Re: <nettime> what does monetary value indicate?

Thanks Marc,

The article includes a discussion of economic 'signalling' that was prompted by conversations with Ruth Catlow which chimes with Felix's questions about what the digital art purchase 'says'

For example, a buyer might purchase a work as an asset in the hope that its market value will increase in the future, or even make a purchase to prevent the bottom from falling out of a market they have already invested in.[8] But a buyer might also purchase a work of art because of what the act of purchasing says about her, culturally, socially and economically. Such “signalling” has long played a role in art markets. Buyers don’t just buy a beautiful object or an asset that they hope will grow in value; buying art is a form of self-investment in a world where social capital often correlates with economic returns. Using this framework, the flamboyant purchase of the Celestial Cyber Dimension cryptokitty might have had several different motivations – the desire to possess an artwork that the buyer finds meaningful; to make a strategic investment in a market; or to make a strategic investment in the buyer’s own social and economic reputation.

with this great quote from Ruth:

Ruth went on to suggest that the purchase was also about the social or economic status of the buyer; “in that moment the buyer was purchasing a souvenir of a moment – a moment he himself created by buying the token” she says. Witnessing the giddy hype of the crypto-auction Ruth was convinced that purchasing the token was also an act of “signalling”, designed to say something about the status of the buyer to the crypto-community. This also chimed with the perspective offered by the auction’s organiser, Jess Houlgrave, when she told me that these auction prices are often driven by a degree of bravado and ostentation on the part of the newly crypto-wealthy. Here the work of “art” is the public sale of the cryptographic token and the buyer’s involvement in the frothy hype that circulates around its future worth.

I'm very interested in Felix's second discussion about money as an expressive medium. Felix mentioned GameStop and signalling in the purchase of cryptoart, while Antonia Hernández is doing very interesting work right now on money as a communciative medium on sexcam websites, or we could equally think of something like conspicuous consumption on Venmo stories. Sorry to bore Ted with my predictable questions, but I'm wondering if this idea of money as an 'expressive medium' is all that new... surely money has always signalled and communicated in a way that's excessive to price and exchange. Think for example, of something like suffragette tokens, where the suffragettes marked coins with demands for the vote and then spent them back into circulation... a kind of proto-social media hashtag.

We're definitely seeing a conflation of communication as money, where ICts are the new banks, and money as communication (where everything from tweets to chaturbate tokens and fitbits units are payment) though.

On Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 12:01 PM marc garrett <marc.garrett2@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Rachel,

It's good to read this article again. It feels grounded these days compared to how things have blown lately.

I think this paragraph of yours resonates even more at the moment.

"This shift from commodity to financial instrument also implies a different economic relationship to the artwork, where the certificate of ownership and authenticity, rather than the formal manifestation of the work itself, are what is most significant. The idea that economic value resides in a certificate of authenticity as opposed to in an artistic image, performance or experience chimes with the marketing of much conceptual and experiential art. While researching the connections between economic value and acts of authentication and signification, artist Sam Keogh points me towards a legal discussion of the value of a Dan Flavin, a conceptual artist known for this fluorescent light tube sculptures. A buyer who has lost the certificate of authenticity wants to know what her Flavin is now “worth”. Nothing it turns out; she lost the right to call her light bulb a Flavin, or crucially to resell it as such, when she lost the certificate of authenticity."

Wishing you well.

Marc

On Fri, 12 Mar 2021 at 16:57, Rachel O' Dwyer <rachel.odwyer@gmail.com> wrote:

I haven’t followed the latest surge in NFTs as much as I’d like, but I wrote this, among other things, on cryptokitties, NFTs and art as a derivative https://circaartmagazine.net/a-celestial-cyberdimension-art-tokens-and-the-artwork-as-derivative/

I’m interested in why now though, beyond growing the speculation in crypto.
the past five years has seen a huge rise in art as an asset class and art is seen as a good hedge against market volatility. Tokens create situations where these art investments have greater liquidity.
But I'm interested in why everyday users are interested in NFTs. Is it pure desperation and precarity - you're in debt, you probably won't own a house so why not make a bet and invest in a token that might win big. Finn Brunton and I were talking about this last week for an upcoming issue of Neural.

On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 4:18 PM patrice riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl> wrote:

Aloha,

Let me say that First Dog on the Moon has, not for te first time, the definitive, if not answer, then at last commentary on the issue:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/12/cryptoart-what-is-it-and-can-you-eat-it

Enjoy!

have a nice day and don't become fungible!

p+7D!

ps: ALL FDotMoon cartoons (& merchandise too! ;-) on the website:

https://firstdogonthemoon.com.au/

(It's Australian, oeuf corse ...)

Op 11-03-2021 18:19 schreef Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>:

I can't answer the second question, but as to the first I believe that there are three distinct forms of money that currently operate in a hierarchy:

-- Infinite money which is produced and deregulated in the financial markets through the manipulation of information

-- Institutional money which is produced and regulated within national frames by governments seeking to stabilize social reproduction

-- Sweat money which is produced on the ground through the exploitation of labor paid at the bear minimum of survivability

The last form of money is the most extensive one, it's the most common coin, the basis of most livelihoods on earth. Institutional money, however, has been carefully decoupled from sweat money; and infinite money has been decoupled from institutional money in its turn. Institutional money began to be produced through Keynesian management of national economies from the 30s onward, it's inseparable from social democracy. Infinite money started up after the postwar gold standard was abandoned in 1971, and became what it is today with the introduction of computerized trading.

What does infinite money mean to its owners? Financial capital is power when it is applied to institutions or labor processes. However it can also be used for status displays, what Veblen called "conspicuous consumption." So you have to bring art back in. For better and mostly worse, "high" culture remains the noisy ghost at the top of the capitalist pyramid.

best, Brian

On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 10:47 AM 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.

https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/first-open-beeple/beeple-b-1981-1/112924

I don't want to start a discussion on the revolutionary vs reactionary
character of this emerging art market. All of that has already been
said. If you want a close approximation of my perspective, I refer you
to this:

https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3

What I'm more interested in here is to ask two things.

What -- after a decade of quantitative easing and crypto-currencies
rising into the stratosphere -- monetary value is indicating for the
segment that profited the most from these developments and what does
that mean for the rest of us?

And, assuming that this is not a cartoon version of a potlatch where
wasting resources serves to put rivals to shame, how many different
scams -- money laundering would be an obvious contender -- are being
layered on top of one other to create this?

Quite puzzled. Felix

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-------------------------------------------------------

Dr Marc Garrett

Co-founder & Artistic director of Furtherfield & DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab

Furtherfield disrupts & democratises art and technology through exhibitions, labs & debate, for deep exploration, open tools & free thinking. http://www.furtherfield.org

DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab is an arts, blockchain & web 3.0 technologies research hub for fairer, more dynamic & connected cultural ecologies & economies now. http://decal.is/

Recent publications:

State Machines: Reflections & Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, & Art. Edited by Yiannis Colakides, Marc Garrett, Inte Gloerich. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2019 http://bit.do/eQgg3

Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain. Eds, Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Nathan Jones, & Sam Skinner. Liverpool Press - http://bit.ly/2x8XlMK
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