tbyfield on Thu, 18 Mar 2021 18:23:57 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> what does monetary value indicate?


Felix, what you're talking about looks theoretical, but at root these are really just questions of provenance, which the art world knows about only too well. I have several artworks that, in theory, could be pretty valuable but in practice are probably worthless because I can't (or, really, can't be bothered to) document or prove their provenance. As art prices have soared and arty milieus have mushroomed over the last decades, standards for authenticating works have gone completely mad. Their ostensible purpose is to reduce the risk of forgeries, but mostly it just creates bullshit jobs in the culture sector. "What did you do today?" "I verified that petrified mass of shrimp carcasses and noodles in a garbage bag as an authentic artifact of Rirkrit Tiravanija's seminal 1992 performance at the 303 Gallery rather than, as most thought, a contemporary forgery or, as some believed, an artifact of the performance he did three months later at Andrea Rosen. And how was *your* day?" It's just plain-old manual proof-of-work.
This growing focus on provenance is just one tiny facet of the rising 
culture of authentication. The same kind of thing has also happened with 
people's work résumés and academic records, process and product 
certifications like ISO 9000/1 standards, heightened security techniques 
from currency design to 2FA techniques, commodity-sourcing 
certifications (everything from Fair Trade agricultural products to 
isotopic analyses of nuclear materials), ART STOLEN BY THE NAZIS – the 
list goes on and on and on and on.
Taken together, this all makes it clear that we live in the Age of the 
Fake. That's not to say everything *is* fake or anything is real — it 
just means that, as a civilization, we're more and more consumed by the 
endless busywork of trying to establish not-fake. When you log in to 
some account you aren't proving who you are in any meaningful sense, 
you're merely giving the receiving end evidence (i.e., reasonable 
grounds for limiting their liability) that you aren't who you aren't. 
And, of course, when you prove you "aren't a robot" by doing some 
re/captcha, you're helping to train ML systems to do image-recognition, 
or at least a few years ago you were. By now there are probably dozens 
if not hundreds of abstract meta-derivative auction systems built on top 
of that that, so you kill time clicking on pictures of fire hydrants 
instead of taking up more valuable CPU cycles bothering someone else 
with whatever you're on about. If that hasn't happened yet, it will soon 
enough: for example, a service that targets neo-nazis and wastes their 
time so they don't waste everyone else's would be a really good thing, 
wouldn't it? But, then, an entire task force at McKinsey could waste 
time preparing a report surveying which political beliefs are most 
easily 'triggered' into clicking on cows rather than getting something 
done. Oh, wait, Facebook, never mind.
Also, it's worth noting that pretty much zero disinterested third 
parties ever have actually gone to the trouble authenticating some 
NFT-ish art thing. In practical terms, doing so might be difficult to 
the point of impossibility. I could claim "I have *the* ur-NFT" but for 
you to validate my claim, you'd need to spend $BIGNUM effort learning 
masses of hypertechnical bullshit involving some ridiculous hodgepodge 
of protocols, services, providers, actors, reputations, etc. Who can be 
bothered? $SMALLNUM time passes and hey, presto, my claim has gone 
unchallenged — and, as with most things, all that was aerial condenses 
into some good-enough approximation of solid, and in itself it comes to 
serve as de facto evidence of authenticity. Because, really, no one can 
be fucking bothered.
To anyone who's spent some time thinking about the modern sense of 
information, this should sound 'eerily' familiar. In Shannon's model, 
information isn't the thing itself, it's better understood as a measure 
of the reduction of uncertainty that it might be something else. When we 
think someone has transmitted the letter "A" to us, we didn't really get 
an A, we just got [letter] are and able to establish a high level of 
confidence that it isn't B through Z. But as you read this mail, you 
aren't concerned with "Wait, is that apparent instance of the letter A 
*really* an A? And what would it mean if my confidence level were 
lowered by N%?" You just read. It's the same with NFTs, except the 
people who make them are getting paid better than I am for typing this. 
But I'm reasonably confident that this email is somehow more important 
than whatever pot-induced NFT stunt Elon Musk is doing today.
Rachel, on one level your summary is obviously right — and, at the 
same time, it's not so simple.
The last ~artwork I made sold to a guy who showed his collection in the 
Deichtorhallen: what he bought was a stack of photos, schematics for an 
installation, and the right to print and build it. As it happens, on the 
way back to NYC from Hamburg I stopped in Amsterdam and met Geert, who 
— no doubt to his lasting regret 😹 — insisted I come back for the 
Next 5 Minutes 2 a month or so later. N5M2 is more or less where nettime 
began, and it was certainly when I decided Euro critical networks were 
much more interesting than the tangle of atavistic relations called 'the 
art world.' So we've been here before. 😹 But, more generally, for the 
last ~fifty years when various kinds of lowercase-a abstract artworks 
have sold, what's actually changes hands was pretty immaterial: 
instructions to re/produce a piece, a grant of the rights to do so, a 
certificate of authenticity, or something to that effect. By the same 
token, despite a lot of leftover techno-utopian reductionism and 
mummery, the sale of NFT-ish things is still — as Felix says — 
material, which is why (or at least how) someone else owns the 
'original' Nyancat but you or I don't.
One takeaway is that we can read recent events not just in an 
economistic frame but, instead, in a more properly historical or even 
anthropological frame. What we're gaining: the economic and technical 
modes of 'art' are reaching new, mass scales. What we're losing: 
everyone seems to have forgotten that '80s/'90s critical thinking about 
art and aesthetics was dominated by questions of originality, 
appropriation, seriality, performativity, transience, institutionally, 
relationality, etc. A lot of the chatter about NFT-ish things endlessly 
criss-crosses this old terrain, but I'm not holding my holding my breath 
waiting for someone to mention Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin, Buchloh, 
Hillel Schwartz, or even Nicolas Bourriaud. (I apologize in advance for 
the bias of that list: it mainly reveals when I lost interest in Art as 
Such.)
It seems obvious that NFTs have little to do with art but everything to 
do with how to bootstrap economies, basically, in space. Like, if you 
don't have a handy asteroid made of platinum or whatever to sell but you 
need to jump-start an economy, you just find some meta-way to 'create' 
arbitrary value within an isolated, self-referential system, and before 
you know it you have the prerequisite differentials and dynamism to get 
things moving. In other words, art is once again enacting its age-old 
function as a domain for experimenting with speculation in every sense 
— conceptual, visual, economic. One it's done that, the techniques 
will become an app that's used elsewhere, everywhere, and in a century 
or so Space Krauss will be debating with Space Buchloh about the 
originality of the NFT and other terrestrialist myths.
Cheers,
Ted

