Re: <nettime> what does monetary value indicate?

Dear Felix, Ted, Bryan, and Dymitri,

I have some differences of opinion about the nature of money, its meaning today, and what it says about digital art, etc.

First, money is primarily a social construct, resting on a whole host of institutions and arrangements. These inevitably change depending on time and circumstance. The Austrian school is certainly over-simple in its notion that money rests on something unchangeable with definite use, such as gold. So is the simple Marxian view that the value of money is somehow conferred by the socially necessary labor time to produce it. (Marx introduced the concept of labor time to argue that workers under capitalism were being systematically robbed, not as some sort of essential fact.)

After all, though it takes more than a penny’s worth of effort to make a penny, it takes about the same amount effort to make a thousand-dollar bill as a ten-dollar bill. The effort it can take to have x million dollars in stocks or in a bank account may not be appreciably different from having 2x million or .5x million. There’s a lot of looseness.

If, as I have argued elsewhere, we increasingly live in an economy based on the scarcity and desirability of (human) attention, then one of the values of having a lot of money and somehow making the fact known is that our learned fascination with money itself leads the flaunters of it to get additional attention, which sometimes can be further monetized. On the other hand, at times, having very little money can also be a way to get attention, which can sometimes also be monetized.

On to art. Art can get attention for its maker or possessor in a variety of ways: being beautiful, being novel, being revelatory, etc. The difference between a famous Picasso painting and a very good copy of it lies ultimately in the fact that Picasso actually worked on one but not the other. Picasso’s paintings made him Picasso, but being Picasso, anything he worked on took on his aura. Of course, now that he’s dead, authenticating which is which is a complicated social process, with margins of error. Only when the art world—or the relevant part of it—is more or less in agreement can we tell real from fake, and thus help determine the apparent worth to collectors. The fact that the catalogue raisonnée for Picasso has only a limited number of works, while the number potential collectors keeps climbing, tends to increase the value of the authenticated ones. If you have the money you might buy it just to bask in his aura, or to admire it, or to get attention for yourself, or—or perhaps also—as an investment more likely to go up in value than down. It can be somewhat like buying a house that you expect to relish living in as well as having as a good investment.

In recent decades, digital art has opened up new possibilities for artists, but there is no sense of the artist’s actually having bodily touched any particular avatar. There are still possibilities of making money, somewhat similar to portions of Christo’s various gates or curtains being cut into small fabric pieces and then sold. Which in turn is not that different from the added value Abraham Lincoln’s actual pocket watch would have over another identical-appearing watch made by the same maker. A slightly older era of digital art might make something like the original CD-Rom available for collectors. But obviously something completely digital that nonetheless could carry the aura of the artist somehow would be very appealing to the community of such artists and their admirers and would-be collectors. Hence NFT’s.

Just as the very first significant Italian Renaissance oil painting might carry special meaning and hence value by being first, it should not be too surprising that the first significant piece of digital art ever sold as an NFT would carry special value. So the price may not be outrageous.

However, even though it can be authenticated as long as the computer train used to record the unique attribution survives, the value of the authentication is seemingly less than say the signature on the painting or the individuality of the particular painter’s brushstroke. For the ten-thousandth digital art work the specialness of being a true NFT most surely will have diminished. The aura is just too faint.

One can surely argue that there are far too many artists, entertainers and what are now simply called “creators,” and that most of their work adds too little to our lives or culture beyond banality. Digital art mostly adds to that oversupply, I’d suppose. But how can greatness emerge except from a sea of mediocrity? We may not want the sea but we should want the greatness. In fact we very much need it.

We should wish for other ways to support great and potentially great art than sales to collectors who may or may not have any feeling for what they are buying. We perhaps should also want a way to preserve the aura, the sense of connection in witnessing art that connects us to the actual artist.

Or is that a silly wish? A poem read on a computer screen can bring the poet to life in one’s own mind. We don’t need to see the handwriting and feel the original paper. A Bach suite does not need Bach’s notation either; one can just listen—again and again. Visual artists have traditionally prospered by selling individual works or small editions. Perhaps digital visual artists are following the wrong tradition; perhaps they are authors more than painters.

Best,

Michael

On Mar 13, 2021, at 4:07 PM, Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> wrote: