auctions entirely dedicated to digital art NFTs), but the marriage of art and money may well turn out to be fraught, fractious and ultimately unfeasible. And divorce is always expensive.

Source: https://athenaeumreview.org/essay/digital-art-nfts-the-marriage-of-art-money

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archiveofprolbems · 4 years ago

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Crypto Currency and the End of Capitalism (Part 1/2)

The technological ingenuity of the blockchain is a development that should not be underestimated. Using this ingenuity, cryptocurrencies provide an economic system that is untethered from a centralized banking ledger. The system’s primary genius comes from the large-scale communal recording and verification process of economic transactions (bitcoin mining). No trust is required in a central apparatus to verify trades. Even though the ledger system, which records who owns what, is decentralized and public, it requires zero faith that individual actors will not tamper with the ledger. The only way to alter this system outside of its intended structure (e.g., the only way to enshrine fake transactions in the communal ledger which benefit you) is to provide more processing power than a majority of the miners.

The “truth” of the blockchain is enshrined and policed in production. It is unlike any monetary system seen before it. In a certain sense, we can think of its significance as similar to the microwave. The microwave allows for something that has not been done before in all human history: to cook food from the inside-out using electromagnetic radiation. When one explains the microwave in this way, which is empirically correct, it makes this technological innovation seem far more significant than what it truly is. In reality, cooking has not been “revolutionized” through the microwave because it is the same mundane process as before, just slightly easier as a result of technological development.

When describing something like bitcoin — making important note of its decentralized verification structure, its inability to be controlled by governments, etc. — one may immediately imagine it is as revolutionary, altering the very fabric of society for the better. Surely this is what its creators had imagined it would do. This is especially clear given that the individual or team that developed bitcoin did so under a pseudonym. Fear of unleashing a technology into the world which would threaten the stability of governments and their economic policies is not something any intelligent programmer would take lightly. Some might have imagined, and some likely still do, that the development of the world’s first decentralized currency is revolutionary in the sense that it will destroy the top-down authoritarian structures of the capitalist market. Instead, we have come to find out that cryptocurrency is just like the microwave.

I make the argument that bitcoin, and other market innovations, cannot “disrupt” top-down capitalist economic structures for many reasons, firstly anthropological: It appears as if the common sense bourgeois position that markets are a product of human nature, and subsequently can and have existed in non-hierarchical societies, cannot be reasonably verified by historical evidence. To quote anthropologist David Graeber:

“In that common-sense view, the State and the Market tower above all else as diametrically opposed principles. Historical reality reveals, however, that they were born together and have always been intertwined.” -David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years.

It turns out, historically speaking, that markets only occur alongside the invention of the state and did not exist before this pivotal movement (or moments) in human history.

Lewis Henry Morgan’s descriptions of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, among others, were widely published-and they made clear that the main economic institution among the Iroquois nations were longhouses where most goods were stockpiled and then allocated by women’s councils, and no one ever traded arrowheads for slabs of meat. Economists simply ignored this information.” Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years.

There is no mystical “state of nature” in which humans freely trade with each other through barter and crude currency systems as the primary means of resource distribution. In early hunter-gatherer societies, we can note that, as Graeber demonstrated, resources are allocated and distributed based upon the needs of the collective society. Markets, and economic transactions, as the primary mode of societal resource distribution emerge only after the violent process of dispossession and accumulation of social surplus which happens alongside the historical emergence of the state.

It is relatively easy to infer from this basic anthropological position that markets are predicated upon states. Of course, this is unless one argues that the state allows for markets to be created but may “wither away” and still allow for market relations in a decentralized system. It seems fitting that blockchain technology would be a beneficial resource to make this reality possible. It is too bad that it isn’t possible. The primary reason a market is not possible without a state, which is confirmed by the anthropological evidence, relates to the necessary monopoly on violence connected to private property. It turns out that market-based economic transactions contain the incentive to screw over the person (or entity) that one is trading with. This does not lend well to cooperation if there is no entity that oversees these transactions and ensures they do not escalate towards violence.

