History does not only tell us what happened; it also illuminates what’s happening today. For this reason, subtle or apparent similarities can exist between a past and present event. The Pop Art movement from the ‘40s to ‘80s and the Crypto Art movement of today follow this hypothesis. Although emerging from disparate eras of human civilization, the parallels between these art movements are very telling.

Contrary to conventional discourse of style and iconography when analyzing art movements, this work examines the relationship between Pop Art and Crypto Art in more extensive contexts like culture and innovation.

Emergence is the first essay of a three-part series. It explores how significant innovations triggered social shifts among humans, thereby encouraging the birth of Pop Art and Crypto Art.

The Second Industrial Revolution marked the rise of consumerism and Pop Art was able to ride on this significant shift. The revolution was characterized by technological advancements that brought about a new energy source -- electricity. A new wave of organizations were able to harness electrical energy to facilitate mass production and soon a variety of products filled the market. Due to the enormous economic growth experienced in this era, better opportunities emerged that improved societal affluence and net spending power.

Organizations understood this trend and made the masses the core of business decisions. This era also marked the incorporation of scientific principles in order to ensure homogeneity across products. Consequently, product homogeneity encouraged mimetic desire among the public and mass production coincided with their purchasing power to drive continuous consumption.

Innovation occurred at a rapid pace during this era and resulted in the disruption of many industries. One of such was the mass media. The space was greeted with technologies like the television, which caused a seismic shift in the social interactions of the masses and the economic models of organizations. For the masses, a great deal of interaction with happenings in their surroundings and the rest of the world transitioned from audio (the radio) to audio plus visual.

The resonating effect of motion pictures was able to pull in all social classes. In no time, television became not only the town square for news, but a reflector of dreams and preferences across diverse aspects of life. Literally everything in an individual’s life revolved around the content disseminated through the television with movies, comics and film shows being the major catalysts of this shift. This occurrence intersected with the existent consumption society and gave rise to a common standard of lifestyle desired by the masses, known as popular (pop) culture.

For organizations, product homogeneity wasn’t enough to thrive; brand design, identity and reach became more significant than ever. Coupled with the advent of a new mass media technology, the market evolved to become open. New organizations debuted the scene and competition for consumers’ attention went fierce. This instigated the rise of commercial art. Manufacturing organizations employed commercial artists to create aesthetic brand designs in order to communicate the value of products as well as make it stand out from competitors.

With television already inseparable from the daily lives of masses, organizations positioned products through advertisements in order to attain reach. This trend resulted in the peak of the advertising industry and a further boom in mass consumption. Alongside movies, comics and film shows, the advertisement industry etched a spot as an influencer of pop culture. All of this was possible owing partly to the creative works of the employed commercial artists. From the comic characters used in shows, to movie posters, and brand designs of products, the commercial artist plays an indispensable role in the processes that elevate a brand to pop culture status.

Having experienced firsthand the profound effect television and pop culture evoked on the masses, some prescient commercial artists, who labeled themselves as The Independent Group, were spurred to elevate the aesthetic value of their works to a high art status. This signaled the advent of Pop Art.

In 1947, the first work considered as Pop Art was made by English artist Eduardo Paolozzi, a founding member of The Independent Group. The piece, I was a Rich Man’s Plaything, is a collage which features clippings of advertisement images from magazines. The work takes its title from the words on the cover of Intimate Confessions magazine, which is also the most prominent clipping in the collage. Other clipped images in the collage include a bottle of Coca-Cola, the poster of a fighter jet and a sign labeled ‘POP’ from a gun which was aimed at a woman’s face. This was the first prominent use of the word ‘pop’ in an artwork, years before British writer Lawrence Alloway (also a member if the Independent Group) coined the term ‘Pop Art’ in 1958

The emergence of Pop Art instigated the trend where commercial art intersected with pop culture, not as a medium to promote a movie, film show or product to the masses, but as art worthy of aesthetic, professional and economic appreciation.

Following its arrival in 1947, Pop Art served as an artistic reflection of a society whose consumption is driven by popular culture. This marked the influence of postmodernism (more on this in upcoming essay sequels) in art with London and New York becoming the new art centers of the world. Although the term ‘Pop Art’ was first coined in Britain in 1955, the Americans succeeded in propagating the tenet with much greater effect. Notable artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and James Rosenquist -- all with a commercial art background, played pivotal roles in the escalation of Pop Art in America.

