On Tue, 31 Oct 2017, Rob Myers wrote:
On Fri, 27 Oct 2017, at 08:13 PM, Pall Thayer via NetBehaviour wrote:
This is a great read. Now I want someone to explain to me how a
non-material (non-existent) work of art maintains its
immateriality (its non-existence) despite a record in the
blockchain.
Immateriality and inexistence are different matters. :-)
Registering something in the blockchain doesn't anchor its being or cause it
to come into existence unless we agree it does or we have some way of
evaluating that existence -
http://robmyers.org/proof-of-existence/
Does being need anchoring, or substantiation? Here we're running into the
ontology of language, if I say "blue book" does that mean it exists? What
if I say "Here is a blue book." and so forth. Mikel Dufrenne wrote about
the world of the book (he was a phenomenology, a teacher of Kristeva
etc.), what the reader takes for granted, in other words the diegesis of
the novel perhaps. And the discussion should move to diegesis as well as
Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief...
For entities we are claiming exist outside of the blockchain, the data that
claims to register that existence is a proxy for them. We cannot validate
the correctness of that claim using the blockchain's consensus rules in the
same way we can for a simple value transaction if we wish to validate the
fact of the registered object's existence outside of the blockchain.
Something about being outside the text. We can only validate that person X
placed a record on the blockchain, and possibly that later they sent it to
person Y.
This does seem to relate to the ontology of capital itself.
We use such proxies when buying and selling physical property such as cars
or houses, or more pertinently when buying and selling conceptual art.
Certificates of authenticity for conceptual art are even more material than
blockchain records. But I feel they are still proxies for the work rather
than being the work, although this may just be the conceptual art fan in me
speaking.
What I wonder about is in a sense the derailing of conceptual art, which
was a reaction at the time, at least among many artists, against the
materialism and mercantilism of the gallery/promotion structure. Given
that a conceptual work can be incorporated into blockchain, which itself
is an abstracting, is it necessary then to go into a discussion of 'buying
and selling conceptual art'? Isn't this a leap which many artists, at
least at the time, wouldn't make; doesn't it reduce conceptualism to the
usual marketplace phenomenology, instead of the radical gesture that, at
least for some, it embodied? For some reason Beuys comes to mind - he
wasn't a conceptualist, but his teaching and art occupied such a radical
position - as does the work of the Guerrilla Girls etc. ..
- Alan
- Rob.
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