Aesthetics 101 for Art Collectors in Crypto/Web3

When NFTs started becoming more popular a few years ago, I was initially hoping that it would be a place where people were talking deeply about aesthetics since everyone was talking about, about talking about, art - in that regard the crypto space been fairly disappointing, to be honest. Most of the chatter about NFTs were basically speculators talking about money (mostly amongst themselves) leaving actual artists and practitioners out of the conversation. This scene was very common, even in conventions and NFT-related events over the last few years - tech/finance people representing themselves on panels, while only throwing a bone to the artist themselves once in a while. (A very common thing that happens in Silicon Valley, unfortunately.)

The whole situation was unfortunate because even for speculators, if you don't know what you're actually buying in an artwork you're more likely than not just going to end up in the red anyway. As they say, "money talks, BS walks" - at least when prices are going up. When it starts going down, though - what's left? Value - or the lack thereof, anyway. The "value" that exists inside of an NFT is purely aesthetic - that's what art is, in it of itself.

The understanding of aesthetics as a concept is actually not that difficult, intellectually speaking. But there is a particular line of reasoning (which got very popular during the Web2 era) that prevents most people from coming to a proper understanding of how it all works - the suggestion that art is always subjective and "in the eye of the beholder" (i.e. aesthetic relativism), therefore is not worthy of applying the same types of analysis or rigor that you would otherwise apply to other fields. It's a combination of (otherwise smart) people not wanting to "think" about their down-time activities and charlatans taking advantage of people's lack of understanding in order to make a quick buck. (I get it - sometimes you just want to turn your brain off and enjoy yourself - but that's where grifters often make their move.) When there is information asymmetry it always works to the advantage of those doing the pushing, after all.

Yes, there are parts of art that are subjective and are open to interpretation. But there's still a lot that you can deduce from the parts of art that aren't - the choice of medium, subject matter, distribution volume, how the work was presented, when and where, the biographical facts of the artist - the indisputable "facts" of a work that should be uncontroversial and matter-of-fact. With those data points as your starting point, you can then move onto talking about messaging and intentionality from there.

There's a big difference between someone who mints 1000s of NFTs about cartoon animals born in Brazil promoting it online versus a painter who spends a whole year painting one work on a physical canvas in the Swiss Alps selling door-to-door, after all, right? In highlighting and comparing these types of similarities and differences, we can then start to figure out what the artist is trying to "say" and what its aesthetic "value" really is. As with any other idea or argument, art needs context too, in order for it to make "sense".

Again - aesthetics is not something that is necessarily difficult to understand intellectually - but it can be difficult thing to process emotionally, since once you get a grasp of how this stuff "works" you will start seeing things in the world that you wouldn't have otherwise - and you won't be able to "turn it off", as most do. Every object or idea created by a human has at least a little bit of "art" in them, after all - once you start seeing how all of it is put together, there's really no going back. It can become overwhelming for many - but if you're fancying yourself as a serious "art collector" making "good" decisions about your latest purchase, you'd think that being able to articulate what the artwork is actually "doing" would be pretty useful, right?

What *Is* Aesthetics?

• The Third Web - Music by ryangtanaka (me)

The definition of aesthetics itself isn't often clearly defined (which adds to the confusion) but we'll go with the standard definition that's most relevant for this context - "the understanding and appreciation of beauty and good taste". Grifters and charlatans often try to define "good taste" through personal taste or compensate the lack thereof with power/money, but the momentum from those sorts of attempts are often short-lived unless there is what's known as "staying power". "Staying power" is the method to the madness that gives us at least something stable to latch onto in an industry that's otherwise running purely on people's feelings alone.

"Staying power" is a term used in arts/entertainment circles to describe works of "lasting value" - things that stay around for a very long time because people still find it worthwhile to experience even years after it was released. There's primarily two reasons why this happens:

• It speaks the truth of something that is universal and timeless. (i.e. Transcendental)
• It recreates an experience for the audience that resonates with them very strongly. (i.e. Mundane)

So this the fundamentals of art appreciation: What exactly is the difference between art and entertainment? They're often used interchangeably but they're not actually the same: Art is transcendental, entertainment is mundane.

