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Hi there! Please enable Javascript in your browser to use Ant Design, Out-of-the-box mid-stage front/design solution! PAPIER * Result * Z Zoe Nov 17,2022 · 6 min read (flat) street for art (pfp) > NFT mfers. Assembly via Mirror. Generative art is no longer a newly-born and those like Takashi Murakami are more than comfortable with an even flatter world: NFT. It is one thing to enter an avatar of an actual gallery space in the metaverse, go over the works of renowned art makers and read reviews that bring the critical stances of ‘trad’ art people to the virtual world; it is another, however, to browse on Opensea and try to purchase yourself an expensive profile picture that’d invite your friend’s genuine (perhaps a bit amused) concern - “how on earth could it be worth that much?” I was looking at mfers, quite belatedly, having heard of such confusions and getting even more confused by statement like “NFT art is not Art” as if we had ever figured out what Art is. It seems that many are erudite enough to have endowed Art with a meticulous anatomical representation that authoritatively excludes NFT. Meme art that lacks in technical and aesthetic complications? I suspect they are talking about art labor and am not sure how much it weighs in the evaluation of the capitalized Art they refer to. Or perhaps in the old linguistic and social game we’ve been playing in the physical world, Art is given a specific role, and this NFT thing we happen to name as ‘art’ too, refers to something different but equally existent. Where does that split occur? Don’t we always say that everything could be made into art since the modern times? I don’t claim to hold the final answer, so I browsed on. Mfers are a joke, I was thinking, and its end does seem like a roll up. OH THIS ONE IS KINDA DIFFERENT, I had a second of delight upon (far from falling for) the simplest stick figure kid against the orange background, the one that sartoshi once used as his own pfp. The thought of the price ruined my crude joy. I CAN SEE MYSELF USING IT. I closed the tab with a most useless note, thinking if one day I could “give useless notes to earn.” It is the instant and solid sense of ownership that kept me thinking. Many things have been said about the social significance of Web 3.0 as the manifestation of its technological characteristics. NFT art, too, feels more like a challenge to the capitalist art system when it’s not a continuation of sci-fi frenzies. On the recipients’ end of art, however, I’m more interested in what triggered the click of the button aside from pure profit, even though it makes an important part of the financial incentives. Even when sartoshi got his first cryptopunks, he found them “fucking sweet.” Isn’t the NFT hype reminiscent of street art? A similarly neat hit on the aesthetic (intuitive or perceptual if you are feeling conservative about applying serious-looking terms) sweet point. The comparison is pretty clear on the outset. Street art - those from the 70s and 80s in the metro stations or dilapidated streets of New York, those from East London before gentrification took place, or those strewing the ruins of Berlin - stand for the rejection of how money works. It is a visually catchy call against the ideas of conventional property by intervening with the impersonal demarcation of urban space for the interest of the capitalists. Street art gives value - non-monetary value - back to the ruins of modernity, claiming leftover spaces from capitalist and nationalist developments. Of course, daring ones would try to maim famous landmarks and monuments, but more take place on the periphery or in the crevices of ‘usefulness’. Similarly, Web 3.0 cannot be discussed without mentioning its challenge to the capitalist logic of Web 2.0. Regarding NFT, people create and collect according to philosophies that the blockchain universe dictates - so long our aged capitalist galaxy that’s bred its own art market now in crises. Street artists take risk and try to make heard their differentiated voices. So is the first batch of NFT art - similar dissatisfaction with old systems and big moneys; unexpected urban space or Web 3.0, they both found their new sites of action. Then who are these players - street art and NFT people? Both types of artists assume identities that they create to represent themselves vis-a-vis the government-sanctioned one that’s under increasingly strict surveillance. However, apart from the validity of pseudonym in both fields, street art and NFT art manifest opposing attitudes towards the question of authorship: the former taking a nihilistic view that rejects authorship and its benefits at all, while the latter, thanks to its technical support, ensures the author’s copyright. What if you can take financial benefits of your anti-capitalist guerrilla war, without taking the risk of being caught? For