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“We are like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration and decomposition.” Dada ManifestoTristan Tzara, 1918 1
“Abandon love, abandon aestheticism, abandon the baggage of wisdom, for in the new culture, your wisdom is ridiculous and insignificant.”
From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism Kazimir Malevich 1915 2
“Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?” Andy Warhol 3
My wife and I decided to do a project together to create a collection of NFTs. In the process, we wanted to create a new art form: Retro Generative Art. If you wish you can see the collection here:
If you have enough spare change lying around be sure and purchase a few. Every new art form needs a manifesto so read on.
Several years ago in Bisbee, Arizona, we attended a Bad Art Festival. 4 The artwork there was universally strange. I remember thinking that I would never ever want to meet the actual artists. The person in charge told me that the works were found in junk shops, estate sales, trash cans, and dumpsters. Behind mental hospitals? Besides the fact that this show was maybe mocking the mentally ill, there is at least a sincerity of purpose here. A failure or absence of training though, and perhaps a non-neurotypical state of mind. Commercial art is different. Commercial art is devoid of human sincerity. Sometimes a faux veneer of sentimentality is added to try to dress it up, to humanize it. Mostly a failure. It is also mass-produced, by machines. Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup Can prints in 1962 5 was seen as an attempt to subvert both the meaning of fine art and the soullessness of commercial art. The line between commercial, popular, and fine art was never as firm as many art critics like to believe, but now it is firmly crossed. Artists like Banksy 6 have subverted the idea of value in art with works that crumble or are destroyed within days while attempts to rip it (literally) from its context and sell it in a gallery look forlorn and sad.
In 1985 I attended the Association of Computing Machinery 7 SIGGRAPH 85 8 conference in San Francisco, Ca. I had the honor of sitting at the table with the mathematician and coiner of the term “Fractal”, Benoit Mandelbrot, 9 for lunch. It was there I saw the first computer-generated art. I bought a set of slides of the artwork. In the fall I gave a presentation of these slides at Dinnerware Artist’s Cooperative in Tucson, Az. While showing the slides I asked the question: “Is this Art?” The responses ranged from “Hell no!” to “Maybe …” Creating images on computers and especially 3D images, was still mostly the realm of mainframes and $60,000 software. Personal computers such as the Apple II, the Macintosh, and the Commodore 64 were changing that. Good 3D software took longer but Photoshop was released in 1990. Photoshop and Adobe Acrobat brought about a profound change to both commercial art, photography, and commercial art. Photoshop was never cheap but easily copied or hacked so anyone could get a copy and learn it. By the time Adobe forced all its products behind a “professional” paywall, powerful image processing software was free and ubiquitous. Now our phones have sophisticated cameras with all sorts of processing features. I can’t find the source of this but I remember someone complaining that giving the unwashed masses so much computing power would degrade “fine” art, cheapen it with bad art and bad design by bad artists and bad designers. This is a very Western concept, art as an activity for only “professionals.” Art or just image-making is a uniquely human endeavor that should be open to everyone. So here are some concepts for the manifesto:
sincerity of purpose
any human can make art
NFTs started out with a technology looking for a use case. One of the major criticisms of cryptocurrency is: “What is it good for?” A question not answered by vague hand waving about personal freedom and markets. In 2017 a game called Crypto Kitties 10 was developed for the Ethereum blockchain. These were small digital cartoon images of cats. Since this was a digital currency, the cats were given a value, and when purchased, were minted on a blockchain as a special token, not a currency but a Non Fungible Token, something both unique and associated with some sort of data set or even a physical object, in this case, a digital image of a cartoon cat and a string of code, it’s “DNA.” If you had two cats you could mate them and either accept or decline the results. The mating is accomplished by something called a genetic algorithm, a computer code that models actual genetic recombination. Instead of genes being recombined, it is attributes of the picture. Say the cat has 5 different colors, five different eyes, 5 noses, 5 ears, wears five different hats, and has five different patterns of sparkles over its head. Combinatorics tells us that the number of possible combinations is 5x5x5x5x5 or 3,125. This seems doable but what if there are 10 versions each of 10 attributes? This is 10 trillion combinations. The object of the game was to breed these Kitties and then trade or sell them to mate again and “improve” the breed. Crypto Kitties became popular for a few years and the price people were paying from them increased greatly. There became more activity around the buying and selling of them rather than the breeding of them. In early 2018 a decentralized crypto marketplace called OpenSea 11 opened as a place to buy and sell Crypto Kitties and other NFTs. OpenSea struggled with inactivity until September of 2021 when the sales started to increase exponentially. NFT images have dropped the pretext of evolution in favor of vast combinations dropped on the public. Let the market decide the quality. These images are generated by computers hence generative art. This is vastly different from say, printmaking where the object is to make x identical copies of the same print. Not so here. If this is to be the format why not reduce the combinations to numbers a human can handle?
