M○C△ Confessional: Leave Generative Artists Out of It

In so many words...

Welcome back everyone to an especially multi-purposed edition of:

Multi-purposed because, while I’m excited for you to read this column, I more-so want to direct your attention to the vital writing I encountered last week, and to which I’ll be responding today.

I was late to the party, not seeing until Friday night what had been published a few days prior, a research paper composed by the writer and artist, Kevin Esherick, called “Generative Anesthetics: A eulogy for generative art.” Nominally an exploration of the generative art movement’s many faults, the essay is also a brilliant meditation on aesthetics, capital-motivated markets, the tension between process and output, hype cycles, and much more.

You may have seen bits of the essay in Esherick’s announcement tweet, but trust me when I say the the full essay is more than worth your time. As we discussed on MOCA LIVE last week with Eleonora Brizi, crypto art lacks much critical discourse, and Esherick’s essay is an oh-so-necessary addition to crypto art’s critical canon. It also demonstrated that rare ability to incite conversation.

The artist Linda Dounia wrote her own response to Esherick’s essay, titled “003: My thoughts on Kevin Esherick's essay ‘Generative Anesthetics,’” which filters Esherick’s conceit through the lens of one who is self-proclaimedly “guilty of creating vapid long-form gen art, or at the very least buying into the myth that it’s the only (successful) way to release computer art on the blockchain.”

And now, I too will try to add something worthwhile to the discussion.

Like many others, Esherick’s essay sparked many truly transmutative thoughts. But while Esherick’s essay is a fundamentally-sound critical analysis, it neglects important context and flippantly implicates the undeserved. Esherick attacks a system, in this case the long-form generative art movement, but offers no quarter to the movement’s participants, the artists themselves.

Which, I must confess, I feel is worthy of a response.

To their credit, Esherick and Dounia emphatically catalogue a host generative artists who have pioneered new, rich, creative explorations of the form. Esherick points to “Maya Man’s Fake It Till You Make It…Stevie P’s Dopamine Machines…Emily Edelman’s Reverie… Andreas Gysin, Kim Asendorf, and DEAFBEEF…OONA…SHL0MS…Ana Maria Caballero, Margaret Murphy, Mia Forrest, Operator” as artists who have innovated the medium. Dounia adds the late Vera Molnar, “Bjorn Staal’s Entangled…Holladay Saltz…Luke Shannon…[and] Minne Atairu” to that list, together compiling a veritable who’s-who of generative art’s revolutionaries.

But Esherick’s essay suggests that these artists represent but one stimulating drop in a sea of otherwise unspectacular generative art, claiming that “Most everything conceptually and aesthetically interesting done in computer art was done well before the NFT wave. The bulk of what we’ve had of late is a monetized rehash. Comparisons to the ‘zombie formalism’ era of the 2010s are apt, the term perhaps even more fitting here than in its original usage. It describes a repetition of 20th century process-based abstraction that sleepwalks in the footsteps of its pioneers, failing to contribute ideas of its own beyond ‘do the same, but with code.’”

(Following Esherick’s example, I’ll pepper this essay with long-form generative I love. First is ge1doot’s Utopia, of which the above piece, Utopia #25 (2021) is an example. Held by Guynorcal.)

He’s not inherently wrong.

A quick jaunt through Artblocks’ marketplace is sufficient evidence to support Esherick’s claim that ,“A recurring visual motif across [Generative art’s] repetition is geometric abstraction, and the genre finds itself constantly retreading territory already well-explored by its forebears in Modernist abstraction and the significant history of generative art that preceded the advent of the NFT.”

We are buffeted herein by clean lines, sharp geometries, tessellated patterns, pleasantly-contrasting colors, techno-architecture, figurative simplicity, abstract expressionism, aestheticized verbiage, glyphs and runes, concentric shapes, particle effects, chromatic tapestries, topographical matrices, optical illusions, minimalism, cyclical animations, mandalas, illustration, cartoonishness, chiaroscuro, cosmological imagery, interactivity, chronological manifestation, etc.

Okay, so, I did that on purpose, listing almost 25 different aesthetic signifiers within this generative artworks that really have little to do with each other.

Why? because I think Esherick’s overall assertion that, “By enabling fast, large-scale production, generative art and the market around it incentivize the creation of cheap, diluted work—conceptually barren and aesthetically milquetoast, propped up by technical jargon that conjures a mirage of depth,” incorrectly impugns a great glut of artists who, individually, make works worth celebration. Perhaps in totality, Esherick’s criticism holds weight, but I personally do not believe that artists have a categorical imperative to seek only the newest ideas, or revolutionize a larger movement, or, for that matter, turn away from a powerful financial wave upon which they have an opportunity to surf.

“It is assembly line art,” Esherick says. That may be true, but criticizing an assembly line should mean criticizing the corporation whom it enriches, not the operators themselves. Esherick does not really make that distinction.

