<nettime> re art & monetary value -- "art in the information economy"

This piece from 1996 on art and various forms of capital in the digital world has some things to say that are pertinent to this interesting conversation. You'll see some theorists not as present in ongoing conversation these days as they were then, but I stand on the piece.

"Art in the Information Economy"

http://people.tamu.edu/~braman/bramanpdfs/011_art.pdf

Sandra Braman

On Sun, Mar 28, 2021 at 5:00 AM <nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org> wrote:

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: what does monetary value indicate? (Molly Hankwitz)
2. Re: what does monetary value indicate? (Brian Holmes)

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Message: 1
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2021 18:50:30 -0700
From: Molly Hankwitz <mollyhankwitz@gmail.com>
To: Michael Goldhaber <michael@goldhaber.org>
Cc: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re: <nettime> what does monetary value indicate?
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Hi Michael,

Or, maybe, originality has been all along, a fictional history, and a
signifier for fictional social relations in much art history, if only to
justify value through ?scarcity? (genius and originality are rare) or
create its justification (there is only one original) and to obscure modes
of artistic production not about ?sole? authorship and individual
creativity? Somewhere along the line, ?originality? was seen to be a
valuable asset in art making, taught, told, produced, encouraged, and then
it died many deaths as a concept; as something to strive for or achieve or
practice or expect? ?Death of the author?, digital reproducibility,
post-medium conditions, AI Art, all seemingly question or consider at least
art without ?originality?.
We have replaced this expectation instead with collectivity, collaboration,
stakeholders, or, much more importantly, maybe, the artist as an ?original?
interpreter of systems. So, I?m thinking that the new artist might be more
akin to an economist who comprehends the communication of value or an
artist who digs deeply into AI enough to transform it...originally. This
appears to me by way of Paglen, Steryel, and others to be a trend. Artist
as ?administrative author? or initiator of a system, through which
communities can act, somewhat recursively to establish value, and/or
prosper via, for instance, a shared currency?

(Fresh from MoneyLab events)

Molly

On Sat, Mar 27, 2021 at 4:02 PM Michael Goldhaber <michael@goldhaber.org>
wrote:

> On Mar 27, 2021, at 1:27 PM, Molly Hankwitz <mollyhankwitz@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> ..how original is original when originality died long ago ?
>
>
> Yes, originality died with the second cave painting, but has been reborn
> many times since, even if only evident to new generations. Depending on
> the fineness of your mesh, it is always relatively rare, and thus, with so
> many trying for it today, perhaps easily not seen. But I bet still around.
>
>
> Best,
>
> Michael
>
>
>
> --

molly hankwitz - she/her
http://bivoulab.org
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Message: 2
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2021 23:28:14 -0500
From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
To: Molly Hankwitz <mollyhankwitz@gmail.com>
Cc: a moderated mailing list for net criticism
<nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> what does monetary value indicate?
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On Sat, Mar 27, 2021 at 8:51 PM Molly Hankwitz <mollyhankwitz@gmail.com>
asked:

Artist as ?administrative author? or initiator of a system, through which
> communities can act, somewhat recursively to establish value, and/or
> prosper via, for instance, a shared currency?
>

I am fascinated by the concept of the artist as "initiator of a system,"
it's the most profound and still-relevant notion of art to come out of the
late 20th century. To initiate a system is to open up the field in which
something like orientation or valuation can take place. Exactly what the
orientations and values must be is not initially prescribed, but still, the
coordinates and the terms of measure are made available and shared, as we
all know from software and activist movements and even love (let's think
co-initiators).

But the demon of contradiction wants me to take something so admirable into
a more troubling direction, which could have some bearing on Felix's
question of NFT motivations.

There were these two dudes, I happen to know their story, Leo Melamed, the
star trader of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and Milton Friedman - well,
you get the picture. Leo went to listen in on the classes given by ol' Milt
at the University of Chicago, notably because of the idea that in a world
of floating currency values, futures markets would easily emerge. Money
could be made from the possible future values of money - it fired Melamed's
imagination. When Nixon suspended the Bretton Woods treaties and opened up
the floating world, Leo commissioned Milt to write an authoritative paper,
and the two co-initiators went to Washington to institute a new world
order. Legal to boot. Friedman rang the bell at the opening of the
International Monetary Market on May 16, 1972. It opened up the entire
computational space of financial derivatives. You can read Melamed's prose
if you're curious, but you gotta see the look on Friedman's face:
https://bit.ly/3rvC1t8

NFTs are gesturing toward a new market, a hitherto unknown territory of
abstraction. For a financier this would be the equivalent of the voyages of
discovery - Christopher Columbus. The everyday lives will get colonized
later on. Right now these people have the sense of establishing, not just
an asset class, but something new under the sun. They feel like world
movers.

The weird thing is that I think many of us can imagine it, at least a
little bit. Do you remember what it was like, co-initiating
social-computational systems? Maybe you still do it?

Around that time back in the early 70s, the conceptual artist Marcel
Broodthaers was ironically exploring what he called "the conquest of
space." It was about Columbus and the art market and the Apollo Program.
Certainly with the symbolic space they opened up - now the Globex trading
platform - Friedman and Melamed oriented the whole neoliberal period. They
discovered a new America. They created and administrated what you might
call an effective abstraction, which has not yet ceased to govern the vast
lifeworlds of just-in-time production and distribution. This is the
terrifying other side of initiating systems.

NFTs are not going to rule the world. This is an attempted conquest of
art-market space. But the desire it attempts to symbolize is significant.
What kind of currency would a computational oligarchy need for the era of
accelerated technological change and asymptotically granular population
control that is emerging as a possibility right now, through the ubiquitous
applications of AI? In the best of cases this would have to be a truly
common currency, enabling resilience, adaptation, transformation for the
future 9 billions of human earthlings - and infinite other species. In the
worst of cases, it would be the currency of a veritable state-financial
nexus, the kind David Harvey talks about, where privatized monetary
creation is the enabler of hyper flexible bureaucratic control.

Frankly, just reading the newspapers, I see a huge struggle going on over
the initiation of systems. Either you get eco-socialism, or you get the
nexus.

Meanwhile I see lots of artists trying to invent new blockchain currencies.
But who is the Marcel Broodthaers of the onrushing AI era? And how would
*they* express themselves?

curiously, Brian
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