Re: <nettime> what does monetary value indicate?

Dear Bronac,

It's hilarious what you say: the beaches, the digital hordes, "the rhetoric is being exposed and is adapting!"

I guess if cryptocurrencies are going to go from being designer assets to something more structural - full-fledged global currencies integrated to states and regional blocs - then it'll be kind of like a giant wave that sweeps over the beach, destroys all those nifty little parties, and leaves only two or three giant beached whales behind. Kind of like how we got GAFANG out of early Internet experimentation.

Anyway, Broodthaers came to mind as a counterpoint to the era of systems aesthetics, basically for his critique of empire (Museum of Modern Art, Dept. of Eagles) and ultimately, of colonialism ("Decors: A Conquest" or "A Winter Garden"). Works which go beyond the scathingly negative to explore the cultural and subjective foundations of imperial power, as it began to be experienced domestically by millions of Europeans in the late nineteenth century, when they ate a ripe banana or entered a steam-heated greenhouse full of tropical plants. If you look back on that work now, at least in the Americas at a time when statues are toppled and people protest in the streets against the ongoing consequences of colonialism, it looks incredibly prescient - far beyond Michael Asher or any other of his contemporaries.

Beeple is like a decayed and recycled Warhol, for sure. That sort of figure is a structural feature of society now. I am curious about the counterpoints, necessarily more rare or at least, harder to recognize. Who are the artists that have been able to represent and critique the incredible conquest of space that we've all lived through - I mean, the fiber-optic cabling of the world and the entry into ubiquitous real-time communications, including global finance of course? Because indeed, the material weight of tech and its environmental consequences are being recognized.

I just can't get into the crypto thing as the biosphere collapses. But if someone has suggestions about artists to look into, I really am a taker.

best, Brian

On Sun, Mar 28, 2021 at 7:21 AM bronac ferran <bronacf@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Brian

Thanks for the tantalising thoughts. I am confused by the analogy with Broodthaers. Had thought rather this was a renewing of Warhol and Banksy for the post-pandemic, digital sphere.

I would refer to an article by Buchloh for closer reading of the hermetic negativityin Broodthaers and associated artists such as Michael Asher:

https://www.artforum.com/print/201304/michael-asher-39885

The interview available via this tweet seems to me to convey a sense of Beeple as a declared non-artist, who works commercially for Vuitton etc, who understands the power and value of branding and rebranding and is not doing it for individual recognition (as he has professional status as a designer):
https://twitter.com/BusinessInsider/status/1370532729364828160

Meanwhile I am enthralled by the gathering numbers of artists gathering on the virtual beaches with their little digital hordes. At the very point when the material weight of tech is finally recognised and its environmental impact is being confronted, the myth of virtuality and weightlessness is being reinforced, as tokens of ownership, of the evanescent. The ecstasy of having an audience: of finding someone who cares! The rhetoric is certainly being exposed and adapting. Watch this space.

B

On Sun, 28 Mar 2021 at 05:29, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Mar 27, 2021 at 8:51 PM Molly Hankwitz <mollyhankwitz@gmail.com> asked:

Artist as “administrative author” or initiator of a system, through which communities can act, somewhat recursively to establish value, and/or prosper via, for instance, a shared currency?

I am fascinated by the concept of the artist as "initiator of a system," it's the most profound and still-relevant notion of art to come out of the late 20th century. To initiate a system is to open up the field in which something like orientation or valuation can take place. Exactly what the orientations and values must be is not initially prescribed, but still, the coordinates and the terms of measure are made available and shared, as we all know from software and activist movements and even love (let's think co-initiators).

But the demon of contradiction wants me to take something so admirable into a more troubling direction, which could have some bearing on Felix's question of NFT motivations.

There were these two dudes, I happen to know their story, Leo Melamed, the star trader of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and Milton Friedman - well, you get the picture. Leo went to listen in on the classes given by ol' Milt at the University of Chicago, notably because of the idea that in a world of floating currency values, futures markets would easily emerge. Money could be made from the possible future values of money - it fired Melamed's imagination. When Nixon suspended the Bretton Woods treaties and opened up the floating world, Leo commissioned Milt to write an authoritative paper, and the two co-initiators went to Washington to institute a new world order. Legal to boot. Friedman rang the bell at the opening of the International Monetary Market on May 16, 1972. It opened up the entire computational space of financial derivatives. You can read Melamed's prose if you're curious, but you gotta see the look on Friedman's face: https://bit.ly/3rvC1t8

NFTs are gesturing toward a new market, a hitherto unknown territory of abstraction. For a financier this would be the equivalent of the voyages of discovery - Christopher Columbus. The everyday lives will get colonized later on. Right now these people have the sense of establishing, not just an asset class, but something new under the sun. They feel like world movers.

The weird thing is that I think many of us can imagine it, at least a little bit. Do you remember what it was like, co-initiating social-computational systems? Maybe you still do it?

Around that time back in the early 70s, the conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers was ironically exploring what he called "the conquest of space." It was about Columbus and the art market and the Apollo Program. Certainly with the symbolic space they opened up - now the Globex trading platform - Friedman and Melamed oriented the whole neoliberal period. They discovered a new America. They created and administrated what you might call an effective abstraction, which has not yet ceased to govern the vast lifeworlds of just-in-time production and distribution. This is the terrifying other side of initiating systems.

NFTs are not going to rule the world. This is an attempted conquest of art-market space. But the desire it attempts to symbolize is significant. What kind of currency would a computational oligarchy need for the era of accelerated technological change and asymptotically granular population control that is emerging as a possibility right now, through the ubiquitous applications of AI? In the best of cases this would have to be a truly common currency, enabling resilience, adaptation, transformation for the future 9 billions of human earthlings - and infinite other species. In the worst of cases, it would be the currency of a veritable state-financial nexus, the kind David Harvey talks about, where privatized monetary creation is the enabler of hyper flexible bureaucratic control.

Frankly, just reading the newspapers, I see a huge struggle going on over the initiation of systems. Either you get eco-socialism, or you get the nexus.

Meanwhile I see lots of artists trying to invent new blockchain currencies. But who is the Marcel Broodthaers of the onrushing AI era? And how would *they* express themselves?

curiously, Brian
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