Esherick does, however, spend ample time discussing the market dynamics around generative art’s massive popularity. “What happens when you build an art movement on top of financial building blocks?” he asks. “Unsurprisingly, it becomes deeply imbued with the financial character of its DNA. So too, then, with generative art (i.e. longform generative cryptoart, as a reminder), the most successful movement within cryptoart to date. Generative art, probably more so than any art that has come before it, must be understood as a product of the market context within which it’s situated.” Esherick goes on to discuss how generative art’s flow of—

1. Pay gas fees —> 2. Artwork is created —> 3. Receive artwork

—inherently commercializes the movement. Both he and Dounia insightfully point-out that the very concept of purchasing an artwork sight-unseen is diametrically opposed to what the romantic essence of artistry, which Dounia refers to as the “falling in love…the curiosity we develop for the art we fall in love with and its maker.”

(This is Alexis André’s 720 Minutes #69 (2021), currently in our Genesis Collection. Each 720 Minutes piece is an interactive clock of sorts, with “720 unique ways to show the current time, one per minute over twelve hours.)

Dounia precisely describes how “Buying art can be about owning something you love and supporting the maker in the process. Buying art can be about investing in an asset class that will accrue in value down the line. Buying art can be about signalling belonging to a particular social class and the indulgences it affords. It can be all these things, but if it isn’t at least the former, it has no intrinsic meaning.”

She’s right, of course.

But we’re missing the forest for the trees here, which is that generative art, and generative artists especially, cannot and should not be held at fault for the corrupted investment instincts of an undiscerning market.

The market that evolved around generative art was always ridiculous, frankly. I have no problem with Fidenzas or Ringers or Chromie Squiggles, for instance, but I’m confident saying that these are artworks do not uniquely merit their five-to-six figure valuations. The explosive and predatory investment in these and many other generative art collections —which continues in places to this day— is transparently unrelated to the artworks themselves. To most investors, these are not artworks, they are investment vehicles. Art-as-investment-vehicle is a timeless concept, but in the generative art world, the traditional illiquidity of art investment is removed. You can sell generative pieces into a collection’s floor. You can gamble on the rarity of traits during the minting process. You can rely on the ingrained network advantage that a 1000-piece collection has over a single artwork. You don’t have to wait 10-to-20 years for a market to develop for a certain artist, because like the underlying cryptocurrencies themselves, prices on these collections have proven to contain volatility, volatility which is always best exploited by large actors.

When we consider too Esherick’s other suggestions —that generative art aesthetics often appear uniform, that the “artistry” is frequently hidden behind complex technical processes, that it is literally impossible to form a relationship to an artwork before value is exchanged for it (as the art is created via the minting process)— it seems almost inevitable that market movers would have chosen generative artistry as their messiah. Esherick adds how, “The reproducibility that makes it so banal is by equal measure what has granted generative art such great success over the last few years. It’s immediately parseable both as code[…and cognitively]…Collections fit a mold. We are thus instantly familiar with each.”

But the market must be the exclusive target of our criticism.

To peruse generative art projects individually is to encounter a gargantuan array of aesthetics, moods, styles, influences, and themes, let alone coding practices. This is not an assembly line run by automatons (some of them, maybe); these are real artists who have approached a new medium with exploration their primary purpose. It is no artist’s fault that the market has proven such a shoddy chronicler of value. Sure, many of these projects are thematically dull, aesthetically reproductive, or ignorant of past innovators, but how is this different than literally any other facet of the art market?

(Here we have Still Moving #6 (2023) by Sasha Stiles and Nathaniel Stern, from Still Moving, this one collected by Vonmises.eth. The project works best with your webcam enabled for motion-tracking purposes.)

I have spent enough time in contemporary art museums to feel confident applying nearly all of Esherick’s criticisms to contemporary abstraction, modern sculpture, and oftentimes photography. Hell, it applies to Greco-Roman sculpture too! Who among us hasn’t wandered through a Greco-Roman Sculpture-laden section of some art museum (this is a rhetorical question) all excited by the first few pieces we see, only to look out at the rest of the nearly identical pieces in the gargantuan hall and decide, “Meh, you know what: I think I’m good here”? That’s not the fault of the sculptures, nor of the sculptor, it is a fault of the context, the experience of being assaulted by so much mind-numbing sameness.

Which is an especially unavoidable reality in crypto art, too.

Crypto art will always tend towards amount. The natural effect of putting more tools and opportunity in the hands of more artists is that more art is created. And because most artists are more insularly concerned with their own ability, evolution, and interests than learning, internalizing, and iterating upon the eons of artistry before them, much of this art will appear similar, if not outright unspectacular.

But it is okay for two independent artists, with no knowledge of each other, to create two works using the same novel processes, which ultimately share repetitive aesthetics. That is an omnipresent feature of all artistry, especially popular artistry where there’s a financial incentive towards sameness.

