Microwave Æsthetics
the case for NFTs
When I was a teenager, I remember going to the Met in NYC and thinking to myself - “I don’t really like anything in here.”
I could see that, yes, talented artists over time had painted and sculpted quite well, but none of it really spoke to me. I found more joy in the art of a comic book than just about every piece in the museum. If had been in charge, I would have acquired Frank Frazetta’s “The Death Dealer” and hung it at the top of the main stairs.
As I got older I came to accept that serious art and the art I liked weren’t the same thing. Prestigious artists somehow commanded the heights with bizarre mediocre work, while those not blessed by the inner sanctum had to leave the “art for art’s sake” world entirely and get by on selling their skills like the rest of us.
And if you went to the MOMA, somehow the work there was even less appealing than the Met. Modern art seemed like a huge prank being played on everyone. I spent years trying to understand and still failing to understand. I read books, I tried to make the ideas and the experiences transmute into beauty and yet I couldn’t shake an underlying suspicion that most of this stuff wasn’t that good. I mean, some of it is ok, but from a pure æsthetic point of view, most pieces feel like failures. Picasso kind of sucks. Warhol is a one trick pony, and the trick isn’t even that good.
And who was deciding these things? People I’ve never met, people more connected than me, people with special glasses allowing them to see the emperor’s clothes. I didn’t get it but thats just the way it was. Like everybody else I kind of moved on. I still liked going to museums, and I still looked for art there that spoke to me, I just didn’t expect to really find any.
All the while in the back of my mind was this feeling - was it all bullshit? I never even considered the alternative - that the people who decide what is the best art don’t know what they are doing.
Where The Hell Are We?
How did we get here? How did it happen that schoolmasters are now in charge of telling us “What is Best in Life”?
Five hundred years ago, the Renaissance was in full bloom. Humanity was for the first time in history breaking away from strict societal controls, powered by the new availability of information (printing press) and the wealth created by the initial escape of capitalism(Italian city states) (cribbed from Josh Rosenthal + Accelerationism).
It went from this:
To this:
Between then and today the paths available to everybody on earth have expanded massively. Each successive generation enjoyed more and more freedom as the arbitrary control structures of society were eroded.
Now that (nearly) everything is permitted the question of ‘what is best in life’ becomes even more important, as does the corollary question of who gets to decide. It turns out to be effectively a set of appointed judges.
A small number of influential organizations decide, or at least used to decide. For much of the 20th century these judgements were handed down with no possibility for appeal. No impeachment mechanism in place, even when it became clear the muggle judges are out of touch.
The barbarians are now making the coolest stuff. They probably were all along.
Who Cares Which Fork You Use?
All of this is what makes the NFT art emergence (explosion?) so sweet, so heartwarming and encouraging.
For years and years the path to becoming “an artist” was a narrow one. The percent of the population who would paint something on an 4x6 foot canvas, sell it and make a living doing so was incredibly small compared to the percent of the population with vision and talent.
Capitalism based on delivery of physical products had arranged a society that severely limited who could be in “the art world”.
And suddenly that is no longer the case. It no longer matters which fork you use.
The restrictor plate on art has come off. Art for art’s sake is back.
Pure æsthetics is back.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty–that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
Artists, interested in building something cool? Check out us out!
This is me on twitter → @rightlingnod.
Ready for explosion. We’ve been pent up for too long.