On 18 Mar 2021, at 6:16, Rachel O' Dwyer wrote:

The best smart contract code is the cryptokitty code! Information on
cattributes and cloning etc.
But yes. With a few exceptions where people actually encode images into the
hash (see https://cryptograffiti.info) the only thing you own with
cryptoart is the act of ownership itself. People sometimes draw
comparisons between owning cryptoart and owning a collectible like a
baseball card (you own 'this' card but you don't have any rights to the image etc) but in this case, you don't even own the card. To me this is emblematic of a shift from the artwork as commodity to the artwork as a
financial asset or increasingly as a financial derivative.

On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 10:10 AM Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> wrote:
Last post in this subject, I promise.

The NFT in the blockchain, recorded for eternity, does not contain
artwork itself, but metadata pointing to the art work. It basically
says, the file over there is the 'originalcopy' and I own it. Of course, everyone can still copy the art work over there (assuming it's a public location), but only that file on that location is the "original" one. Of course, if that server disappears, then the meta data point to nowhere,
and becomes impossible to distinguish between the copies that might
float around somewhere.

One way to sidestep this is not to point to a location, but to a hash,
which can stored anywhere in a decentralized file system.

In Beeble's case, the token contains metadata that points to such a hash (a IPFS file). This has the advantage that it's not depended on a server
which may or may not be around for very long, so it removes the
dependency of the particular entity which host the server mentioned in
the token.

So, so this is the file that the token points to:

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmPAg1mjxcEQPPtqsLoEcauVedaeMH81WXDPvPx3VC5zUz

{"title": "EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS", "name": "EVERYDAYS: THE
FIRST 5000 DAYS", "type": "object", "imageUrl":
"
https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmZ15eQX8FPjfrtdX3QYbrhZxJpbLpvDpsgb2p3VEH8Bqq
",
"description": "I made a picture from start to finish every single day from May 1st, 2007 - January 7th, 2021. This is every motherfucking one of those pictures.", "attributes": [{"trait_type": "Creator", "value":
"beeple"}], "properties": {"name": {"type": "string", "description":
"EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS"}, "description": {"type": "string",
"description": "I made a picture from start to finish every single day from May 1st, 2007 - January 7th, 2021. This is every motherfucking one
of those pictures."}, "preview_media_file": {"type": "string",
"description":
"
https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmZ15eQX8FPjfrtdX3QYbrhZxJpbLpvDpsgb2p3VEH8Bqq
"},
"preview_media_file_type": {"type": "string", "description": "jpg"},
"created_at": {"type": "datetime", "description":
"2021-02-16T00:07:31.674688+00:00"}, "total_supply": {"type": "int",
"description": 1}, "digital_media_signature_type": {"type": "string",
"description": "SHA-256"}, "digital_media_signature": {"type": "string",
"description":
"6314b55cc6ff34f67a18e1ccc977234b803f7a5497b94f1f994ac9d1b896a017"},
"raw_media_file": {"type": "string", "description":
"
https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmXkxpwAHCtDXbbZHUwqtFucG1RMS6T87vi1CdvadfL7qA
"}}}


Which, again, is just metadata pointing to, well, a webserver
(makersplace.com). In other words, the seller, in order to have any
object at all, is dependent on makersplace.com to remain online. In this case, it doesn't really matter, because buyer and seller is, in effect, the same person. But in other cases, the buyer becomes dependent on the seller for as long as s/he hold be token. Of course, the "originalcopy" could also be stored in decentralized file system, but apparently, this
is not done very often. Some people have called this structure
"long-game extortion."

See, https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372163423446917122

On 16.03.21 10:41, Florian Cramer wrote:
On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 5:49 PM Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>
wrote:
I'm sure many have followed the NFT art saga over the last couple of months and seen today's headline that somebody just paid $ 69,346,250
for a NFT on a blockchain, meta-data to claim ownership of the
"originalcopy" of a digital art work.
Thanks to Amy Castor's article (which you also mentioned/linked to,

https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beeple-art-buyer-and-his-nft-defi-scheme/
),
we now know that the buyer didn't actually pay $69,346,250, but "$60
million in ETH and $9 million in fees, also in ETH" - a significant
difference IMHO. The whole Christie's sale thus boils down to a
conversion
of one type of ETH token into another type of ETH token within the
portfolio of a crypto currency investment firm, and using the art market
transaction as means of pumping the value of the latter.
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