When Hobbes remarks that the “state of nature” is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” he would have been correct about this assessment assuming that humans only interacted with each other within this “state of nature” through economic transactions. The trading that does happen in these early societies (e.g., societies that Hobbes would argue are closest to the state of nature) are generally between strangers and play out similarly to how Hobbes described the state of nature. The social rituals around them often include either anger/violence or social mechanisms to undercut the inevitable anger and violence that may come from the realization that one has gotten the bad end of a deal. From Graeber’s example of the Nambikwara of Brazil:

“If an individual wants an object he extols it by saying how fine it is. If a man values an object and wants much in exchange for it, instead of saying that it is very valuable he says that it is no good, thus showing his desire to keep it. “This axe is no good, it is very old, it is very dull,” he will say, referring to his axe which the other wants. This argument is carried on in an angry tone of voice until a settlement is reached. When agreement has been reached each snatches the object out of the other’s hand. If a man has bartered a necklace, instead of taking it off and handing it over, the other person must take it off with a show of force. Disputes, often leading to fights, occur when one party is a little premature and snatches the object before the other has finished arguing.”

We can see that the only manifestations of a market system in early anarchistic societies (that is, societies without a state) is “carried out between people who might otherwise be enemies and hover[s] about an inch away from outright warfare — and… if one side later decide[s] they had been taken advantage of, it c[an] very easily lead to actual wars.”

Contrary to Hobbes’ view, this “state of nature” where there is a constant threat of others stealing one’s personal property because there is no government to mediate personal differences, is only noticed in the market transactions that are few and far between within early communal societies. The image of the barbarous chaos of a pre-state, pre-government society (or lack of society for Hobbes) in which my personal property may be arbitrarily taken by the strongest and most physically capable whenever they deem it desirable to them would logically lead to the development of the state to mediate our differences and protect the weak from the strong. Hobbes is correct that this would be an entirely irrational way to live. If it was “human nature” to organize ourselves as he described, then the development of the state would be logical. This is why societies that have existed without a state primarily distributed goods based upon the collective group’s needs and desires, not upon trade and barter.

While bitcoin’s decentralized autonomous ledger system may sneak some power away from centralized financial systems, blockchain could not hope to predicate an anarcho-capitalist society. The ledgers which keep track of economic transactions within a blockchain may appear to be rhizomatic (that is, they maybe be predicated on a “mass root” system of non-hierarchical connections that must all be severed for the organism to die). Yet, these connections are also ironically predicated upon a state to enforce their validity. Let’s imagine that in a cryptocurrency based anarcho-capitalist utopia, I buy a pair of shoes through bitcoin, and the seller steals them back after our economic transaction is verified. Without a state to intervene and enforce the property relations enshrined in the ledger, I am fresh out of luck.

In this example, blockchain technology’s decentralized nature actually makes the state’s job of enforcing property relations (which are recorded in the communal blockchain ledger) even more difficult. The state would have no capacity to meaningfully alter the ledger itself in this situation. In a certain left accelerationist sense, the potential domination of blockchain-based currencies is a good thing. It weakens the state’s capacity to oversee and monitor economic transactions and moves us further towards a market system that is truly “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

The primary process of recording which is essential to the capitalist society is the recording of capital itself. As Keynes correctly identified (and Daniel W. Smith excellently explicated), the capitalist social formation is fundamentally structured on the question of “codes, flows and stocks.” (1) Who owns what? (2) Who trades what to who? And (3) who verifies this? Are the three primary questions the capitalist society is contingent upon. If it is unable to continue to answer these, then it is destroyed. Blockchain based currencies answer these questions in an entirely unique way compared to traditional monetary systems. The inscription of capital is a communal process which cannot be disrupted by attacks on the central mechanisms of recording. The truth of the transaction is enshrined in production, it cannot be altered if the state or other important actors deem certain transactions as unfavourable.

