Re: what does monetary value indicate?
On Sat, Mar 27, 2021 at 8:51 PM Molly Hankwitz 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 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: what does monetary value indicate?
Hi Michael, Or, maybe, originality has been all along, a fictional history, and a signifier for fictional social relations in much art history, if only to justify value through “scarcity” (genius and originality are rare) or create its justification (there is only one original) and to obscure modes of artistic production not about “sole” authorship and individual creativity? Somewhere along the line, “originality” was seen to be a valuable asset in art making, taught, told, produced, encouraged, and then it died many deaths as a concept; as something to strive for or achieve or practice or expect? “Death of the author”, digital reproducibility, post-medium conditions, AI Art, all seemingly question or consider at least art without “originality”. We have replaced this expectation instead with collectivity, collaboration, stakeholders, or, much more importantly, maybe, the artist as an “original” interpreter of systems. So, I’m thinking that the new artist might be more akin to an economist who comprehends the communication of value or an artist who digs deeply into AI enough to transform it...originally. This appears to me by way of Paglen, Steryel, and others to be a trend. 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? (Fresh from MoneyLab events) Molly On Sat, Mar 27, 2021 at 4:02 PM Michael Goldhaber wrote: > On Mar 27, 2021, at 1:27 PM, Molly Hankwitz > wrote: > > > ..how original is original when originality died long ago ? > > > Yes, originality died with the second cave painting, but has been reborn > many times since, even if only evident to new generations. Depending on > the fineness of your mesh, it is always relatively rare, and thus, with so > many trying for it today, perhaps easily not seen. But I bet still around. > > > Best, > > Michael > > > > -- molly hankwitz - she/her http://bivoulab.org # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: what does monetary value indicate?
Maybe looking at ancient coins and currencies will supply some context no one has thought of...Yale Music zoom session on what was real in Byzantium... https://yale.zoom.us/webinar/register/1716147047174/WN_QpX_wQWkRm66Dymd95VmqQ Forthcoming... Molly On Sat, Mar 27, 2021 at 4:02 PM Michael Goldhaber wrote: > On Mar 27, 2021, at 1:27 PM, Molly Hankwitz > wrote: > > > ..how original is original when originality died long ago ? > > > Yes, originality died with the second cave painting, but has been reborn > many times since, even if only evident to new generations. Depending on > the fineness of your mesh, it is always relatively rare, and thus, with so > many trying for it today, perhaps easily not seen. But I bet still around. > > > Best, > > Michael > > > > -- molly hankwitz - she/her http://bivoulab.org # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: what does monetary value indicate?
> On Mar 27, 2021, at 1:27 PM, Molly Hankwitz wrote: > ..how original is original when originality died long ago ? > Yes, originality died with the second cave painting, but has been reborn many times since, even if only evident to new generations. Depending on the fineness of your mesh, it is always relatively rare, and thus, with so many trying for it today, perhaps easily not seen. But I bet still around. Best, Michael > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: what does monetary value indicate?
Cryptokitties such an idea...money as expressive medium- because words and ideas circulate like currency - stamp the dollar bill with anarchy, antifa, Harriet Tubman! A token is something which exchanges and can circulate...at some point we step outside if circulation itself, which social media tends to escalate? is there any point in chasing ones own tail...will cryptoartworks require vaults? online communities have been monetized before...discussions around the specifics - “sharing””ownership””meaning” reinvesting language and value with the value of meaning to serve esp margins what does this have ti do with internet of things? object-orientation? will processes develop price tags they do not already have...? strategies like performance for sale room for generative slot machine aesthetic...how original is original when originality died long ago ? smile molly On Sat, Mar 20, 2021 at 9:15 AM Adam Burns wrote: > On 15/03/2021 10:38, Florian Cramer wrote: > > It’s [NFTs are] like a “Certificate of Authenticity” that’s in Comic Sans, > and misspelt. > > written in crypto crayons. for the love of humanity! > > oh ... but wait. check out these 'humanitarians' > https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission > #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: -- molly hankwitz - she/her http://bivoulab.org # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
The ecstasy of ownership
The ecstasy of ownership I'm still stuck with the whole NFT thing. But I want to move away from context of art, which has such a long history of conspicuous consumption, speculative bubbles, and dubious objects that it's very tempting to see this basically as the continuation of all of that, a bubble, inside another bubble, inside yet another one, pumped up by fraud. And there is probably much to that way of reading it. But what about Jack Dorsey's first tweet? Worth $2.5 millions. What kind of object is that, and what is driving the desire to own it? I think it's fair to say that it's a historically significant document and that it makes sense to preserve it for posterity because it symbolizes something larger. But why buy it? In this particular case, there was an element of a charity-auction to it, people buying overpriced stuff in order to raise money for a worthy cause. So, there is that. Rich people patting each other on the back so that some flakes of their "net worth" can fall off the table. There probably also some fraud in there. But even if you take all of that into consideration. Don't think it can explain everything. There is more to it, and that "it" has to do with ownership raised to a kind of metaphysical category. Or, to be more precise, it's an expression of a culture -- let's say libertarian tech bros -- in which all relationships to the world, and possibly to the self too, are expressed as private property. In which all different forms of social value are expressed through paying lots of money for a title of ownership. The "ownership society" is an old conservative phantasy, in which everyone acts like a little proprietor, and here it's realized in its most extreme form. It's the ultimate flattening of human desires into a desire to own. Making fun of the fact that by buying an NFT one barely acquires anything is kind of besides the point, because the desire to own does not express a desire to control (the standard privilege of ownership), but expresses a desire relate, a desire to be recognized as part of history. Bragging rights, as they call it. An earlier generation of very rich people has expressed a similar desire by donating money to worthy institutions and then having a room or an entire building named after them. The difference is not between digital and analog, though, but between different ways of imagining human relations (mediated through objects) and the degree to which ownership as the only imaginable type of social relation has come to dominate certain sectors of society. As a contrast, take something like ubu.com or monoskop.org. These are also projects in which someone -- Kenneth Goldsmith or Dusan Barok, respectively -- expresses an unusual degree of attachment to, and valuation of, certain digital artifacts that are meaningless to most others. They also invest significant resources, decades of their own labor, to realize their desire. But the desire towards these objects is not expressed as ownership, but as care, as a self-appointed obligation to create an environment in which these objects can unfold their potential for which they are so highly valued. I think there is a kernel of that desire also in some of the NFT purchases, even if buried under piles of bullshit. And they stand for an existential poverty, a poverty of imagination, of language, and of sociality. It's an ecstasy of ownership, and it anything good is to come out of this, it is to render the very notion of ownership meaningless. -- | || http://felix.openflows.com | | Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt | OpenPGP_signature Description: OpenPGP digital signature # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
