"This was the year... that artificial intelligence went from a dreamy projection to an ambient menace and perpetual sales pitch."

"Does it feel like the future to you, or has A.I. already taken on the staleness and scamminess of the now-worthless nonfungible token?... I suppose there was something nifty the first time I tried ChatGPT — a slightly more sophisticated grandchild of Eliza, the ’60s therapist chatbot — though I’ve barely used it since then; the hallucinatory falsehoods of ChatGPT make it worthless for journalists, and even its tone seems an insult to my humanity. (I asked: 'Who was the better painter, Manet or Degas?' Response: 'It is not appropriate to compare artists in terms of ‘better’ or ‘worse,’ as art is a highly subjective field.')... I remain profoundly relaxed about machines passing themselves off as humans; they are terrible at it. Humans acting like machines— that is a much likelier peril, and one that culture, as the supposed guardian of (human?) virtues and values, has failed to combat these last few years.... I spent a lot of this year thinking about ​​stylistic exhaustion, and the pervading sense that, in digital times, culture is going nowhere fast.... [I] wonder if... these perpetual mediocrity machines, these supercharged engines of cliché, end up pressing us to revalue the things humans alone can do...."

Writes Jason Farago, in "A.I. Can Make Art That Feels Human. Whose Fault Is That? A fake Drake/Weeknd mash-up is not a threat to our species’s culture. It’s a warning: We can’t let our imaginations shrink to machine size" (NYT).

What would it take to get us to notice this once much-talked-about topic that had fallen entirely out of the news?

The topic is NFTs.

I'm reading "More Than 20 Report Burning Eyes After NFT Festival in Hong Kong/Bored Ape Yacht Club, the collective that hosted the three-day event, said it was investigating possible causes, including UV lights used at a party on Saturday night" (NYT)

"[T]he Trump cards will feature... the former president’s face grafted onto reasonably fit male bodies, clad in various costumes of masculine bravado..."

"... including sporting garb, a sheriff’s duster and lots of blue suits.... We can look to some of the darker trends in the contemporary art market... when seemingly trivial or worthless objects... are repurposed as art and treated as both intellectually substantial and commercially valuable.... What matters here is... how closely Trump’s attempt to market amateurish iconography parallels the way artists, critics and collectors have used laughter to establish the boundaries of the art world. Simply put, if you can’t take Duchamp or conceptual art seriously, you are a philistine, by the definition of the art world. It proves that you are unwilling or incapable of a basic set of thought exercises and mental calisthenics that are essential to the appreciation of contemporary art. One of the hallmarks of Trump’s art, and the work of other artists who have attempted to market Trump imagery as art, is the expectation that elites will laugh at it. Those who laugh are immediately outsiders to Trump world, where a taste for the tawdry is established as a fundamental shibboleth of loyalty and belonging. Call it inverse philistinism: the use of intentionally bad imagery, perhaps with a wink, to create an 'us-them' dynamic...." 

Writes Philip Kennicott in "Trump NFTs are not art. Unless you consider grifting an art form. These $99 trading cards are laughably bad. That’s the whole point" (WaPo).

Hey, that got surprisingly intellectual!

Big and small headlines at WaPo on crypto.

1. "Crypto collapse erases more than $1 trillion in wealth, forcing a reckoning for everyday investors." 

2. "Melania Trump auctions off her hat, and has become the latest victim of the cryptocurrency crash." 

I'm glad to see that on the "most read" list in the sidebar, the big story is ranking above the big hat story:

Actually, it's the Melania story I choose to read, because it's hard to understand how accepting cryptocurrency hurts her. It's only a hat she doesn't want that's going out in the world. What difference does it make to her — the "I really don't care, do u?" lady — how the cryptocurrency bids translate into dollar amounts? She restricted the bids to cryptocurrency — for whatever reason — but since there are different cryptocurrencies, aren't all the bids presented at the bidding site in dollar amounts? No, she's only accepting one cryptocurrencies — Solana — so that simplifies things. Its value has fallen 40% in the last week, but wouldn't that cause people with Solana who want the hat to pour a lot more of this declining stuff into the quest for the hat? How is Melania a victim? 

