WRITING
Not an NFT
July 2022
Fungibility is not new to the art world. Posters, books, stickers,
digital
collages, and digtial photographs are all fungible. They can be mass produced with the click of a button. Paintings, on the other hand, create non-fungible assets. In some ways, physical objects and signatures of the author are an archaic blockchain of security and ownership, like a block of gold or a pair of diamond earrings. With the proliferation of NFTs has come a new subjectivity within the world and a new conceptual project for art.
I am interested in fungible aesthetics as a non-fungible form. My signature for paintings is fungible and mass-produced, while the subject of painting posters is non-fungible. Our relationship to the things we make and the stuff we find valuable has started to change. I am interested in challenging our understanding of fungibility within the art world as a physical and conceptual idea. Painting fungible aesthetics is an endeavor focused not on flatness, like the flatness of an offset printer laying ink on material, but instead in the material thickness of layering paint, canvas, and Velcro into a three-dimensional object for us to walk around and experience in person. As Walter Benjamin mentioned about photography in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, we are currently in a social shift towards a new art.
Signature as fungible aesthetic.
Most recently, I have been interested in generating AI images as fungible aesthetics. These machine vision aesthetics are printed and sewn onto canvas as non-fungible forms. During the process of sewing, there is an error in the assemblage of parts. I see a new type of conceptual project which combines AI and textiles.
AI generated images using Midjourney.