As mass consumption increased, production processes demanded efficiency and optimization. This resulted in the start of the Third Industrial Revolution where computers were introduced to automate and digitize operations. Over time, significant improvements in the hardware (the microchip) and software components (the operating system) of the computer evolved it from an industrial equipment to an individual’s device. On top of that, the internet was invented and this positioned the computer in the driver’s seat of the revolution.

The internet flipped the old world and encouraged the rise of new types of organizations. These organizations built digital infrastructures that leveraged the internet and opened up new economic models. This enabled the masses to interact with computers for daily activities like communication, socializing, learning, finance, commerce, and so on, in a much more efficient manner. As more people got acquainted with the internet through the services offered by these organizations, widespread globalization followed.

The universal accessibility of the internet has created a digital culture among humans and morphed it into a mass communication tool. The internet being a hub for the spread of information, dreams, and relationships, and people using it for the majority of their activities evince the rise of digital culture. Furthermore, digital culture is evident in the obliteration of the hurdles between creation and distribution. Digital goods are now being created in abundance by users and a wealth of value is available for all to consume. New occupation opportunities have also opened up for individuals to create niche digital economies and earn a living. This has increased the collective wealth of human civilization.

With the internet already the new medium for mass interaction, attention to aesthetics became crucial and the digital art niche boomed. From the content consumed through the interfaces of digital infrastructures to internet advertisements, digital artists make the art and visuals that propagate the networks of these infrastructures.

Although immensely beneficial, the abundance of digital goods on the internet comes with a major challenge: there’s no mechanism in place that accrues the economic value generated by a digital good, regardless of its popularity, usage and consumption on the internet. Piracy and infringement of intellectual and creative rights have been the consequences of this downside. In the same vein, art created by digital artists are not exempted from these consequences.

In an effort to alleviate this challenge, some digital infrastructures have resorted to setting up paywalls for digital art, but economic value still can’t be captured by artists. In fact, this move has turned out to be counterproductive as value is being accrued to the network, not the art nor its creator. Like the commercial art of the Second Industrial Revolution, the aesthetic value of digital art is relegated as a medium that serves the interfaces and networks of digital infrastructures.

The underlying reason behind the inability of digital goods to accrue economic value lies perhaps in its intangibility. It’s a long held perception that intangible elements cannot be owned and ownership has been a prerequisite for economic interactions between humans. This viewpoint argues that in a permissionless space like the internet, where anyone can create and/or duplicate anything, conferring ownership of digital goods is a futile effort. Where there’s no provable ownership, economic activities like trade, lending and borrowing can’t take place, hence no accrual of economic value on digital goods. However, as digital culture has taken center stage in human civilization, it’s become pertinent to bestow ownership of internet goods using digitally native mechanisms. By doing this, economics invariably kicks in and value accrual of digital goods is possible.

Today, blockchain technology has experienced immense improvements. Blockchains are ledgers which record transactions and these ledgers are not controlled by a single entity, are available for all to see and cannot be changed arbitrarily once a transaction is recorded on it. These features make blockchains well suited for recording and proving ownership and transfer of digital goods.

The cryptographic mechanism that facilitates this innovation is known as the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) standard. This standard certifies unique and irreplicable ownership of a digital good, which makes the good non-fungible (that is, cannot be substituted) with other goods. Due to the public availability of blockchains, ownership of a digital good can now be proven/verified easily by anyone.

This technological shift alleviates the challenge experienced by creators of digital goods. In 2014, the first Crypto Art was tokenized by Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash on the NameCoin blockchain with Monegraph (Monetized Graphics), the first NFT platform -- also built by the duo. It was a significant event that marked the beginning of the Crypto Art movement.

Today, many digital artists are adopting this innovation to confer and transfer (sell) ownership of their arts and for the first time in human civilization, the economic value of digital art can be accrued to owners. In the same way television and pop culture elevated commercial art to a high art status, internet, blockchain technology and digital culture are elevating digital art to art worthy of economic, aesthetic and professional appreciation.

The context behind the emergence of every movement is fundamentally cultural. From time immemorial, technology has always possessed the power to trigger a cultural shift, which in turn changes people's way of thinking.

Pop Art and Crypto Art are not art movements that introduce new style and iconography. Pop Art and Crypto Art are the artistic reflection of an unlearning and learning society, due to the advent of new innovations (television for pop art; blockchain for crypto art) which change people's way of life (pop culture for pop art; digital culture for crypto art).

