Crypto-art is mediocre.
A nice SEO and SMO fire-starter, isn’t it? I can sense a thousand Tilfords gabbering onchain with their feet, however, I cannot prove it.
Let me repeat that:
CRYPTO-ART IS MEDIOCRE.
Let that sink be shattered:
Usual apologism: Yes, there exist artists, creatives, designers, and builders who, in their respective media, and by a virtue of beauty, a rose by another name if you please, create, either in the chronosis, or kairos, of per block time of existence, that art that is beautiful.
Beautiful?
Beauteous?
Now Gökhan, come on.
You really mumblecore as if you were friends with dear late Sir Roger Scruton.
Whenever I share anything by late Scruton, an over-achieving sth sth fr fr of an artist slide into my Twitter DMs and cares to remind me of that Scruton was this, Scruton was that whilst all they themselves offer is sucking up the unsuspecting sophisticated degens’ liquidity.
Both deserve the action there: degen, of being sucked off their liquidity; the artist, or the conman who claims to be the artist, of being able to save up some whale-size of stables—never ether, some artists might have taught you that, anon, when they nuked the markets a deep deep down cannoli a sell off for a lapse of momentary battle of marketplace of ideas, 69M remember?
At least that one produces nice posters for teenagers who live in the alternate reality of Woodstock ‘99.
Why deserve?
It is because both parties perpetrate a deliberately ugly aesthetics of, and, through what’s left of culture there to make into a future. No, I am not talking about an ugliness disguised as supreme Balenciaga.
Cristóbal Balenciaga Eizaguirre might not have ever dreamt of today’s B. However, B has a classy line (that I myself adore) that is cheaply copy-katzed. It is not that. I am talking about the so-calledly queer (unrelated to gender, & identity, or any woke capital agenda) one that taints the very adjective itself.
You know of that which I am implying here:
Artists have fucked the beauty in art off human psyche for ever, and ever, and ever since the feeling, sentiment, comprehension, and reality of time-making in, especially those of crypto-economics, are profoundly mind-renting.
That is, even if this ugly aesthetics of art as counter-culture (muh-my-arse’s counter-culture! vultures) is about to last for a couple of years more till media-tethered-to-liquidity-pools, that are NFTs that host alleged art pieces; it will be felt, kairotically speaking, as if it’s a very very long time.
Ugliness as Liquidity Bootstrapping?
Some cohort of DeFi natives would recall the times that were only a lil’more than two years when there was only a handful of people who were ideating, minting, creating, speculating, providing liquidity in, on, and through what’s today known as NFTs—NFTs implying mainly art markets and collectible bazaars that might be on-, or off-chain, however, are valued, and obliged to travel with records tethered to, or ingrained into permissionless and distributed ledgers thanks to blockchain technology. Some call it web3 for the sake of character space, and advertising for retail upon whom they gently dump their dryness, and discounted tokens with which it’s easy to produce claimable serfs who think of themselves as artists, collectors, and even curators.
During those times, artists and moonbois used to hate each other. I recall reading artists who were selling works not cheaper than 200 ethers during the last (and the last [sic]) NFT bullrun exclaim direct and pure hate towards “DeFi people.” There was a couple of people whose imagination could appreciate both the financial and art markets alongside the technological acceleration, advancement and betterment of the network that these NFTs would bring forth. That is, these artists who are now utilizing ugliness were then also ugly, in that, all they needed was liquidity bootstrapped with ugly art.
However, there is something more that ugliness offer for artists: Lazy creativity.
If you have ever set foot in a Humanities, Social Sciences, or Liberal Arts faculty, you are probably familiar with the laziness that acts as a social contract in the lives of many thereabouts, except for few who are almost always easily labeled as fascists just because they like to live healthier.
…and, that Laziness has been the main determining factor that has been seedling that which is perpetrated to be the art onchain.
I will be writing about this Laziness in the next installment of this series. Thank you for reading so far. If you subscribe to this blog, you’ll be able to receive notifications via e-mail.
GM.