One way of conceptualizing this phenomenon, following the Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of “rhizomatic” and “arborescent” structures, is the ebb and flow between deterritorialization and reterritorialization within a politico-economic system dominated by capital. Capital critiques and breaks down pre-existing social formations for the sake of the further generation of capital — one can think of women gaining a modicum of rights as a result of their integration into the workforce as an example of this; the destruction of some element of pre-capitalist social formations for the sake of more available workers to generate capital. One can conceptualize the elements of blockchain currencies which operate entirely independently of the state apparatus, e.g., their public decentralized ledger systems, as being deterritorializations which then have an even increasingly more difficult time safely being reterritorialized. It is in this sense that Marx did not even understand how correct he was when he stated that “all that is solid melts into air.”

While this tendency within capitalism generates the capacity for lines of flight outside of the system, any deterritorialization done by capital itself cannot hope to lead towards lines of flight. These capitalist deterritorialization cannot allow for the possibility of a movement outside of capitalism. Within Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Guattari explicates how rhizomatic structures that attempt to form based purely on the deterritorial capacities of capital will necessarily reterritorialize into arborescent, top-down authoritarian structures.

“The history of capitalist subjectivity appears to me to be inseparable from a double tension, which pulls it in opposite directions: towards a deterritorialization expelling it from its ‘native lands’ — of the orders of childhood, filiation, life situation, professional guarantee, ethiconational identity…and towards an existential reterritorialization that is strictly imbricated with the functionality of the system as a whole.”

Any semblance of a rhizome produced for the sake of capital, which works to critique the pre-capitalist top-down arborescent structures, will necessarily be re-integrated into the system to help strengthen it, will necessarily be rendered arborescent. When one analyzes something like a cryptocurrency and notes its decentralized nature, one must importantly analyze this structure on a three dimensional, as opposed to two dimensional, plane, noting that while certain elements of this relationship appear rhizomatic they are in fact necessarily connected to an arborescent structure which comes from above.

(thank you to https://twitter.com/schizoidvisions for the drawing)

The communal, decentralized ledger system that bitcoin revolves around is also contingent on the centralized use of violence for the sake of the enforcement of that ledger system (private property) or it would mean nothing. The state follows the ledger system and the ledger system only works so long as the state protects it.

Capital constantly works to critique itself, to “revolutionize” against itself, and in many cases even does so faster than the left can critique it. This is not towards the end of capitalism, of course, but its further acceleration. One can note the business jargon of “disruption” as a by-product of this. The capitalist is constantly fighting against themself to destroy potentially obsolete markets and provide to consumers new value-networks that can accrue more profit, more surplus extraction, more value. As Nick Land writes:

“Capital revolutionizes harder, deeper, and faster than “the Revolution”. Its lack of attachment to itself exceeds anything the left has been able to consistently match. Capital’s scandalous immortality is derived solely from its inventiveness in ways to kill itself.”

We must not allow capital to kill itself. We must be the ones who kill capital. It must bleed to death under our knives. The left must understand the immanent tendency of capital towards self-criticism lest our critique of capital be a critique of a system that no longer exists except for in the writings of long-dead philosophers. One of the primary achievements of the left in the 20th century was the further entrenchment and spread of capital. In a certain sense, we have been much better allies to capital than capital has been to itself. If the further acceleration of capital may allow for the system to destabilize — if there may be a blockchain-based world economy where the management and inscription of capital is public, decentralized, and unregulated — then the left must pounce on this new world. We must do so instead of either (1) clinging to the old world, with the perceived certainties of state capitalist leftist projects or (2) simply critiquing the old world, which begins to disappear not because of the left’s might, but because of the might of capital itself.

