Tag: Memes

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Day 62 And Who Can Make Art

My ego dislikes debate, but my heart leaps at tension.

Over the weekend, my friend Phil and I decided to make a functional art installation called Illegal.Auction. The premise is simple: we are selling Fungible Tokens (or NFTs) of Culture. 

Unsettled ideas of generation and representations colliding with abstractions like finance are important issues both culturally and practically.

Art is for itself, so who cares either way. A certain dogmatic insistence that “medium is the message” is pervasive in the critiques. Are movies different than books? I don’t think they have anything to do with the price of milk. It reminds me of the classic Annie Hall scene (speaking of artistic intent and harm) where Marshal McLuhan explodes on a chattering group “you know nothing of my work.” Woody Allen’s character concludes the scene if only real life were like this. Well on Twitter you can recreate this scene everyday!

It is funny because commentary is distinct from creation. And a lot of people have takes on McLuhan that he himself doesn’t agree with. But who cares right? Interpretation of art is ostensibly art.

It’s very interesting to see just how angry people get about the worth and value of culture in particular. As if it’s some monstrosity to comment on the abstract financial value of some creation with worth that cannot be extracted.

If it were so easy to make value judgments about art then we would trade it on the Chicago exchange like pork bellies and orange juice. Not that we don’t already sell art and trade it and frankly it has been a massive tension through the history of human creation how we value that work, but now many have decided to insist that art is non-fungible. Not interchangeable on a one to one basis like an apple. And yet we are acting like everything can be valued and traded so easily with NFTs. By making art tradeable on exchanges, we have made some thing inherently non-fungible, fungible.

This is ultimately where Illegal.Auction came from. These conversations are important and transformative. That we choose to represent the tensions with representations of reproductions of jpgs of art is part of the art installation. That it is a functional sale is in inherent to the tension.

There is a part of me that is really worried that because I am not a practicing artist that is paid for work or represented in a gallery, that I don’t have a right to comment on these issues. I am a technologist and I do work in finance and the overlap of disciplines makes this an inter-disciplinary question in my mind. It seems like some people disagree with my right to create art (and certainly the morality of remuneration).

But if we insist that only artists can make art I don’t have any right to make installations remixing software and representations. But I’m not sure anyone reading this is comfortable with that world. I am not.

I think people want there to be simple yes no questions to these things. Is it legal? Did you steal? Is it a transformative remixing of a cultural artifact? Is it worth $1 million? And the truth is is that there is no easy answer to what political system is best or how much some thing is worth. Trillion dollar industries are based around the fact that we don’t have clear answers. Irate commentary doesn’t help any of us understand the infinite questions of worth and creation. It is good to do and helps further understanding but its crucial to remember indignation and moralizing is a function of ego.

Personally I don’t think that wealth has any moral value. I don’t want to have to be wealthy in order to be valuable. Or if a piece of art I make does make money do you have a right to tell me it is objectionable because this isn’t how you make money? I guess you do. Whether you can stop me from doing it is a central questions for the ages and also literally why it is important to create pieces like Illegal.Auction in the first place.

This commentary I think is worth having. Not whether speculative infinite land grabs with financial instruments make you worth more to billionaires. They probably do. That’s fine! I think people are mostly offended by the idea that non-artists can make art. Especially if a transaction takes place. If we had stamped illegal on the jpgs and blocked out NOT ART on them would it have made it better? Conceptually I’m not sure that that’s true and probably reflects the viewer’s own sense of value and worth more than a legal, political or moral reality. Also I personally think it cheapens the point just to make concessions to dogmatic insistence on ownership in a space that isn’t settled because frankly it cannot be.

Much of the narrative and coverage around NFTs is that they delineate ownership, value and origination more cleanly. I’d argue that they are actually having the opposite effect. NFT’s are ripping away edifice and abstractions that we use to assign value and worth. And that makes people uncomfortable.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 31 and The Goal

I feel a real sense of accomplishment that I did what I set out to do; write one piece of long form content everyday for a month. Now of course having achieved my goal I would like to do it for two months straight but I’ll give myself a moment to enjoy the happy feelings that come from finishing what you set out to do.

On the first day my writing muscles felt atrophied. It has been sometime since I wrote regularly and here I was committing to do it every single night. But I was able to get into the habit and quickly found myself enjoying the routine.

