M○C△ Confessional: It's Time to Abandon the Masses for Good
In so many words...
Friends, it gives me great pleasure —as always— to have you back alongside me once again for another:
And I want to start with what felt like crypto art’s central event over this last week, the hostile online engagement which descended upon artist Petravoice when she tweeted out the following seemingly-innocuous post:
It should come as no surprise to anyone even half-abreast of crypto art goings-ons that there is a vehemently anti-AI crowd out skulking around the internet, and they tend to be rabid and cruel when something manages to capture their collective attention. This week, their attention turned to our friend Petra.
The responses to Petra’s post were about as you would expect from a Twitter community that, at its best, launches verbal molotov cocktails hither and thither for fun:
“I ordered a pizza at Domino's the other day, so I guess now it's like: The dish vs The Italian chef” said a named Max Wolf, referencing himself as the Italian chef. Incredibly clever.
“You are not an artist, you are a consumer and want to consume art at the touch of a button. unfortunately, you are confusing the differences here. An artist creates something, whereas you watch a machine copy something that someone else has created, which makes you a consumer” said some schmuck named Valentin.
A certain CaitlinKoi —the loudest, most frequent, and most aggrieved of Petra’s detractors— preached that “You're not an artist if you don't actually create art. Typing words into a program and letting the algorithm chew up other peoples' art and then spit it out is NOT creating art.”
A community note was even affixed to the post which said:
Let me ask, do YOU find this helpful?
Do any of us find any of this helpful?
Now, I don’t think I must too-lengthily defend Petra because plenty of good folks (like Artie Handz, Dana Bryce, and Charlesai) on Twitter did that already, but suffice to say, the anti-AI art crowd is an insufferable and petulant group of online blowhards who:
A) don’t understand AI artistry at all
B) are generally pretty third-rate artists in their own right, and
C) would be much better off putting half the time they spend railing against AI on Twitter actually fucking practicing making fucking art.
Petra, I feel, handled the situation with grace. She did not feed the trolls, did not fight them, did not respond to their outcries with frustration, only with elegant self-confidence, at least as far as I can see. As often comes with being made a “Crypto Twitter Main Character,” Petra vaulted upwards in notoriety, and it seems afterwards that her art is being valued much more highly than it was previously. To Petra, all I can say is I have no notes. For all who want an example of what it looks like to handle Twitter hate thoughtfully, simply study Petra’s example: hunker down, continue creating, allow the community to stand up for you, amplify that community, meet disdain with decorum.
This newsletter is not really about Petra or the dipshits who dragged her, and more about what I’m calling the “Futility of the Masses.” Whether it’s laypeople assaulting cryptocurrency, laypeople denigrating NFTs, laypeople spewing venom upon AI, it is beyond clear that those outside of the very specific, discussion-heavy, avant-garde, technologically-cutting-edge crypto art ecosystem are positively pitiful pundits of anything we do here. I’m not sure how many times we’re all going to have to collectively go around this cul-de-sac before we realize that the masses are not our friends, they are not interested in what we’re doing here, they’re either inattentive or they suck. The general public has proven antagonistic to every single new, interesting, or experimental aspect of crypto art, and that is not liable to change any time, certainly not any time soon.
And so I must confess to you all: I believe it is time to forgo and forsake any interest in the masses, for they have proven themselves incapable of manifesting a modicum of the creativity, appreciation, and thoughtfulness which are necessary for engaging with any art movement, let alone ours.
Fuck ‘em.
Perhaps it without saying, but as I think most of us know, to view the all AI art as half-assed or impersonal is to fundamentally misunderstand what AI is, how it works, how it’s used to create art, and what facets of it are impressive and intense and interesting. Sure, some AI art is half-assed and impersonal, but learning to tell the difference, inventing an individual framework for quality, all of that requires time, effort, attention, and education, qualities that generally appear absent in the online art-criticizing community. GANs, latent-diffusion models, prompt-engineering, comfyUI, you kind of need to be familiar with these terms in order to qualify for passing judgment on AI art, in my opinion. Hell, if you gave these blowhards six-months and $100,000 to download a StableDiffusion model and generate an image all on their own, I bet less than 1% can figure it out. For that matter, I can’t really figure such shit out. I can’t handle anything more complex than a Midjourney prompt, and I can barely handle that.
