Tomorrow Rebel Talent opens at artHYPE on Pico and 4th Ave. As I get ready to install this show today, green has emerged as a symbolic color that flows throughout the show.
The last two weeks almost every person I’ve met and every other art story is about NFTs. Jerry Saltz tweeted that everyone would own one.
As other artists have already observed, NFT’s are the epitome of Tech Bro culture (and their wives) and the billion-dollar art gatekeepers having a ball during desperate, violent times. They willfully ignore the environmental costs of crypto technology and pretend that buying carbon offsets reduces carbon. We can’t pay away carbon dioxide In the atmosphere.
In the last decade, many artists have moved in the direction of upcycling toxic and polluting materials in art, Aurora Robinson is an incredibly successful example of this trend. I have had some luck selling Upcycled work as well. NFT’s defy this trend.
And what are NFT’s? Images associated with an alphanumeric code on someone’s hard drive. NFTs are perception on the screen and images in the brain—an art so abstract and distant to human touch that any artist who makes anything with their own hands would be wise to reject this superficial art genre. NFTs are really only accessible to the few and the wealthiest people, who could do more to humanize our collective experiences, and value privacy, in society and the workplace.
UPDATE 2.20.23: I recieved a gift of an NFT recently, I’ve made one or two, but I’ve never bought any. I was struck by the obvious. This short video was probably made in Adobe Premiere and After Effects. I actually met the people who made it, lovely, and from Canada. After the video was polished and approved by the company who commissioned it, it was uploaded to an NFT platform to get it’s blockchain address. This seemed a ridiculous waste of time and resources. Why does making a video a “blockchain video” (aka an NFT) make it any more valueable? Why does giving it an identifying tile, with x number of copies with different titles, make it valuable? An artist could do this with a piece of paper for each client who buys a copy of their video (and artists do), which is much less impact on the environment. I think and hope that Gen Z will want nothing to do with Crypto, or NFTs, and that using blockchain technology for currency and art will fade into memory, for the con it is.
UPDATE 5.02.21: I can’t fault any artist who is inspired to create NFTs!! And I might as well. We just need to admit this is an environmental issue and commit to taking better care of our planet. We can use less electricity, and we do need a more humanized work/life balance in general. In Ready Player One movie (maybe not the book), the people created two days a week without the game…
KW Sarrow NFT-free zone Acrylic and ink on canvas, 9 x 12 in, March 2021