Oh, I'm sure people could put together a list of ways in which Melania is a victim. Make a list and rank it, with the Solana-for-a-hat problem on it. If it ranks high, then good for Melania. But I'm laughing at the Washington Post readers who are drooling over the news that Melania is suffering.

 WaPo snatches the hat and runs with it:

"The original 2007 video 'Charlie Bit My Finger,' a standard-bearer of viral internet fascination, has sold as a nonfungible token for $760,999..."

"... and the family who created it will take down the original from YouTube for good.... Many duplicates of the video remain online, including one apparently rebranded by the family itself in anticipation of the auction. But the auction allowed bidders to 'own the soon-to-be-deleted YouTube phenomenon' and be the 'sole owner of this lovable piece of internet history.'"

The NYT reports on this mindless financial transaction.

Something was sweet, charming, and ephemeral 7 years ago, and now it's come to this. I guess I'm glad the family took in some money, and it's impossible to give a damn about whoever/whatever paid $760,999 for the nothingness that has something to do with the viral clip.

Reading about this transaction, I feel...

Amused and superior

Confused and wary

Envious and fascinated

Sad and nostalgic

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Some collectors questioned the idea of owning art without exclusivity. 'Why pay $69 million for something anyone can see online?'"

"... said Peter Kraus, chairman and chief executive of Aperture Investors, a New York advisory firm, who collects with his wife, Jill, a trustee at the Museum of Modern Art. Their acquisitions include one of six existing versions of 'The Clock,' Christian Marclay’s 24-hour-long video collage showing thousands of clips from movies throughout history. 'Scarcity is worth something; it’s about owning something that you think is beautiful and can’t be seen in anybody else’s house,' Kraus added. 'There has to be some clarity around what it is that you are owning as a collector.'" 

From "As Auctioneers and Artists Rush Into NFTs, Many Collectors Stay Away/Auction sales show a schism in the market: speculative buyers flock to crypto art while blue-chip collectors hold back, fearing legal gray areas and copyright issues" by Zachary Small (NYT). 

The NYT put a link on "The Clock," but it did not go to the full "24-hour-long video collage," only to a short video with where we hear from Siri Engberg, the senior curator of visual arts at the Walker Center in Minneapolis.

She seems weirdly lit up — those eyes! — and asserts: "Marklay has brilliantly wove together clips to give us this sense of artificial cinematic time." Yes, "has... wove together."  Somehow that solecism makes me feel that Engberg isn't really thinking the thoughts that go with the words coming out of her mouth. 

What Markley has done is take movie clips showing clocks and watches and displayed them so that if you start his montage at the right time, the time displayed in his video is — for the whole 24 hours — the time it really is in your time zone. 

Did you notice that I used the word "montage" and the NYT wrote "video collage"? That sets off my bullshit detector. The NYT write has got to know the word "montage." The only reason to say "video collage" instead is if you're stretching to make Marklay seem like an important visual artist and hoping to distract us from thinking about all the people who labor in conventional film editing. And by conventional, I mean they make films people will watch through to the end.

Kraus, the investor adviser quoted in the beginning of this post, questioned buying NFTs when anybody can look at this art on line, but the funny thing about "The Clock" is that no one will watch 24 hours of showing watches and clocks. Hearing the idea alone is enough to get the concept. The 2-minute video I've embedded is probably more than anyone needs to sit through. So how could there possibly be someone who will pay $69 million for the NFT of it?

The question answers itself! Owning the NFT isn't about looking at the art. It's about owning a unique token of the art. You're not so much owning art — like some aged plutocrat with paintings on his wall — as you are owning ownership. It's a perfect celebration of nothing. 

