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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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All materials contained on this site are protected by United States copyright
law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or
broadcast without the prior written permission of the platform NFT Papier and
the writer in the case of third party materials, the owner of the content. You
may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of
the content.

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