AND OTHER CRAY CRAY CRAP
much physical culture, at a time when online culture was already being monopolised by the big platforms. Performing musicians, for example, were badly hit by the closure of live music and were quick to see the possibility of an alternative to miserly streaming royalties – a week before Winkelmann’s Christie’s sale in March, the band Kings of Leon issued their new album (albeit still with a physical version available) to be bought via an , racking up $2m in sales. In November legendary producer Timbaland released elements of his forthcoming as s. With musicians increasingly at odds with streamers over revenues, alternative platforms for monetising your fanbase will continue to be attractive.
Similarly, for a generation of commercial visual artists, trained in graphic design, illustration, and video, oers the promise of a vehicle by which the price of one’s creative work can be controlled and traded, at a time when the economy of digital culture has tended to strip creatives of ownership and control. Winkelmann, remember, once earned a living making visuals for events, making his Everydays images for years before he had even heard of s, steadily building his fanbase on Instagram.
None of this can be separated from the hype around cryptocurrency, of course. The explosion makes sense as the merging of cryptocurrency with the fan culture of digital goods, led by oftenunderpaid digital ‘creatives’. The marketplace for images of bored apes, or cryptopunks, or any of Winkelmann’s fevered, derivative imaginings, is one founded on the torrent of exchanged value flowing through the Ether (Ethereum’s cryptocurrency). That this kind of visual art has become a form of bragging rights for crypto millionaires is because there are now such people as crypto millionaires. But as the value of cryptocurrencies like Ether and Bitcoin continues to rise, the incentive to market your creative work in this particular form becomes vividly attractive. Distinguishing the artist’s desire for control over their creative work and the speculative mania driving cryptocurrency is pointless, since there’s money to be made on both counts.
This doesn’t necessarily mean any of this will be more equitable for artists, of course. The big trading platforms, such as Nifty Gateway and Opensea, are in the business of making money from artists too. But the lure for all involved is hard to resist. For a culture increasingly conducted online, and with virtual reality and augmented reality being touted by big tech as the next big thing, the pressure to turn data into objects that can be traded in virtual currency by net-natives who are as much online as ‘’ is building. Mark Zuckerberg’s hourlong October ‘keynote’ video, heralding Facebook’s conversion to the ‘Metaverse’, has a fleeting glimpse of the new art object – as Zuck’s hipsterfrienddialsintotellhimaboutthe“£streetart”she’sfinding “all over Soho” the swirling virtual artwork starts to fade. “Hold on,” she says, “I’ll tip the artist, and they’ll extend it.” In the future, artists will all be tipped by tech billionaires.
But the dematerialisation of rarity was always going to happen. For years, video and digital artists, their gallerists and lawyers, have concocted contracts to limit the supply of artworks that are inherently reproducible. Art stars have discovered the vast sums that can be made from editioning works, and that the certificate of authenticity is the only document that really counts, without which a work becomes worthless. We may like to think that the explosion is driven by speculative delusion. That may turn out to be true. But in principle it resolves the problem of rarity for the age of digital content, adding the strange allure of ownership (and of course speculation) to the intangible culture of images in which we increasingly live. Artreview