Essay... “Culture You Can Wear”: Why PFPs Compress Tokenisation, Personification and Representation

Thesis. PFPs don’t just depict culture; they instantiate it. They compress three roles (tokenising a cultural motif into property, personifying it as a usable self, representing it in the stream of images) into a single, network-native object. Traditional art can do any one (and sometimes two) of these; PFPs make all three the default.From “art about culture” to “culture in operation”All art encodes culture. Benjamin’s classic point about mechanical reproduction was that new media transform a...