In our experiment, we used 5 variations of three objects or 5x5x5 = 125 variations. My wife created five house fronts, five plants and five animals, and 125 unique addresses for each work. She cut them out and we pasted together and scanned and digitized all 125. It took us about 4 hours. Then I did a little bit of processing and sizing to create the NFT images. Then there was putting them up on OpenSea and selling them. This was maybe the worst experience I’ve had in decades with a piece of software. Mysterious crashes, part of the collection would disappear, links that went nowhere, and all agonizingly slow. What an insult to the creator this site is! Because of this, I would put the human limit on retro generative art at 30 combinations. So now I’d like to add two more additions to the manifesto:
human-sized combinations
the artist has first pick at quality control
technology that works
NFTs are what the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber calls “social money,” 12 this is wealth accumulated for social status, for bragging rights. People have collected things for centuries: beetles, butterflies, stamps, coins, and minerals, We just ended a yearly Gem Show in Tucson which brings in people from all over the world and during which millions of dollars changes hands. In Deming New Mexico is a museum that contains weird collections from local residents. Ceramic frogs, little dogs, booze bottles shaped like Elvis, glassware stamped in the likeness of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, John Kennedy, and Pope John. Baseball cards. Modern children are bombarded with ads for different Barbies with different outfits, My Little Ponies, GI Joes, Transformers, Beanie Babies, Trash Can Kids, everything in sets, collections. Collect them all! NFTs are just an encrypted ledger showing creation, value, and provenance. Attached to them is some sort of data set or even a physical object like tickets to an exclusive party. Think of the selfies! When one owns an NFT you own the specific digital data but nothing else. As far as I can tell the artist still owns the original. This is especially iffy with images as certain compression and sizing slightly change the nature of the image. There is a question on what exactly is a copy. One of the most profitable collections of NFTs is the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Look-a-likes have proliferated but in January, when a group published a collection of Bored Apes which were just mirror images of the original, OpenSea banned them.13 This set up an outcry that this was a travesty to decentralized markets and “free speech.” But as they say: “Money talks, bullshit walks.” What exactly is a unique image? If I change a pixel or put a little evil gleam in an ape’s eye, can I sell this as my own? Or the digital equivalent of defacing the image, graffiti. I’m sure these problems will employ legions of lawyers for the next century.
Are these images the same or different?
So next:
value is to be collectively agreed on, never imposed
value to the creator above all else
I’ve noticed that the artist manifestos between WWI and WWII are all about destruction and overthrowing the old order. There is creative disruption, a term bandied about that really seems about privatizing the public good. All the digital age has given us is shadows, our social lives in tatters, a vast vampiric system that feeds off of and regulates our creativity. Restoration, the emergence of new forms, rebirth, is what is needed. So now the list is complete:
Retro Generative Art
sincerity of purpose
any human can make art
human-sized combinations
the artist has first pick at quality control
technology that works (who cares about your blockchain)
value is to be collectively agreed on, never imposed
value to the creator above all else
restoration, rebirth, the emergence of new forms
What about the manifesto? Well, you just read it.
1“Dada Manifesto,” Obelisk Art History, accessed February 14, 2022, https://arthistoryproject.com/timeline/modernism/dada/dada-manifesto/.
2 “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,” Obelisk Art History, accessed February 14, 2022, https://arthistoryproject.com/artists/kazimir-malevich/from-cubism-and-futurism-to-suprematism/.
3 “Andy Warhol Quotes (Author of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol) (Page 2 of 7),” accessed February 15, 2022, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1203.Andy_Warhol?page=2.
4 Louise Reilly Sacco, “Museum of Bad Art,” Museum of Bad Art, n.d., http://museumofbadart.org/.
5 “Andy Warhol. Campbell’s Soup Cans. 1962 | MoMA,” The Museum of Modern Art, accessed February 18, 2022, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79809.
6 “Banksy NYC Street Art,” NYC-ARTS, October 4, 2013, https://www.nyc-arts.org/collections/80384/banksy-better-out-than-in.
7 “Association for Computing Machinery,” accessed February 19, 2022, https://www.acm.org/.
8 ACM, “SIGGRAPH 1985: 12th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques – ACM SIGGRAPH HISTORY ARCHIVES,” accessed February 19, 2022, https://history.siggraph.org/conference/siggraph-1985-12th-annual-conference-on-computer-graphics-and-interactive-techniques/.
9 Benoir Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (W H Freeman, 1983), https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-fractal-geometry-of-nature_benot-b-mandelbrot/249702/.
10 “CryptoKitties Explained: Why Players Have Bred over a Million Blockchain Felines,” VentureBeat (blog), October 6, 2018, https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/06/cryptokitties-explained-why-players-have-bred-over-a-million-blockchain-felines/.
11 “What Is OpenSea? OpenSea Business Model Explained,” Wishpond, February 2, 2022, https://blog.wishpond.com/post/115675438362/what-is-opensea.
12 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years: (Melville House, 2011), https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290.
13 “OpenSea Bans NFT Projects Selling Overturned Bored Ape Yacht Club Avatars,” accessed February 20, 2022, https://mhyc-lakeerie.com/opensea-bans-nft-projects-selling-overturned-bored-ape-yacht-club-avatars/.
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