#022 The Commodification Myth
on RTFKT, the aesthetic argument and how the ideal on-chain creator is Elon Musk
Thumbnail is a segment from This Outfit Does Not Exist. As a complement to my subscriber-only deep dives, thumbnails are a shorter, more personalised, set of musings on the future of culture and technology. If this sounds exciting please:
This week’s thumbnail began in Marfa and was finished in New York. It was inspired by the cost-centric chatter that underlies all things crypto x culture and has been gorging on my timeline with increasing fervor
The thumbnail
As someone who grew up attending Jewish primary school, I confronted the Creation Myth every single year. As the story goes, our original ancestors occupied a lush utopia, entirely unbound, with the exception of a single rule: ‘do not eat fruit from the tree of knowledge.’
As dissent lies at the core of all good stories, Adam and Eve inevitably disobeyed, ate the fruit, and were punished, with banishment from paradise.
While most scholars do not consider this acquisition of knowledge punishment in and of itself, the cause of our progenitor’s shift from a state of bliss to a state of restlessness is a clear lesson. One that I believe can be taken from the Bible and applied to the blockchain.
Blockchain technology is lauded for many reasons — security, immutability, decentralisation etc. But no factor is more central to blockchain’s lore than transparency. As a ‘permissionless ledger’ any transaction recorded ‘on chain’ can be viewed by anyone at any time. All that’s needed is a series of letters and numbers that corresponds to wallet address or transaction hash. Put simply, you can view all the information around a digital asset—who bought it, who sold it, for how much and when—by typing 25-40 digits into a site like etherscan and clicking ‘search’.
At the most basic level what this means is anyone with a simple code can see how much is in your digital bank account. But, even more disruptively, it also allows anyone to look at your collection of digital artefacts and see exactly how much you paid for each piece.
Tack onto this ‘transparency’ the existence of platforms like OpenSea, which allow you to see a cultural asset’s ‘floor price’, ‘best offer’, ‘total volume’ and ‘last sale’, and each cultural artefact becomes saddled with its own fruit of knowledge, along with a blockchain shaped bite.
The double click
If you google ‘what is the value of art’ Reddit will hit you with this inspiring take:
As this ‘scholar’ so eloquently infers, as a multi-trillion-dollar industry, art and culture is inextricably tied to finance. But ever more so on-chain.
Before the late 20th century the price of a cultural good was determined 1) at time of sale and 2) at periodic points of resale. In both instances, what was and was not sold, and to whom, remained at the seller’s discretion.
Between 19791 and 2020 however, the advent of e-commerce resulted in a sharp increase in the accessibility, velocity and transparency of cultural objects.
Accessibility – platforms like ebay, 1stDibs, Vestiaire Collective, Etsy and Chairish made it possible for anyone to buy, sell or resell their cultural goods
Velocity – new protocols freed resellers from dependencies on infrequent auction house sales and dealer restrictions, allowing cultural goods to be flipped instantaneously
Transparency – with the wealth of online information it became easier to determine the price a cultural artefact was bought and sold for
The amalgamation of these factors resulted in cultural artefacts becoming not just increasingly available but increasingly commodified. And with the advent of NFTs, each of these dynamics accelerated to new extremes, resulting in a culture where resale was not an afterthought but rather the goal of a purchase.
Entering the NFT space in early 2021 I came face to face with these modern cultural consumers. The ‘flippers’, ‘degens’ and ‘apes’ (aka. basement dwelling ghouls) I believed were behind this financial fixation. But it wasn’t until I spoke at the Christie’s Art and Tech Summit that I truly awakened to the severity of the shift.
Founded in 1766 Christie’s vies for the top spot as the oldest and most respected resale institution in the cultural economy. They first ventured into NFTs with the sale of Beeple’s ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’ in 2021, and have since developed their own Web3 platform along with an annual Art and Tech Summit which incidentally the proverbial ‘we’, absolutely love to see.
Speaking alongside Keith Grossman (CEO Moonpay), Ciara Byrne (VP Innovation Conde Naste) and Grimes (singer/songwriter), I was shook. Not by how digital assets had become a pervasive topic of discussion for one of the world’s oldest cultural institutions, but how unashamedly finance was laid on the table – not as a secondary part of cultural discourse but as its defining factor.