Timeline of Revolutions

Seven on Seven 2014: Kevin McCoy & Anil Dash

I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything

History does not only tell us what happened; it also illuminates what’s happening today. For this reason, subtle or apparent similarities can exist between a past and present event. The Pop Art movement from the ‘40s to ‘80s and the Crypto Art movement of today follow this hypothesis. Although emerging from disparate eras of human civilization, the parallels between these art movements are very telling.

Contrary to conventional discourse of style and iconography when analyzing art movements, this work examines the relationship between Pop Art and Crypto Art in more extensive contexts like culture and innovation.

Emergence is the first essay of a three-part series. It explores how significant innovations triggered social shifts among humans, thereby encouraging the birth of Pop Art and Crypto Art.

The Second Industrial Revolution marked the rise of consumerism and Pop Art was able to ride on this significant shift. The revolution was characterized by technological advancements that brought about a new energy source -- electricity. A new wave of organizations were able to harness electrical energy to facilitate mass production and soon a variety of products filled the market. Due to the enormous economic growth experienced in this era, better opportunities emerged that improved societal affluence and net spending power.

Organizations understood this trend and made the masses the core of business decisions. This era also marked the incorporation of scientific principles in order to ensure homogeneity across products. Consequently, product homogeneity encouraged mimetic desire among the public and mass production coincided with their purchasing power to drive continuous consumption.

Innovation occurred at a rapid pace during this era and resulted in the disruption of many industries. One of such was the mass media. The space was greeted with technologies like the television, which caused a seismic shift in the social interactions of the masses and the economic models of organizations. For the masses, a great deal of interaction with happenings in their surroundings and the rest of the world transitioned from audio (the radio) to audio plus visual.

The resonating effect of motion pictures was able to pull in all social classes. In no time, television became not only the town square for news, but a reflector of dreams and preferences across diverse aspects of life. Literally everything in an individual’s life revolved around the content disseminated through the television with movies, comics and film shows being the major catalysts of this shift. This occurrence intersected with the existent consumption society and gave rise to a common standard of lifestyle desired by the masses, known as popular (pop) culture.

For organizations, product homogeneity wasn’t enough to thrive; brand design, identity and reach became more significant than ever. Coupled with the advent of a new mass media technology, the market evolved to become open. New organizations debuted the scene and competition for consumers’ attention went fierce. This instigated the rise of commercial art. Manufacturing organizations employed commercial artists to create aesthetic brand designs in order to communicate the value of products as well as make it stand out from competitors.

With television already inseparable from the daily lives of masses, organizations positioned products through advertisements in order to attain reach. This trend resulted in the peak of the advertising industry and a further boom in mass consumption. Alongside movies, comics and film shows, the advertisement industry etched a spot as an influencer of pop culture. All of this was possible owing partly to the creative works of the employed commercial artists. From the comic characters used in shows, to movie posters, and brand designs of products, the commercial artist plays an indispensable role in the processes that elevate a brand to pop culture status.

Having experienced firsthand the profound effect television and pop culture evoked on the masses, some prescient commercial artists, who labeled themselves as The Independent Group, were spurred to elevate the aesthetic value of their works to a high art status. This signaled the advent of Pop Art.

In 1947, the first work considered as Pop Art was made by English artist Eduardo Paolozzi, a founding member of The Independent Group. The piece, I was a Rich Man’s Plaything, is a collage which features clippings of advertisement images from magazines. The work takes its title from the words on the cover of Intimate Confessions magazine, which is also the most prominent clipping in the collage. Other clipped images in the collage include a bottle of Coca-Cola, the poster of a fighter jet and a sign labeled ‘POP’ from a gun which was aimed at a woman’s face. This was the first prominent use of the word ‘pop’ in an artwork, years before British writer Lawrence Alloway (also a member if the Independent Group) coined the term ‘Pop Art’ in 1958

The emergence of Pop Art instigated the trend where commercial art intersected with pop culture, not as a medium to promote a movie, film show or product to the masses, but as art worthy of aesthetic, professional and economic appreciation.

Following its arrival in 1947, Pop Art served as an artistic reflection of a society whose consumption is driven by popular culture. This marked the influence of postmodernism (more on this in upcoming essay sequels) in art with London and New York becoming the new art centers of the world. Although the term ‘Pop Art’ was first coined in Britain in 1955, the Americans succeeded in propagating the tenet with much greater effect. Notable artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and James Rosenquist -- all with a commercial art background, played pivotal roles in the escalation of Pop Art in America.