Herein, the always-parasitic market found generative artistry a willing host. But all artistry, across mediums and styles, would be a willing host. We can exalt hermit artists creating art with no regard for the market, but let’s be realistic: If there is money somewhere, artists will covet pieces of that pie, the consequences on art history be damned.

Linda Dounia writes that “We have the opportunity to liberate computer art in our brave little corner of the world…There are three bosses that beg slaying in this endeavour: (1) understanding the effects of our brand of gen art on our culture, (2) rejecting the hegemonic ‘engine’ through which computer art is currently produced on the blockchain, and (3) multiplying our perspectives on what computer art can be/do in/for our culture(s).”

I will respond to each of these points as follows:

1. I don’t believe artists have a responsibility to care about their effects on culture. The input is too personal, the outcome too abstract. Maybe ethically, they do, but we’re fighting human nature here.

2. Rejecting the hegemonic ‘engine’ is only sensible if there are alternatives to that engine. I have not seen many, and the ones that do exist are too technologically complex for most.

3. I’d argue that this is a natural effect of generative art tools remaining available; Artblocks only launched in 2020, and Chromie Squiggles, the first project therein, didn’t release until January of 2021. I know things move quickly here in crypto, but it’s only been 3.5 years since that most-famous of generative-art engines became available to the public. At least two of those years have taken place within a painful bear market, where many artists were forced towards the nearest money-making medium. But the multiplicative perspectives are already here, as emphasized by Esherick and Dounia’s lists of artists from earlier, and it will only increase.

Ultimately, all these points seem fairly inarguable once we apply the proper context to Esherick and Dounia’s essays. Generative art was not created in a pure vacuum. It skyrocketed in popularity in lockstep with a PFP-based NFT market, after which it too encountered the same prolonged period of financial instability that crippled crypto art at-large. If the market was only interested in rewarding a tiny subset of crypto artists throughout that period, then it feels superfluous to criticize the survival-minded artists who contorted themselves into that subset.

The double-edged sword of crypto art’s values once again unsheathes itself:

We want artists to make a living from their art, but we’re unprepared for what artists will do when that living is threatened.

We want vast and equitable discoverability, but we decry the mediocre artistry that we then discover.

We want tools available to all who want them, but we demand these people study art history, consider the abstract consequences of their talent (or lack thereof), and reserve for public output only that which is innovative and new.

It’s all just unrealistic.

(Obviously, we weren’t getting out of this without perhaps my favorite piece of crypto art, period: Matt Kane’s Gazers #0 (2021) of his Gazers project. Matt still holds this one, as I suspect he always will.

On that last point: We all place way too much emphasis on minting. Just because work is minted does not mean it necessarily should be considered within whatever canons we criticize. When we peruse Artblocks or Objkt or Fxhash and look over the generative work there, we must remember that we’re looking first-and-foremost at experimentation, at uncertainty. We are looking at works in progress. We are looking at people fooling around with a new medium, a new mechanism, the resultant mix of new paint. Artists must engage in the minting process if they’re going to see the results of their labor, if they’re going to further their practices, and it’s unfair that we should necessarily judge them on what are probably better seen as the equivalent of color studies, sketches, and rough drafts. Currently, however, we amalgamate all of this art together with the truly brilliant because our discoverability tools equate it all. As I said previously, we want equitable discoverability in theory, but the result is that we get shown way too much crap. Unfortunately, as is the case in all walks of life, the crap will always outnumber the high-quality.

Listen, I too create crap. I have created far more crap than I have high-quality work. This essay may be a demonstration of that fact. If anyone is unhappy with such a characterization of crypto art, generative art, etc. I don’t think they’re being realistic about artistry.

All in all, I think Esherick’s essay, and Dounia’s response, are remarkable texts that deserve all their individual recognition.

But Esherick too glibly implicates individual artists in what should be a more-pointed takedown of the market, and Dounia only emphasizes that point. Esherick is very incisive when dissecting the market dynamics around generative art, but doesn’t touch at all on the very real, downstream effects of those market dynamics. And finally, we all place far too much emphasis on minted work. Just as a collector acquires generative works sight-unseen, generative artists create them sight-unseen, too.

Put simply: We want artists free from constraints, and thus, we cannot scold them for their ensuing freedom. Art history, art movements, art markets, all of these things are pitifully less important than individual artists themselves. That does not mean the former three things are above criticism, but it demands that we critics provide more sensitive context in our criticisms.

Or maybe (and I mean this honestly), it makes criticism unnecessary in the first place. After all, who benefits from Esherick’s essay? Who benefits from mine? Do these texts change a single artist’s mind to mint or not to mint? Do they slow the market’s insatiable appetite? Do they influence the creation or delay of even one project? If they do…should they? Should I have that kind of power? Should Esherick? Should anyone?

Questions to answer another day.

-Your friendly neighborhood art writer,

Max