FROM THE EMAIL: A reader named Kay sends me a link to this: "In a horrifying, Orwellian plot twist, the upcoming auction for an NFT of a drawing by Jean-Michel Basquiat will allow the winner to destroy the original artwork." I regard this as a publicity stunt, nothing that will ever happen, but, as they say, when you talk about destruction, you can count me out.

"'It will one day be worth $1 billion'... Many people really, really wanted the Beeple sale to succeed. In fact, the high price [$69.3 million] smacked of market manipulation."

"NFTs rely on blockchain, a database technology based on decentralized, collective control of blocks of data that have been chained together in a way that makes the data immutable. Metapurse — the company founded and financed by Metakovan, the buyer of 'Everydays' — says it 'identifies early-stage projects across blockchain infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estate.' According to the Art Newspaper, Metapurse 'is also a production studio for NFTs and a major funder of the digital art form, reportedly owning the largest known collection of NFTs in the world.'... Making the whole spectacle look even more egregiously engineered, the underbidder was Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, another blockchain company.... The irony is that the driving force behind conceptual art... was a desire to resist commodification.... Conceptualists... thought that if you dematerialized art — if you took away the object and our urge to fetishize it — it would be an act of resistance against the art market and the whole capitalist system. How naive that turned out to be. Of course you can commodify artworks that exist only as ideas! It’s really easy.... You need only relationships, differentials, future projections and other ideas, all of which can be bought and sold.... As for the actual work that was purchased? Yawn. Beeple’s technique — collaging lots of colorful images in grid format — is a soporific cliche. Images like this, sometimes coalescing into other images, are ubiquitous. Metakovan’s claim — that 'it represents 13 years of everyday work' — is weak tea.... [But] I like it when the connection between functionality (or even aesthetic merit) and monetary worth is stretched. It can make us question conventional ideas of what has value and what doesn’t. That can be salutary...."

Writes Sebastian Smee in "Beeple’s digital ‘artwork’ sold for more than any painting by Titian or Raphael. But as art, it’s a great big zero" (WaPo).

This blog represents 17 years of everyday work. Where's my $90.6 million? 

Anyway... what do I care if rich people shift their money around according to the rules of some wacky game and get nothing tangible? It's the same thing that occurs in gambling. Is anyone defrauded at any point? Are they paying their sales taxes and income tax properly? Other than that, how can it matter? Is there a philosophical question to contemplate? 

I forget whether Metakovan is a person or a company. Let's see: "the buyer, the Singapore-based founder and financer of the cryptofund Metapurse who goes by the name Metakovan." 

So it's a person, some cryptic figure in Singapore. The prefix "meta-" denotes "change, transformation, permutation, or substitution" (OED). So "Metapurse," I get. But what is Metakovan? Kovan is a geographical location in Singapore. Is there really a person here?

Considering the complexity of the concepts, I wonder: Is the real artist Metakovan or Beeple? Or is there really anything at all — other than the market, a concept to be admired and cavorted in or scorned by each of us, as we see fit. 

And, again: Where's my $90.6 million?

"The artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, has just sold an NFT at a record-breaking $69.3 million, the third-highest price achieved by a living artist."

"The sale, at Christie’s, for the purely digital work was the strongest indication yet that NFTs, or 'nonfungible tokens,' have taken the art market by storm, making the leap from specialist websites to premier auction houses. Beeple, a newcomer to the fine-art world who first heard about NFTs five months ago, is the most high-profile artist to profit off the huge boom in sales of these much hyped but poorly understood commodities. If you’ve heard about them and want to know what the fuss is about, here’s a primer... An NFT is an asset verified using blockchain technology, in which a network of computers records transactions and gives buyers proof of authenticity and ownership... ...NFTs make digital artworks unique, and therefore sellable."

From "What Are NFTs, Anyway? One Just Sold for $69 Million/'Nonfungible tokens' and blockchain technology are taking the mainstream art world by storm, fetching huge prices. We explain, or try to" (NYT).

This post is the stark opposite of the previous post.