ambitious street artists who aspire to go ‘street in,’ the bottom-up mechanism of NFT and the market’s divergence from the capitalists could seem promising. The list of similarities and possible convergences goes on. Both tap into the meme culture and thus deconstruct cultural consumption in general as media phenomenon; both depends on community building for their dissemination and increase in value (monetary or prestige-wise), for they are closely linked to an urgent need for identity solidification - the counterculture for street art, or the pioneer supporters of Web 3.0 who did not have much say regarding the social, academic, and commercial mechanisms of the arts in the other case. Even their thorough integration into the space, real or virtual, point to two types of exceptional site-specificity: either the work is spatialized to daily life physicality as for street art, or the audience is disembodied and absorbed as for some NFT art and art spaces. What particularly intrigued me, however, was how NFT and street art both make me FEEL different than in front of a white-box piece. The artist, the work, the viewer - this trinity always exist, but the circuit of identification might take you different amount of time. When you collect a “trad” art piece, even an Andy Warhol, it takes a lot of time, perceptual and cognitive commitment, and a fair of amount of self-persuasion to make you FEEL your personal closeness to it: the artist is out there, a big name that you can’t get out of your mind and rid of the work per se; the content should deserve its collectability, so even a simplest Andy Warhol comes with piles of theoretical justification, which keeps the work’s afterlife quite distant from its creator; the work seems to belong more or less to the public sphere with its indelible connection with art institutions in its perpetual circulation that definitely outlives you - the art work is distant. Let’s face it: the work does not fully belong to you. It hardly comes with a private enough ownership. NFT art is different and some might compare it to the collection of fashion items. But have we not felt something similar too when we view a street art? You walk into a neighborhood, spot a cartoon figure on the wall, and recognize it immediately as a certain street artist’s new mark, from its style. The visual message is simple and style blatantly individual - you register the work and recognize the artist at the same time, not unlike identifying the new pfp of your NFT-loving friend. The art of signature to the extreme. While street art does not belong to you personally, it doesn’t belong to anyone else either. Its utter public-ness/decentralized-ness makes it equally close to any passerby - ownership comes from comparison. NFT art, especially PFP, is easily owned too - mentally. It becomes part of your identity smoothly and does represent who you are online. The mode of ownership - shall we say ‘comparative ownership’ to emphasize the its role in the case of street art - affects our relationship with the work and thereby shapes our feelings. Would you do the same with your trad art collections without the slightest inner struggle? Use it as pfp if you need a vanity boost, but you can’t share the work’s identity and it hardly makes part of yours. Admittedly, street art and NFT are more different than similar, and any gross comparison as such might be misleading. But street art does offer an inspiring lens through which NFT phenomenon could be read. For instance, the flooding fakes originate from the incentives of NFT opportunist and meme-ish recreation - in street art, we see images overwriting or in conversation with pre-existing works like ancient objects mashed up in stratum upon stratum of archaeological layer. Reversely, how could blockchain be visualized or spatialized with each block reminiscent of a brick on a street-side wall? Perhaps we can dig deeper into the psychology of fortifying or emulating in NFT by not limiting ourselves to the social, economic, and artistic paradigms we are already versed in applying. Not long ago, the end of mfers made a stir. Sartoshi vanished like the supposed inventor of blockchain, like a performance art in homage. He definitely had fun with the market like Banksy once flirted with serious collectors, shredding his Girl with the Balloon right during an auction. The art market has a good appetite and tugged into the malicious joke of the legendary street artist - the work even rose in price after the incident, probably because some can’t let it fall. Will mfers get sustained support from its communities and wave through the storms and bubbles as swiftly as Banksy-ian jokers? Or perhaps, Banksy is preparing for a naughty debut in NFT? I allowed myself some fun from the conjectures. Why not. > New York Subway street art in 70s. Photo by Martha Cooper. 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