The biggest change I’m noticing is a smoother less disjointed focus in my mental processes. Rather than needing to work myself up to writing or pick a topic and commit to a narrative, I now ease myself into the threads from the day and see where my imagination takes me. This mental fluidity (which requires non judgement which is a struggle sometimes) is slowly improving the quality of my thoughts. I look forwarded getting ideas on paper and tying together disparate thoughts now each day. To seeing what strange new connection might emerge from the day. Like limbic memory and crisis or the power of loosely organized crowds

I’ve also noticed a distinct uptick in the momentum of life. That a daily exercise of writing could push forward my focus shouldn’t be a surprise but nevertheless I’m seeing progress on ideas that may become a reality. Because I’m using this space to think about my investing, finance, and cultural chaos a daily writing habit means I am makings fast progress on a thesis. Writing is an excellent forcing function for seeing ideas more clearly but also for seeing if you may have the seeds for something bigger.

If you are considering a writing exercise like mine I highly recommend doing a month long commitment. Do it in public. You may be surprised by where you end up. I covered a lot of emotional ground which has been a really boost to my spirits.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 15 and The Wolf You Feed

A perennially popular “just so” story newly reborn as meme is The Two Wolves Inside. Not to be confused with the also excellent three wolves howling at the moon tee-shirt, this parable has a bit more payoff.

You can find endless “graphic design is my passion” variants of the parable from charming Etsy shop hipster versions to deeply weird mashups of Corinthians and Lanape culture. Thanks Art of The Christian Ninja Pastor dude. I’ll pick the firefighters training blog variant as beefy bros that save us from fires seem as good as any to own up to existential food demon metaphors. It’s not the best of the bunch and missed key elements like the wise grandfather telling the boy a story. But it absolutely captures the spirit of heinous layouts and type treatments meant to inspire you to greater things. Which is probably more core to the meme. As from there it reduces itself to further derp.

Why all this lead up? Why am I showing a badly executed meme that isn’t even the full story. Be patient good reader. Bad to the wolves. Well obviously we want to feed the good wolf. But also starving a part of you that isn’t socially acceptable also seems like a real asshole move. Why would you treat yourself so poorly? Or anyone for that matter. It’s like saying to a date “if you can’t handle the worst of me you don’t deserve the best of me” and then wondering why you get treated like a child. Bitch everyone needs to parent their screaming inner child. Blackmailing a potential partner into doing it for you is called codependency.

But I digress. I recognize the need for my own darker impulses. The tendency to swear (makes me relatable), the yawning almost never ending need for love and attention (makes me good at making things people want) and a litany of other bad wolf behaviors all serve a purpose. So maybe feed both wolves but recognize one of them can also kill you. Nurture it but keep it on a leash. Be the alpha of that pack. Oh god it’s been three wolves all along!

The tricky bit here seems to me where we extend out the metaphor to others. We want to be with friends and colleagues that are not fucking over their own wolves. Eating disorder wolves being starved out of fear. Ignored wolves. Misunderstood wolves. God it’s a parade of the kind of bullshit you have to empathize with daily as we grapple with the intrinsic sin and frailty of mankind. To say it makes the workplace a mess is an understatement.

It’s currently on my mind because I want to spend my time with people who are feeding and training their wolves for the best possible outcome for them. Genuine engagement with your faults and talents is a joy. It makes you better. It makes others around you better. And it’s just more fucking fun. People who refuse or are unable to engage with the sum total of their humanity just aren’t as interesting as those who are committed to becoming the best version of themselves. They also don’t tend to win as often, as limiting yourself out of fear is a finite game with only so many options to be seen as a winner. You either win a definite sum or you don’t. Evolution and bigger games and more interesting problems never arrive. I’ll just wholesale quote Alex Danco here.

First, finite games are played for the purpose of winning. Whenever you’re engaging in an activity that’s definite, bounded, and where the game can be completed by mutual agreement of all the players, then that’s a finite game In contrast, infinite games are played for the purpose of continuing to play. You do not “win” infinite games; these are activities like learning, culture, community, or any exploration with no defined set of rules nor any pre-agreed-upon conditions for completion. The point of playing is to bring new players into the game, so they can play too. You never “win”, the play just gets more and more rewarding. “

So ask yourself are going spending your time with people who are balancing out their wolves in a never ending game of joyful interaction? Or are you spending time with folks trying to kill off parts of themselves in order to win a prize that is simple and understandable. It’s not exactly a value judgement. Winning is good. Harmful behaviors towards others is bad. But I hope that we can all agree that a truly great life is a lot more nuanced than a scoreboard and a morality checklist. And yes this is me encouraging us all to spend time with better people who will support that.