-Liv Agar

Source: https://livagar.medium.com/cryptocurrency-and-the-end-of-capitalism-1-2-f11db6a4815b

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archiveofprolbems · 4 years ago

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QAnon and the Crypto-Rhizome (2/2)

The paradoxical structure of a cryptocurrency — one which seems decentralized, rhizomatic, anti-authoritarian yet is, in reality, the exact opposite — can be seen as antithetical to many of the botanical organisms which Deleuze and Guattari make an analogy to in their concept of the rhizome. The express power of these bizarre, seemingly rhizomatic (and yet somehow arborescent) structures comes as a result of their paradoxical nature. One requires more than a surface-level interrogation into them in order to understand their true nature as a threat to anti-authoritarianism as opposed to its ally.

We can see this phenomenon as the inverse of many of the rhizomatic botanical organisms Deleuze and Guattari evoke in their work as a reference point. As pointed out by Jathan Sadowski in Too Smart, rhizomatic clonal colonies such as the “Trembling Giant” in Utah are primary examples of the botanical rhizome which Deleuze and Guattari are referencing. Ironically, the trembling giant appears upon a surface level analysis as being a large group of individual aspen trees, as if it is arborescent. In reality, this massive, ten-thousand-year-old organism is a collection of many trees all connected to each other through a subterranean root system. It is interesting to note how the cryptocurrency structure, or what I will refer to as a “crypto-rhizome,” is the exact opposite of this. It appears upon a surface-level glance as if it is a large, decentralized organism predicated upon a multiplicity of different non-essential connections, yet if one were to dig deeper, they would note the essential, singular point in this organism which, when cut off, would kill the entire thing.

Therefore, the crypto-rhizome is the exact opposite of the botanical rhizome, yet it carries with it many similarities. On a surface level glance, the botanical rhizome may allow one to assume that it is simply a forest of different (yet dependant) organisms, where each one can be killed if one severs the essential connection in each (that is, if one cuts off the trunk of each of the aspen trees in the trembling giant). A larger, structural analysis of these botanical rhizomes shows, of course, how much harder it is to kill this organism. Each aspen tree must be separated at the root level from the others (which in reality are not “others” but merely a different element of the same organism) then each tree must subsequently be killed.

On the other hand, the crypto-rhizome appears at a surface level analysis as being rhizomatic and therefore makes it impossible to target an essential point in the organism which, when severed, would destroy it. It does this specifically to hide the actually existing single, essential point which all data, life, meaning, etc. (depending on where this concept is mobilized) must flow through in order for the entire structure to function. The elements of the crypto-rhizome which appear as if they are rhizomatic are a result of a sort of pseudo-criticism of the top-down structure that is unable to destroy it and becomes subsequently integrated within it. With cryptocurrencies, the single essential point (ironically) becomes the very same point that fiat and other currencies flow through: the state apparatus. While it may have been an attempt to break down this top-down structure, it is entirely unable to do that and is still predicated upon the central point.

The crypto-rhizome masks its true nature for the same reason that the botanical rhizome masks its nature; for survival. On a surface level analysis, this leads one to disassemble the crypto-rhizome how one ought to disassemble the trembling giant and vice versa. The crypto-rhizome may appear as if one should disassemble it by attacking the multiplicity of non-hierarchical spontaneous, non-essential connections that make themselves obvious upon a surface level analysis (just as one ought to properly disassemble a rhizome). It makes it seem as if this is the case, of course, to hide the essential and non-rhizomatic top-down connections which, when severed, would actually destroy the crypto rhizome. Without the destruction of these points, the crypto-rhizome will not be destroyed.

This is how a movement like QAnon, for instance, ought to be conceived. Many were baffled that QAnon became even more popular following (1) the large-scale de-platforming of QAnon accounts on social media websites and (2) the removal of Donald Trump from office. People were baffled by this because they view the QAnon movement as a rhizome and not a crypto-rhizome. “Surely the absurd and sporadic structure of the QAnon movement,” they thought, “could not possibly survive all of its prominent members being banned, its centrally important websites being taken down, its primary raison d’etre (that is, of Trump remaining in office) being proven wrong.” This is an analysis that necessarily requires one to think of the Q movement as if it is structured like a rhizome, contingent upon the connections made online between the individual Q believers and fellow-minded right-wing conspiracy nuts on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.