For the summit’s opening act—a conversation between Mike Winkelmann aka. Beeple and Vignesh Sundaresan the collector of the piece that coronated him ‘one of the three most valuable living artists’—the main topic discussed was the price of the work.
Initially I viewed this as a one-off, specific to the piece itself. After all ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’ $69 million price tag, was what catalysed many artists’, collectors’ and institution’s entrance into the crypto art space. However, as two other leading digital artists—Erick Calderon and Tyler Hobbs—were ushered onto the stage to the overture of their respective sales volumes’, I realised that this focus on finance was not uncharacteristic but endemic.
Earlier this month, at this years’ Artblocks Weekend, I was brought back to this revelation with a blood curdling sense of déjà vu. Artblocks is a platform that sells blockchain-based algorithmic art—an one-chain continuation of the generative art genre pioneered by legends like Vera Molnar. Unlike those whose obituaries will include the time their Bored Ape soared to the moon2, Artblocks collectors are some of the highest calibre individuals in the crypto art space. For the most part they’re technologically knowledgeable and culturally eloquent, with both creators and collectors lauded for highly technical and conceptual work. Nonetheless last weekend, just as at Christie’s, every piece extolled for its artistic merit, was caveated with its financial form.
Zooming out
“So what if culture is commodified?” You might snarl,“Why do you care?”
For those in search of a cautionary tale, look no further than RTFKT.
Founded in 2019, RTFKT made waves as one of digital assets’ darlings — selling out collections of digital sneakers, accruing a community in the hundreds-of-thousands, and partnering with the likes of Takashi Murakami and Rimowa to give NFTs a validity previously unknown.
The cherry on their cake came in 2022, when the brand was acquired by Nike for a nine-to-ten-figure sum. To creators and collectors working in a world that many mocked, this served as a signal that WAGMI was more than just a neologism.
With all this in mind, when the company announced that they’d be winding down earlier this week, a degree of mourning was to be expected. But take a look at the comments on the company’s announcement and you’ll see that the sentiment goes far beyond a dirge. Instead of remarks that signal fear around the state of the digital assets market, or sadness that a champion is closing its doors, when reading these remarks you are faced with thousands, upon thousands, of lines of vitriol. Though some of the reposes include indigence towards Nike itself, most hinge on the concept that consumers have ‘been rugged’ — crypto community slang for losing money.
Take a step back and compare this response to any other cultural scandal and it’s clear that there’s something fundamentally wrong. When painter and photographer Richard Prince was involved in a copyright controversy collectors weren’t storming his gallery demanding refunds for his work. When John Galliano was accused of antisemitism during his time at Dior consumers weren’t turning to social media to decry how much money they’d lost buying his clothes. Though RTFKT could have communicated their closure with a little more grace, the responses of their ‘fans’ say more about crypto than they do the company.
Conducting an RTFKT-ual autopsy, the root of the problem is obvious: cultural assets should not be cursed with a permanent price tag, not to mention one that is updated in real-time. The causes of the ailment don’t just lie in the technologically accelerated dynamics of accessibility, transparency and velocity, formerly discussed, but in the type of consumer that these qualities attract.
In her recent essay for The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey flawlessly sums it up, identifying those who sink their time and money into day trades, cryptocurrency and sports bets as members of a rapidly growing ‘Bro-Economy’. While cultural asset flippers might like to perceive themselves as intellectually superior to the more primitive ‘apes’3, upon close scrutiny their genetic makeup is close to identical. Both digital asset flippers, and their degen equivalents, possess a high risk appetite and desire for connection that lead them to make, and share, bets.
For those still unconvinced, take a read through Marc Bain’s article ‘Why Streetwear and NFT’s are a Perfect Match’. As early as 2021 Bain recognised that ‘Both [NFTs and streetwear] thrive on hyped assets, driven by scarcity, that attract high prices on the secondary market and have become status symbols online’. A look at StockX—a streetwear unicorn that allows buyers to anonymously bid on and purchase sought-after items— reveals this to be true. As the name suggests, though selling sneakers, the site operates like a stock market, where prices are determined by real-time bids and asks from users. Just like the digital asset frontrunner OpenSea.
Moving back to the question – why do you care? the impact of a hyper-commodified creator culture, and the collectors it attracts, impacts both who creates and what is created, detrimentally.
