I hesitate to bring up issues here which themselves are problematic, but here goes.
First, to the extent that art is a Foucauldian discursive formation (at least as I taught it at RISD in the 70s), labor, in the form of reading/ writing/conversation/declamation/discourse is involved.
Second, at least again at that point, there was a tendency to associate the value of a work in relation to the labor necessary to produce it; in other words, an artist would be paid according to the labor she put into the creation of a work, real or invisible, substantial or insubstantial. (I remember Adrian Piper talking with us about this, but I may be mistaken; this was early in her career.)
And third, there was within conceptual a discourse of the invisible or non-existent work, vide for example Lucy Lippard's The Dematerialization book.
There was of course a heavy critique from Haacke and others of the commercialization of art (also of course in music, tv (Radical Software) etc.).
So the value of the non-existent work here might well be based on the discourse; one can imagine a work which is not being discussed to blockchained, which no one knows about, possessing a labor value close to the null set itself.
For me, what's new in the work being discussed here is its relation to blockchain, and this places it within economic strata and habitus that makes me uncomfortable. Not that that matters at all, but the point is the embracing of invisibility and non-existence in relation to blockchain and (economic) value, doesn't this also relate problematically to neoliberalism? If one is going to work in this direction, is it worthwhile to consider breaking the chains of blockchain (in a way somewhat related to breaking the chains of the male domination of the artworld, vide Guerilla Girls etc.)?
I'm sick of the terms 'value,' 'transfer,' etc. - you can find them in the model contract drawn up by Seth Siegelaub and (I believe) Adrian Piper among others way back then - and then the critique seemed paramount.
In other words, how to turn blockchain against itself in the realm of the invisible? (Or at the least invisible or non-existent work of art?) And then as well, what of the labor taken up in the production of the discourse which forms the habitus or white walls or architecture of this emptiness (which oddly relates the South Sea Bubble or subprime mortgage crisis) -
Where is the gender, the criticality, the labor value in this? Not only in other words Marxist exchange but also use value; otherwise is not this the machinery of capital in another guise?
I hope this isn't too ignorant/offense/naive/stupid on my part. A disclaimer - I don't understand the machinery itself of blockchain etc. (i.e. the coding/storage issues) so I may be missing the point, in which case apologies.
And in the real world, today I literally cut open my ear, recoiling from a non-exitent fungus, and am trying to forestall blood on the sheets in the motel Azure and I are staying in for a week, trying to escape the violent American environment, in the search for long-tailed duck calls and their (the calls) relation to polyphonic music.
Best!, Alan _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