This analysis ignores the essential, centralized point in which, in reality, the Q movement necessarily flows through; that is, Donald J. Trump. Trump functions, in many ways, as a despotic signifier for the Q movement. By this, I mean that all meaning and value must fundamentally flow through and relate intimately to Donald Trump for those who believe in Q to make it legible. If a world event cannot be understood in some way in relation to Donald Trump, then this world event is not worth thinking about; it may have even been planted as a distraction to get people to stop focusing on what is really important (that is, things that one can make relate in some way to Donald Trump). It is, therefore, no surprise that Q believers looked at the coup in Myanmar, which was launched using false claims of a rigged election, as a sign that something similar would somehow happen in America.

The baking process, which is the essential process of interpretation for the Q supporters, may be seen as analogous to the mining process of a cryptocurrency. In fact, a cryptocurrency known as “Tezos” actually refers to its mining process as “baking” and those who verify the blockchain transaction processes as “bakers” instead of miners. The baking process (of the Q believers) may appear as if it is decentralized and autonomous, not necessarily referencing any source of authority directly. This is how many Q believers can imagine themselves as “free thinkers.” This is another tricky effect of the crypto-rhizome. Many who even participate within its structure do not realize the top-down, authoritarian nature of the connections they are making.

Importantly, Q believers do not get their belief that Trump is secretly working with military intelligence to stop a Satanic shadow cabal of pedophile elites sent to them by the White House or the State Department. The truth of the world for Q believers is fundamentally related to the autonomous process of baking Q drops and interpreting world events to fit into some relationship with Trump’s supposed grand plan to stop the Satanic shadow cabal. Like crypto-mining, this process is entirely decentralized and not directly overseen by a source of authority. Yet, this mining/baking process contains a production of truth that is necessarily contingent upon top-down structures. Just as the mining process that creates the public crypto ledger is contingent upon the state to enforce private property, so to is the baking process contingent upon Donald Trump as a source of authority.

Trump serves as the despotic signifier for the baking process, yet this does not imply that he is in charge of how QAnon believers will see him or how they will bake world events in relation to him. One of the reasons why QAnon is such an absurd belief system which has no real reference to Trump’s personal goals and desires (by this, I mean that he desires to make more money, to be more well-liked, etc. and they see him as desiring to take over in a military coup) is because one existing as a despotic signifier does not necessarily imply that one has absolute control over one’s society.

We can imagine the example of Hirohito during Imperial Japan as an excellent representation of the potentially limited powers that the despotic signifier has (an example given to me by Twitter mutual @JimothyBurg1ar). Hirohito had very minimal control and capacity to act during Imperial Japan. Yet, essentially all acts of war, military decisions, governmental policy choices, etc., were done under the guise of relating to his authority. All crucial actions were fundamentally related to him, his personal interests, security, decision-making, etc. yet he had no actual influence. If Hirohito had been removed from power, this would have fundamentally altered Japanese society. He has no real capacity to influence politics, yet his position is essential, and all meaning-making must essentially relate to him.

It is important not to give in to the liberal “great man theory” of history when describing figures like Trump and their role as a despotic signifier for QAnon. Hegel refutes great man theory, ironically, very similar to Deleuze and Guattari in imagining that Napoleon was “history on horseback.” For Hegel, Napoleon had represented the zeitgeist of the Napoleonic Wars, where all world history had diverged into him, relating to him and his decisions. But that did not mean that Napoleon was in charge of world history during this time. In fact, becoming as world historically significant as Napoleon is likely not a desirable trait (as one can see in how Napoleon’s life ended). This is one way of imagining how world historically significant Trump is as a figure while also somehow viewing him as not having a meaningful effect on the creation of something such as QAnon propaganda. Trump, of course, enables the Q conspiracy by not denouncing it. Yet, it is not a surprise to see a conspiracy theory like QAnon attach itself to an individual who, given the opportunity, would not denounce it for personal gain.