"Art" is sometimes called "high art" because of its attempt at transcending the toils of day to day life - why in earlier eras its productions were very closely connected to churches/temples, political uprisings, and spiritual practices as a whole. (To help followers lift themselves from the burdens of current existence.) Even now, many practitioners in the fine arts industry try to aim for that feeling of being "uplifted" in one way or another.

The prime example of "entertainment" is Hollywood, where there is a very clear emphasis on familiar tropes and themes: money, fame, sex, drugs, achievement, social acceptance, etc. Entertainment industry professionals are often targeting the "good times" their audience had during their adolescent years, in an attempt to recreate the feelings from back then. It is consciously trying to tap into your unconscious mind in this way, all the time. These techniques are also used in marketing strategies - in other to push product that you may (or may not) need.

Where art attempts to lift the spirits from the world, entertainment strives to make the experience of the work itself relatable to "earthly" desires and needs of the audience themselves.

Another way to frame the two sides is how the word "love" is defined: art tends to express a love for something in a platonic way (ideas, concepts, values, deities), whereas in entertainment, love-interests are usually aimed at romantic relationships or the love of more "mundane" (money, materialism, social status) goals. This duality is reflected in the economics of each as well: art tends to be geared towards high value/low volume markets, while entertainment tends to be mass-market driven with lower costs of entry. Boutique goods vs mass-distributed goods, basically.

In practice, these distinctions are not always clear cut and you could even make the argument that the most interesting works are ones that blend both things, leaving the audience satisfied on both counts. But if you look closely enough, you'll probably find that 99% of the things that exist out there usually "lean" towards one direction or another. (Even in things like video games and social media, yes.) This actually makes it easier to spot the the exceptions - the idea of "upward mobility", for example, comes from combining the transcendental with the mundane, with a specific narrative to bridge the two. The more "believable" the narrative, the stronger its impact - the more universal the story is, the more "staying power" it has, long-term.

To make it even more simple, Transcendental art is an expression of what "could be", while mundane art is "what is". NFT art itself swings back and forth between this pendulum, based on market conditions and people's beliefs of what the "next big thing" will be. Can you see it? It's not random - it is a pattern.

So Now What?

So in a nutshell, that's aesthetics 101 - at least when it comes to "Western" art - which NFTs are a sub-category of, in its current form. In case you're wondering what the point of knowing all this stuff is - it starts to get interesting when you start tying it in with other trends happening elsewhere.

You could make an argument, for example, that the recent hype in Artificial Intelligence is transcendental. This is reflected in the artworks it produces, too - with lots of imagery of space, future utopia/dystopias, and combinations of things that don't currently "exist" - this is because the movement is still enamored with the possibilities of the technology at this point. (This will shift once people start running into its bottlenecks, but that's for another post.)

Crypto art, on the other hand, is mundane. Crypto art has always self-identified as "degen" (including the recent hype in $PEPE), using images of punks, animals, and other types of "earthly" themes. It's trying very hard to be "relatable" - for better or worse.

Now onto its politics - AI services are owned by big companies that love to consolidate everything into one process, while crypto advocates are pushing for decentralized and distributed systems - in a way, it makes sense that even its power structures closely follow the duality of its aesthetics, too. To support AI is to worship at the altar of the machine above, to support crypto is to focus your attention to the people themselves below. People will just swing back and forth between the pendulum, going to where the grass seems greener, over and over.

People are complicated and the reality is that there is always both things going on in most cases - not to mention all of the people out there faking it, making it more difficult to decipher what is actually going on. But the thing about aesthetics is - once you start seeing this stuff in everyday life, you can't unsee it - you will start to notice patterns connections between art and the happenings of the real world, because art is literally everywhere. It is both a guide to making better decisions, as well as a BS detector to keep yourself safe from the harms of the mal-intentioned.

There's a reason why artists have often been mistaken for mystics and oracles - because they seem to see things happening before they actually do. But it's not magic - it's a skill you learn to hone and develop as someone who is merely paying attention to what is actually going on. In a world dominated by fake-news, that type of pre-cognition might seem like magic maybe - but I do really believe that it's a type of thing that anybody can pick up if they wanted to.

If you consider yourself to be a serious art collector, that literally is your job, after all.