I started writing this close reading because during the writing of my primordial soup post on NFTs, a friend (who might not want to be named?) linked me to it, and I thought I would give it a re-read, and in that thread I had some thoughts. I read it once prior to making Cruel World; it was one of the things that exposed me to the world of NFTs in the first place!
In context of the piece, this reads as a self-deprecating acknowledgement of the medium's faults -- "Digital art is flawed but we work with it anyway!" But it only really has value as an oppositional stance to digital scarcity. As a whole statement, it does digital art, and its artists, a disservice by describing many of the medium's potentially beautiful, and surely true, qualities as weaknesses.
I'm as upset about this as I was before, even with my opposite-of-rose-tinted-glasses off my face.
A lack of scarcity is absolutely not "the only thing" that digital art has going for it, and digital artists can appreciate so many more things about their medium than that. This flattening of the landscape only seems so important when we're busy preparing our battlements for the war against NFTs. It's a wasteful and harmful consequence, simplifying an art form down to only the things that help win a war like this.
We don't need these battle lines. They threaten to make us ruin our art so that we can better embody not-NFTs.
~
Pipkin makes some beautiful observations about digital art in the space I've excised, and I'd like to include it here for completeness. The duplicatability of digital art is a beautiful aspect of digital art that I like to see honoured here, in this way. But it can't come at the cost of everything else that digital artists might choose to love or respect about the art form.
You can read the full section here.
Quote from: Everest PipkinI've been working in digital spaces making artwork since well before cryptocurrency was around, and lack of scarcity is the only thing we've got.
Digital files don't have that much going for them. [..]
What digital files and digital artists do have is duplicatability. [..]
This is it! This is the one thing!
In context of the piece, this reads as a self-deprecating acknowledgement of the medium's faults -- "Digital art is flawed but we work with it anyway!" But it only really has value as an oppositional stance to digital scarcity. As a whole statement, it does digital art, and its artists, a disservice by describing many of the medium's potentially beautiful, and surely true, qualities as weaknesses.
I'm as upset about this as I was before, even with my opposite-of-rose-tinted-glasses off my face.
A lack of scarcity is absolutely not "the only thing" that digital art has going for it, and digital artists can appreciate so many more things about their medium than that. This flattening of the landscape only seems so important when we're busy preparing our battlements for the war against NFTs. It's a wasteful and harmful consequence, simplifying an art form down to only the things that help win a war like this.
We don't need these battle lines. They threaten to make us ruin our art so that we can better embody not-NFTs.
~
Pipkin makes some beautiful observations about digital art in the space I've excised, and I'd like to include it here for completeness. The duplicatability of digital art is a beautiful aspect of digital art that I like to see honoured here, in this way. But it can't come at the cost of everything else that digital artists might choose to love or respect about the art form.
Quote from: PipkinWhat digital files and digital artists do have is duplicatability. There is no original file. When I make a copy of a text document, 3d model, or game and give it to you we both have the original. We're both having a first-hand experience. We both are engaging with the work wholly as itself, not second-hand documentation.
[..] Digital artists have media that can proliferate over a network and be held by many people at once without cheapening or breaking the aura of a first-hand experience.
You can read the full section here.