The specific sites of meaning creation (the baking process) related to QAnon are not (in the immediate sense) constructed by a top-down state apparatus. They reference Trump as a despotic signifier, yet this does not mean he is in control of it. This marks a significant break from how fascist propaganda is usually disseminated.

As noted by Adorno and Horkheimer, fascist propaganda takes a similar model to the culture industry. Mass culture is produced analogously to factory production (it is organized in a top-down structure by corporate executives, where the individual is conditioned to be simply handed a heavily commodified, relatively intellectual simple product as central to their cultural life). Adorno and Horkheimer argue that fascist propaganda is produced following the exact same relationship to the culture industry and the culture industry introduces the individual to this relationship and makes fascist propaganda more effective. This can help reasonably explain why so many movie references are crucial to the QAnon worldview; their fascist propaganda literally references products of the culture industry instead of simply working analogously to it. Contrastingly to this traditional model, though, QAnon is not produced using the top-down industrial relationship seen in traditional fascism.

Many may respond that they disagree with this position and assert that Q is probably an op by either the CIA or Russia, invented to divide American politics or embolden the right etc. This account would meaningfully imply that the fascist propaganda of Q is, in fact, identical in nature to the fascist propaganda of old. This belief falls into the inverse misunderstanding of those who imagined that Q accounts getting banned would end the QAnon movement. Instead of imaging QAnon to be entirely decentralized, rhizomatic, they instead assert that it is entirely top-down, arborescent. One will gravely misunderstand the Q movement if they ignore either its partially rhizomatic elements or its overall arborescent structure. QAnon is not an operation by a state intelligence agency simply because it is too ridiculous. No competent government could ever imagine that such an absurd story (with such an absurd introduction on 4Chan) would ever even dream of being remotely as successful as QAnon has been.

The Q ethos has generally been constructed in a way that is very dissimilar to a majority of fascist propaganda; it has not been directly built upon a central ministry that espouses particular positions that the fascist masses then come to believe. It was created entirely autonomously of these central mechanisms of propaganda (which still certainly exist) and espouse beliefs that in certain situations even contradict the central propaganda apparatus.

In a certain sense, we can imagine that this is a product of the post-industrial age, where the division of labour centred around factory production is exported to countries in the periphery to be replaced primarily by service jobs. The gig economy has a far more analogous structure to the production of contemporary fascism than factory production for a multitude of reasons. The most important one being the transition away from a Foucaldian disciplinary society towards a Deleuzian society of control.

“Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighbourhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier’ but that card could easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position — licit or illicit — and effects a universal modulation” — Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control

Within the Foucauldian disciplinary society, one is organized analogously with the factory, where a disciplinary mechanism of power takes the unmolded collective of semi-skilled proletarian labour and moulds it to fulfil a specific task on the long and monotonous industrial division of labour to increase profits. We can compare the disciplinary society to how traditional fascist propaganda is produced.

Within the society of control, one is organized alongside the model of the gig economy. Deleuze had written in 1992 that the society of control functioned alongside the corporation, but he had predicted this phenomenon early enough to not see its primary locus in our contemporary era, which is still corporate but nevertheless far more specific. Different institutions of power join together in a collaborative effort to define the individual by a large set of data points (their consumption habits, their location, their credit score, their GPA, their criminal record). If certain elements of the data set deem one “undesirable” (e.g., you are sometimes late on rent, you have a criminal record, you said something bad about capitalism online), the algorithms which manage the data sets collected about you collectively work to deny you access to particular elements of society.