On the creator side, where culture is commodified, the ideal artist is not one who ascribes to Mondrian’s view that ‘The position of the artist is humble’ but instead one who endlessly shills her work as deafeningly as possible. In this world of ‘loud luxury’ Francis Bacon’s advice that ‘The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery’ is hopeless. Instead of an enigma, the ideal creator becomes someone who has the ability to instil belief in the value of his work by updating a community of return-hungry trolls on Telegram, every 15 minutes.
In this world where cultural value equates to drumming up belief in commercial success, the archetypal creator is not the next Michelangelo, or even the next Banksy, but rather the next Elon Musk.
As creators morph from those with an exceptional ability to manufacture aesthetic intrigue, to those with the power to get ‘degens’ to froth at the mouth (not to mention the epidermal thickness to withstand their relentless vituperation) what is created changes too. As Mitchell Chan so eloquently stated during his talk ‘What Do You Do After You Change the World?, innovative art is often characterised by solipsism, whereby ‘an object you create becomes a diagram of its own creation’. Naturally where the zeitgeist is cash the medium is forced to become finance.
A high end exemplifier of how this could look is the work of Jonas Lund– an artist who created a DAO to allow stakeholders control his artistic practice. Beginning in 2018 fans were encouraged to buy a token that allowed them to control what Jonas created via an on-chain vote— with the explicit aim of profiting from his behaviours. As the project’s manifesto states ‘As the career path of Jonas Lund improves and his market value increases, so does the value of a Jonas Lund Token, thus allowing shareholders to profit through dividends and potential sales of the tokens.’
Jonas’s work is undoubtedly good art, as are similarly referential projects such as Stevie P’s ‘Fake Internet Money’, Matt Kane’s ‘Volatility Art’ and Kevin Absoch’s ‘I AM A COIN’. But head over to OpenSea and wade through the borderless mire of Dodgecoin, Pepe and Bitcoin inspired pieces4, and it becomes clear that an endless cycle of art that references its consumers’ obsession with price is quite simply fucking boring.
Turning back to Lowry’s piece on the ‘Bro-Economy.’, whilst on first glance day-trading might seem like the obvious analogy to flipping cultural objects, in reality, the most pertinent comparison comes from the second point of the broconomy’s trifecta: sports betting.
Unlike trading stocks, or buying Bitcoin, participating in sports is meant to be an activity enjoyed as an end in itself. Yet, just like cultural objects, the technological enhancement and deregulation that has occurred over the past eight years, has transformed sports into a financial activity. Today 49% of self-proclaimed ‘sports fans’ have admitted to placing some form of bet on their beautiful game — shifting their reason for engaging from seeing their favourite team score, to earning some cash.
As this essay started off on a theological note it’s only proper that it ends on one too. So I’ll close out this rant with F.R. Tennant’s aesthetic argument. In his 1930 book ‘Philosophical Theology’ Tennant argues that the existence of a creator deity is proven by the existence of beauty. His belief was that the extraneous elements of human existence – arts, music, literature etc., were what proved humanity to be more than just the arbitrary result of natural selection and thus showed the existence of a higher power.
Though theology might not be your thing, you have to admit there’s something resonant about the principle that underlies Tennant’s idea: that the arts are beautiful precisely because they are devoid of any function outside of their own enjoyment.
Whilst the Wu-Tang Clan’s view that cash rules everything around me is as evident as Tenant’s claim, it’s only by decoupling beautiful things from base motives that allows them to remain that way. So although on-chain you can ascertain exactly how much your artwork/ sneaker is worth at any given moment, before checking OpenSea question if that fruit of knowledge is one you really want to bite from. If it was up to me gloats about buy price would be reserved for Bitcoin5.
– Dani 👽
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
The Three Pillars of the Bro-Economy by Annie Lowrey for The Atlantic
Why Streetwear and NFT’s are a Perfect Match by Marc Bain for Business of Fashion
When a man called Michael Aldrich created the world’s first e-comm site
A crypto lingo term for accruing disproportionate financial value
A slang term for people who engage in high-risk trading behaviours
Not to mention tireless and unoriginal ‘gamification’ dynamics that commonly accompany them
And other digital currencies/ meme coins/ stocks