A juicy piece of meat to distract the watchdogs of your mind #10/50
Warhol's Factory, Marshall McLuhan, Marshall Mathers, clout chasing celebrities, & what's a bug vs. a feature of NFTs?
Andy Warhol once said, “In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.”
This quote is often mangled to something the effect of everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame.
As if there exists a clock marked “Your Fame” on a wall and any success you achieve begins to bleed time from it.
In reality, Warhol was commenting on mass media and how quickly ideas could spread with the advent of live television. The quote was attributed to him in early 1968, the same year he was shot outside his New York studio, which some argued set his work off in a different direction.
In reality, Warhol was obsessed with mortality, wealth, and fame throughout his career.
After his Campbell’s Soup can paintings premiered — see last edition — Warhol realized he wanted to scale his work faster.
Instead of stenciling and painting works by hand, which itself was still a commercial style, Warhol adopted a mass-market approach via screen printing.
Here’s an example of one of his first prints of Elizabeth Taylor, made at The Factory:
Screen printing was a graphic art at the time, not for serious work. (Think Kinko’s sign creation.)
Used as an artistic process, it can produce reliably consistent prints. Yet Warhol would print haphazardly by design, pressing colors quickly, generating imperfections due to his haste.
Above, you can see the red undercoat bleed through Liz’s hair. These small offsets, to Warhol, mimicked the tabloid feel of misaligned newspaper printing runs.
Each Warhol would turn out a little differently, with small variations in color and placement, making every print simultaneously one of a series and one of a kind. (And set the stage for how we think about NFT collections.)
These early pieces also worked thematically; Warhol fused process and subject to explore a uniquely American truth — Celebrities suffer from shallow over-exposure.
Why Does Fame Matter?
As I write this, we are one week away from the 2022 Super Bowl, where Calvin Broadus Jr. and Marshall Mathers will perform at the halftime show.
You probably know them by their professional names, Snoop Dogg and Eminem.
You might also know they both hold Bored Ape Yacht Club apes; expectations that their BAYCs will appear during the half-time show is sky-high.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton recently showed off their apes on The Tonight Show and two multi-millionaires casually chatting about $200k JPGs on a national television stage raised… eyebrows to say the least. (See Atlantic’s “Celebrities and NFTs are a Match in Hell,” to get the vibe.)
While we might think of fame and wealth as synonymous, Celebrities are largely wage-earning laborers.
Wealth accumulation is usually over a short, ill-defined period. It’s not a surprise to me that early NFT adopters have been famous — including some creating their own NFTs — as NFTs are a perfect tool to monetize fame directly by tapping into a direct audience relationship.
But here’s my deeper question about celebrity involvement:
Do NFTs attract celebrities because virality is built into their design? Or do celebrities flock to creative endeavors that provide clout?
And what does that say about the systems we’re creating?
The Medium is the Message (or Massage)
Let me introduce another Marshall: communication theorist Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was a contemporary to Warhol in the 1960’s. McLuhan foresaw that new forms of media create new worlds—worlds with realities that rival real life.
McLuhan also believed the structure of the medium was more important than the content. For example, he argued that the programming on television was less important than how radicalized watching television would make us. The passivity of consuming TV is what he critiqued, since the structure is what alters our reality more than the content, often without us even noticing it.
For McLuhan, it wouldn’t matter if you watched PBS or Fox News — the act of watching both was the same:
For the 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. . . The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.
The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.
The world changes.
And it requires serious artists to withstand and criticize those changes, which is the antithesis of celebrity.
Popularizing Popular Art
I think it’s fair to credit Warhol with changing the way that art and commerce intersected in America.
While he started creating artworks of movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Marylin Monroe, he applied these same techniques to his commissioned works in his later career.
By the mid-1970s he was spending most of his time finding wealthy socialites to purchase custom works in his same style, like this one:
I’ll bet you can’t tell me who is depicted here*. This commercial approach fed Warhol critics in late 70’s. The relationship between the medium and the message was suddenly gone.
It’s one artistic impulse to force a viewer to question her participation in the celebrity-industrial complex; it’s another to use the same structures to try to make your subjects famous.
NFTs are certainly guilty of chasing fame.
How Does the Medium Remake Us?
Warhol once said, Art is what you can get away with.
Here was his most daring attempt to get away with something — take a moment and read the title aloud.
(I mean, this has some serious degen energy, amiright?)
Most NFTs would love a Reese Witherspoon to profile pic their work because success in web3 requires you bring your own audience. Celebrities have their own audience to bring while the work of creating community is time-consuming.
Fame is a cheat code, whether earned or bought.
Warhol, despite his love of celebrity, found solace in the American ideal of the modern age — that we could all partake of the same experiences:
What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too.
A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
This quote is a testimony to the benefits of commercialization and mass marketing — it puts experiences within reach and embodies the opposite of Warhol’s late 70’s portraits of the rich.
So which Warhol are we building with NFTs — an exclusive experience or something to be enjoyed by all?
If this experiment on the blockchain is just a 15 minutes of fame cash-grab, it doesn’t matter very much. The critics are right that NFTs are digital tulips, or the pet rocks of the 2020’s.
If NFTs are meant to survive beyond this current age, they must reconcile with two very different strategies:
Build your community authentically from the ground up
Accelerate growth by courting fame
I’ll concede Art and Commerce are two sides of the same hammer of creation — commercial viability is vital for working artists.
But at some point, if the point of a community is that only some of us are gonna make it (OSOUAGMI?) at the expense of others, it ceases to be a community.
It just becomes another boring social club.
I side with McLuhan. I believe the serious artists are the ones who best understand a new medium because they are suspicious of its aims.
NFTs, as a medium, can falsely infuse us with a sense of importance and intimacy for the sake of commerce.
Think about it: the projects that are intentionally deceptive — rug pulls — play on not only a desire to be wealthy, but also to be included in something special.
Successful projects must do the same; manufactured virality and volatile price swings are a fundamental feature of NFTs, not a bug.
They’re not going away any time soon, unless we demand something new.
Next time:
Maybe we don’t want web3 just yet…
The trouble of coin economics
Why do NFT projects want to act like a bank?
Tweet of the Moment
When people regret their fav celebrities aping into NFTs:
As always, I have so much more to tell you,
Paul
P.S. Please Share or Subscribe!
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*It’s Mark Leibovitz in the Warhol painting, an art dealer who hung out at Studio 54
(https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5718332)
More on Warhol and McLuhan here:
https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/andy-warhol-and-his-process
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/warhol/warhol-timeline
https://marshallmcluhan.com/
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/nft-jimmy-fallon-paris-hilton-millionaire/621486/
https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/evvyxw/comme-des-garcons-revive-a-troubled-andy-warhol-artwork