It is only able to do this based upon the pure atomization involved in “platform-based” business models in which everything is not owned by the individual but rented out by large corporations as a “service.” One rents their car, their house, the music they listen to, the shows they watch, means of production they labour on etc. This extends to services such as uber, which deeply atomizes individual work not by moulding the individual through disciplinary power on an assembly line but by renting their labour out to others and enforcing the completion of that labour through a GPS-based surveillance apparatus.

As a result of this, power does not mould the individual based upon a Foucauldian disciplinary panoptic model (which threatens that surveillance is at any time possible); power moulds the individual through the literal constant application of surveillance by a technopolitical security apparatus.

The crucial similarity in structure to a movement such as QAnon comes from the fact that this apparatus is dispersed and seemingly rhizomatic. Unlike the traditional industrial factory’s disciplinary power, it works to permanently observe the individual and collect data on them in increasingly intimate ways that abstract the subject while simultaneously reifying them.

“We can see the rapid growth of a technological rhizome through the ongoing effort to connect everything together into integrated, expansive, smart systems… The rhizomatic smart systems spread and creep, becoming massive and sprawling while reproducing the interests and imperatives they represent. Uprooting a large rhizome is a difficult task. You can try to sheer parts of it, but more stems will emerge elsewhere from the mass of roots.” — Jathan Sadowski, Too Smart

Sadowski’s account of digital capitalism and its relationship to the Deleuzian society of control within Too Smart is excellent. He highlights the nature in which the society of control appears as if it is rhizomatic, yet in reality, it is not. This society, of course, cannot be predicated upon a purely rhizomatic data structure as it is embedded within a techno-capitalist surveillance state. The crypto-rhizome is the emerging data structure that attempts to envelop all else through an acceleration of capital.

As the society of control, along with the increased power of corporate data accumulation, mass surveillance, atomized gig economy jobs, renting everything one requires instead of owning it, etc. becomes more significant and outshines the disciplinary society, we will begin to see more and more of our world flow through these crypto-rhizomes. In many ways, they are far less stable than that of the purely arborescent structure (as highlighted by the inability of QAnon to meaningfully organize itself politically and cryptocurrency being far less stable than fiat-based regulated currencies). But in many ways, they are much stronger than the traditional arborescent structure.

For the most part, the crypto-rhizome comes from an attempt to critique the traditional arborescent structure, which does not have the capacity to go far enough. We can see this in the example of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies attempting to critique the top-down authoritarian structure of a central bank, or QAnon attempting to critique the “powers that be” who uphold the oppressive global political system, or even in “platform-based” corporations who are ushering in the society of control attempting to “disrupt” older corporate models. In each case, we can imagine that this attempt at criticism makes our own criticism (which works to abolish the entire structure) far more difficult. QAnon, for instance, already attempts to “market” itself as an opposition to the status quo, which will fight against the “elites” and allow for the “common man” to thrive. It, therefore, may distract and mislead individuals who would otherwise be sympathetic to a meaningful critique of the state and capitalism.

This is why, firstly, it is extremely dangerous to describe something like QAnon as being “partially correct” as a result of it saying something about the existence of a group of “elites” who control society. If our analysis is to be truly rhizomatic, if it is to truly work to deconstruct arborescent, top-down structures instead of being integrated within them, we cannot give a single point of credit to these crypto-rhizomes. To do so is like giving credit to the silicon valley tech billionaires who are “disrupting” old capitalist markets by transitioning us to the society of control. It would seem ridiculous, in my opinion, to credit these tech billionaires for admitting the old capitalist social formation is “faulty,” given that their solution is to make the situation even worse (just as QAnon does).

To properly destroy these new crypto-rhizomatic social formations necessitates one at least understanding their nature, lest we attempt to destroy them as if they are either purely rhizomatic or purely arborescent (and fail just as one would fail to attempt to destroy the trembling giant merely by cutting down its individual aspen trees). As Deleuze writes: “It is up to [young people] to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.”

-Liv Agar

Source: https://livagar.medium.com/qanon-and-the-crypto-rhizome-2-2-11e3ec661737

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