Hi all,
We'd love to answer this but as some of you nay know. We are moving the whole
site, including this list over to 2 different servers, as well as having to
redesign everything.
It will all be there, fresh & scary tomorrow ;-)
It's a gonna take couple of months to shift the archive totally across but it
will get there soon.
I'd to thank Kate Lomax for all the heavy db bits, and back end work, and
Lauren Angelkov Cummings on much of the design & back end stuff ;-)
wishing you all well.
marc
Marc Garrett
Co-Founder, Co-Director and main editor of Furtherfield.
Art, technology and social change, since 1996
http://www.furtherfield.org
Furtherfield Gallery & Commons in the park
Finsbury Park, London N4 2NQhttp://www.furtherfield.org/gallery
Currently writing a PhD at Birkbeck University, London
https://birkbeck.academia.edu/MarcGarrett
Just published: Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain
Eds, Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Nathan Jones, & Sam Skinner
Liverpool Press - http://bit.ly/2x8XlMK
Sent with [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com) Secure Email.
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [NetBehaviour] Prospectus for nothing
> Local Time: 22 October 2017 1:40 PM
> UTC Time: 22 October 2017 12:40
> From: netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org
> To: netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org
> Edward Picot <julian.les...@gmail.com>
>
> Dear all,
>
> See what you think of the following:
>
>> Works of art offer unparalleled opportunities for investors, both individual
>> and corporate. They have proved their worth time and again as hedges against
>> inflation. The only disadvantage is the physical work of art itself.
>>
>> Valuable art is increasingly bought, not to be displayed, but to be hidden
>> away in warehouses in ‘freeports’: tax- and customs-free spaces where
>> objects are, legally, indefinitely ‘in transit’ between countries.
>>
>> Shares in valuable works of art are now being offered for sale online, for
>> example via Maecenas ([https://www.maecenas.co](https://www.maecenas.co/)).
>> Investment in art is thus being spread out from the privileged few to the
>> slightly-less-privileged not-quite-so-few. If you’re not rich enough to buy
>> an entire work of art, you can buy a fraction of one instead, without ever
>> seeing or touching the original.
>>
>> You don’t even have to know what the original work of art was like. All you
>> have to understand is its market value.
>>
>> The more successful online investments in art become, the more likely it
>> becomes that the works of art themselves will be permanently hidden from
>> view. They will cease to have any meaningful existence in terms of physical
>> form, expressiveness or aesthetic quality. All of this will be dissolved and
>> sublimated into their market price.
>>
>> The next logical step in this process is for the artwork itself to disappear
>> completely, and for the market value of the work to be the only thing that
>> actually exists, right from the outset.
>>
>> Therefore, today, we are offering you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You
>> are invited to buy shares in nothing.
>>
>> Nothing is a completely unique work of art. It’s uniqueness lies in the fact
>> that it doesn’t exist. It is an absence, wrapped in a negation, buried in a
>> nullity.
>>
>> Even though it has no physical dimensions, nothing does have a precise
>> geographical location. For the sake of security, to preserve value and avoid
>> taxes, it will be held in permanent storage. The location of this storage
>> may vary from time to time. Nothing is currently stored at 51.57057,-0.09667
>> - the Furtherfield Gallery, Finsbury Park, London.
>>
>> The method of storage is itself unique. In Flann O'Brien's novel The Third
>> Policeman, one of the policemen (MacCruiskeen) has a hobby of making tiny
>> boxes, each tinier than the previous one. He keeps them one inside the
>> other. When he unpacks them, the last five are completely invisible, and in
>> fact there's really no way of telling if they exist at all. 'The one I am
>> making now,' he says, 'is nearly as small as nothing.'
>>
>> Nothing is being kept inside MacCruiskeen's tiniest box, and anyone who
>> would like to visit the Furtherfield Gallery to view it in storage is
>> welcome to do so, during normal opening hours.
>>
>> Please be aware, however, that nothing, and the box in which it is stored,
>> are both completely invisible.
>>
>> In keeping with Furtherfield’s copyleft philosophy, nothing is being
>> licensed on a creative commons basis. Anyone is welcome to reproduce and
>> display nothing, provided they give fair attribution to Furtherfield.
>>
>> Also in keeping with Furtherfield’s open and democratic principles, we are
>> making one trillion shares in nothing available, at a price of ************
>> each.
>
> Questions: Firstly, for Ruth and Mark, would you be happy to have nothing on
> display at the Furtherfield Gallery? An empty room, an empty plinth, an empty
> box, or even a pin with nothing balanced on its tip?
>
> Secondly, for Rob, is it practical to offer a trillion shares in something?
> And what's the smallest cryptocurrency amount that could practically be
> charged for each share? In my innocence I was thinking that you could charge
> one BitCoin for each share, imagining that a BitCoin was probably worth about
> 50p, but when I looked it up on line I see that a BitCoin is now worth about
> four and a half thousand pounds. Is it possible for people to pay for things
> in fractions of a BitCoin, for example a thousandth or a ten thousandth of a
> BitCoin? In order to do so, if they didn't have any BitCoin already, would
> they have to buy at least one, ie. stump up several thousand pounds?
>
> It looks as if the cheapest of the cryptocurrencies is the Doge, which is
> about 46p at the moment, and you can get a few of them free as a starter
> deal. So I suppose the cost of a share could be one Doge: they're less well
> known, but more fun. Is that practical? Could you make a trillion shares
> available via the BlockChain and charge one Doge for each of them?
>
> The other alternative would be to make very few shares available, and charge
> a lot of money for each of them, which would be more like the proper elitist
> art market, and therefore perhaps a bit more satirically pointed... But
> probably nobody would buy them. And if anybody did buy them, you might end up
> feeling as if you were endorsing the whole art market system.
>
> Edward
>
>>
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