As mass consumption increased, production processes demanded efficiency and optimization. This resulted in the start of the Third Industrial Revolution where computers were introduced to automate and digitize operations. Over time, significant improvements in the hardware (the microchip) and software components (the operating system) of the computer evolved it from an industrial equipment to an individual’s device. On top of that, the internet was invented and this positioned the computer in the driver’s seat of the revolution.

The internet flipped the old world and encouraged the rise of new types of organizations. These organizations built digital infrastructures that leveraged the internet and opened up new economic models. This enabled the masses to interact with computers for daily activities like communication, socializing, learning, finance, commerce, and so on, in a much more efficient manner. As more people got acquainted with the internet through the services offered by these organizations, widespread globalization followed.

The universal accessibility of the internet has created a digital culture among humans and morphed it into a mass communication tool. The internet being a hub for the spread of information, dreams, and relationships, and people using it for the majority of their activities evince the rise of digital culture. Furthermore, digital culture is evident in the obliteration of the hurdles between creation and distribution. Digital goods are now being created in abundance by users and a wealth of value is available for all to consume. New occupation opportunities have also opened up for individuals to create niche digital economies and earn a living. This has increased the collective wealth of human civilization.

With the internet already the new medium for mass interaction, attention to aesthetics became crucial and the digital art niche boomed. From the content consumed through the interfaces of digital infrastructures to internet advertisements, digital artists make the art and visuals that propagate the networks of these infrastructures.

Although immensely beneficial, the abundance of digital goods on the internet comes with a major challenge: there’s no mechanism in place that accrues the economic value generated by a digital good, regardless of its popularity, usage and consumption on the internet. Piracy and infringement of intellectual and creative rights have been the consequences of this downside. In the same vein, art created by digital artists are not exempted from these consequences.

In an effort to alleviate this challenge, some digital infrastructures have resorted to setting up paywalls for digital art, but economic value still can’t be captured by artists. In fact, this move has turned out to be counterproductive as value is being accrued to the network, not the art nor its creator. Like the commercial art of the Second Industrial Revolution, the aesthetic value of digital art is relegated as a medium that serves the interfaces and networks of digital infrastructures.

The underlying reason behind the inability of digital goods to accrue economic value lies perhaps in its intangibility. It’s a long held perception that intangible elements cannot be owned and ownership has been a prerequisite for economic interactions between humans. This viewpoint argues that in a permissionless space like the internet, where anyone can create and/or duplicate anything, conferring ownership of digital goods is a futile effort. Where there’s no provable ownership, economic activities like trade, lending and borrowing can’t take place, hence no accrual of economic value on digital goods. However, as digital culture has taken center stage in human civilization, it’s become pertinent to bestow ownership of internet goods using digitally native mechanisms. By doing this, economics invariably kicks in and value accrual of digital goods is possible.

Today, blockchain technology has experienced immense improvements. Blockchains are ledgers which record transactions and these ledgers are not controlled by a single entity, are available for all to see and cannot be changed arbitrarily once a transaction is recorded on it. These features make blockchains well suited for recording and proving ownership and transfer of digital goods.

The cryptographic mechanism that facilitates this innovation is known as the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) standard. This standard certifies unique and irreplicable ownership of a digital good, which makes the good non-fungible (that is, cannot be substituted) with other goods. Due to the public availability of blockchains, ownership of a digital good can now be proven/verified easily by anyone.

This technological shift alleviates the challenge experienced by creators of digital goods. In 2014, the first Crypto Art was tokenized by Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash on the NameCoin blockchain with Monegraph (Monetized Graphics), the first NFT platform -- also built by the duo. It was a significant event that marked the beginning of the Crypto Art movement.

Today, many digital artists are adopting this innovation to confer and transfer (sell) ownership of their arts and for the first time in human civilization, the economic value of digital art can be accrued to owners. In the same way television and pop culture elevated commercial art to a high art status, internet, blockchain technology and digital culture are elevating digital art to art worthy of economic, aesthetic and professional appreciation.

The context behind the emergence of every movement is fundamentally cultural. From time immemorial, technology has always possessed the power to trigger a cultural shift, which in turn changes people's way of thinking.

Pop Art and Crypto Art are not art movements that introduce new style and iconography. Pop Art and Crypto Art are the artistic reflection of an unlearning and learning society, due to the advent of new innovations (television for pop art; blockchain for crypto art) which change people's way of life (pop culture for pop art; digital culture for crypto art).

Timeline of Revolutions

Seven on Seven 2014: Kevin McCoy & Anil Dash

I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything