Most people don’t get Crypto Art.
#Bitcoin is just now starting to make sense for many people as revealed in recent thoughts of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase. In not long past news clips Jamie Dimon named crypto "a fraud" and "a pet rock" which contrasts with JP Morgan Chase's recent transformation trumpeting the "anticipation of crypto" and Jamie Dimon presently declaring he will "defend your right to buy bitcoin".
Bitcoin is a paradigm shift in money. It's a revolutionary idea of the decentralization of money. Money after all is nothing. It's whatever you want it to be, as history has proven. Money can be a cockle shell, a gold coin, a rock, a beaded necklace. Money is what you did that someone else wants. It is action and transfer of action. This is why Bitcoin is so beautiful. Bitcoin acknowledges your action (your work) and marks the transfer of your work in time and frequency on a decentralized tablet viewable by all in real time and un-erasable. Money is your energy (or work) in transferrable form. Bitcoin may be a form of crypto, but it has its own unique properties which make it the hardest money ever deployed.
But what about Crypto? Crypto is a scam, a sham, a shill, a pyramid scheme. Crypto embodies a large breadth of different cryptographic coins, nfts and tokens. Crypto is a nuanced market that exploded the last few years which most people scoff or dismiss as a gamble. Some of the more known coins splashing to the surface are #Eth, #Solana, #Cardano, #Doge, #Shiba and every day a hundred more tokens seem to launch. Every day brings a new coin or new PFP to be shilled. Some aspects of crypto are gambling and the enviro certainly is full of master players and tricksters, but historically this is par for the course of any new money idea. Think of the goldrush. Many prospectors flooded the West in search of a bucket or a nugget of gold. Among the hopeful, there were shillers and shammers galore. Currently, the crypto world appears to follow suit, but there is more to it than the eye beholds.
There are several aspects of crypto that aren’t heralded, especially Art Crypto. Art Crypto reminds me of when Dada declared "Art is Dead!". Dadaists viewed their art as anti-art. Dada was a counterattack to the world and a revolution to the idea of art as they knew it. Like Dada, Crypto Art is a revolt by artists making art out of pixels or code and embedding their own art into the blockchain with decentralized provenance. Like Duchamp's toilet bowl, CryptoPunks and BAYC PFPs were at first seen as almost laughable to the art world and question the idea of "What is art?" when it's a digital pixel stored on the blockchain.
As an artist, understanding the innovation of algorithm + art by embedding crypto art on the blockchain is mind blowing. Art created in digital form (1's and 0's as some visual, aural, video display) is then interwoven within a contract algorithm and spliced together into the blockchain with provenance into perpetuity! The art creation is marked in time and frequency. The artist is marked in time and frequency. The first owner is marked in time and frequency and all future record of ownership is marked and encoded on the blockchain. Crypto Art created in 2024 is immutably marked and intertwined with the algorithm into futurity. Crypto Art is not static, but continues across time and space. Crypto Art is not reserved to be merely hung on a solitary wall, but can be seen and enjoyed on a phone, on the web, in a video game, on a giant screen in the middle of a city, or even viewed on a thousand displays across the world simultaneously. Art, music, poetry, story, life as streams of compute are interwoven and embedded on the blockchain and enfolded within the energy of life as algorithms to reverberate throughout all of time. Crypto Art is nothing but revolutionary.
Crypto Art is more than functional utility or only "Art for Art's Sake". There is nothing more contemporary than digital, verifiable Crypto Art #NFTs on the blockchain. Get your "Campbell Soup" PFP now, while the market is befuddled. What do you think your kids are going to hang on their virtual living room wall in their cross-platform @FortniteGame? They will bring their NFTs with them wherever they “virtually” go and into the AI sphere. Maybe they will proudly hang their Wyckett Tea Potts NFT up on their avatar's simulated cupboard? 🌟 NFTs are greater than their function or simply digital art — they are [art + algorithm] embedded through time — a stream of the human consciousness captured on the blockchain to resonate beyond our lifetime. Crypto Art's provenance has yet to be inscribed. The algorithm is the art and its merit can only be revealed over time and on the immutable blockchain. ♾
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