The public’s ignorant fear of technological complexity is not unique to AI, of course. There was a massive pushback by the traditional art world towards photography as it started to gain traction in the early 1900’s. The photographic champion Alfred Stieglitz, and colleagues like “Gertrude Käsebier, Alvin Langdon Coburn , and Frank Eugene,” founded the Photo-Secessionist movement in 1902 specifically to emphasize the aesthetic legitimacy of photography. As Lisa Hostetler wrote for the Met Museum, “Stieglitz espoused his belief in the aesthetic potential of the medium and published work by photographers who shared his conviction,” which ultimately led to exhibitions, magazines, and the larger acceptance of photography as an independent art form with its own merits and visual language.
Do you think your anti-AI masses could name a single historically-significant photographer? Do you think they could name two? What about digital artists, or as they were known at the beginning, computer artists? Do you think they acknowledged or mourned the deaths of digital art pioneers like Vera Molnar or Roman Verostko?
How many times am I saying that the first thing that comes up on Google when you type in “Is digital art…” is “Is digital art real art?” That comes alongside other gems like “Is digital art harder than traditional art?” and “Is digital art a medium?” and “Is digital art cheating?”
The lay-community —one which still has not comprehended the legitimacy of photography, let alone computer art, let alone blockchain— is 100% incapable of directing anything towards AI but passionate, uninformed hatred. Artists have time-and-again proved themselves an especially noxious population in each of these examples, where the established mechanisms of art-creation have been threatened. Remember, crypto art was not just formed of artists, it was formed of artistic misfits. Those unhappy with a depressing cycle of print-making, art fairs, gallerist cold-emails and the like, those who already encamped themselves in offbeat or technologically-literate corners of the internet, these are the folks who founded crypto art, and they are the folks who found crypto art after its establishment.
In all of these examples of a new technology penetrating into the art world, the artistic community found themselves staring deeply into the abyss, only to find a previously-unthinkable pair of eyes staring back. Now, those eyes are better-drawn, more realistic, more creative than anything they’ve seen or could conceptualize on their own. Of course they’re scared. Cornered animals are always the most dangerous. And we are at the beginning of a cultural shift with real religious and ethical and psychospiritual implications; for whatever reason, that shift is taking place initially in the art world.
We in crypto art have already shifted, and we have shifted well in advance of our peers. The art students in their academic castles haven’t yet shifted, the critics haven’t shifted, the collectors have barely shifted, and the general public hasn’t budged an inch. There are intelligent, well-spoken, passionate contingents in each of those groups, but they haven’t shifted, and so they can’t see what we see. They can only see those eyes staring back at them. And fear will always win-out over intellect.
This only emphasizes that the dream of crypto art going mainstream is over, and that’s because crypto art is an engine constantly propelling itself to the fringes. Maybe if there was only blockchain to deal with, the world could catch on. Maybe if NFTs remained purely a distribution mechanism, the world wouldn’t judge them so harshly. Maybe if we never happened upon broad questions of ownership, influence, and medium, many groups that disavow crypto art could have been attracted here. But crypto art is crypto art because it can’t help itself. We must ask these questions. We must build new platforms. We must use plumb every new technology available. And so we will continue crawling towards the fringes —where we are disrespected, feared, and downtrodden— because it is in our DNA to do so.
I have seen a similar assertion in more financially-motivated circles, but we must abandon what remaining positive expectations we have of the masses. Call it the traditional art world, call it retail investment, call it whatever you like, it isn’t coming. Not only isn’t it coming, but when it sees what’s happening here, it will turn away in disgust, it will glare, it will shout obscenities.
It will not understand.
It will not agree.
It will not be kind.
Hell, I still shudder every time I must explain to the uninitiated what I do for work, what crypto art is, why NFTs have value, why this all matters so much. And it matters so so much.
AI is at the furthest possible end of a technological vanguard only beginning to earn its first modicums of mainstream respect. Take Petra’s example; do not play into the hands of the nervous and the trembling. Your pain justifies their fear. Their fear feeds only upon pain and frustration. That’s the only way it justifies itself. All fear ever wants to do is justify itself. It is insatiable.
A related example: I sometimes encounter people who want to read things I’ve written. Well, I write a newsletter every week, should be simple, right? But these newsletters do not explain concepts. They reference individuals you would not know unless you existed within crypto art. They use industry jargon abundantly. They aren’t for the world to see, they’re only for you to see. You and I and the rest of this small, dedicated collection of crypto art adherents who are our community. I can’t write these things for the world because the world refuses to understand. It is one of the world’s favorite things to do.
So we must do as Petra does: Forget the fucking rest of the world. Pay no heed to what they say, what they espouse, the arguments they believe to be very well-formed and clever. They cannot see any of us. They cannot see what we do. They can only see themselves reflected back: knock-kneed and teeth-chattering and pale as a ghost.
-Your friendly neighborhood Art Writer,
Absolutely agree, cheers and thank you for your newsletters!