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https://dylan.cent.co
A Critical Reading of Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainte…
T. Dylan Daniel reads Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to understand the Metaphysics of Quality.In Robert Pirsig’s famous work, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a metaphysical concept is born. Pirsig explores his relationship with his son as he explores the US on a motorcycle and as he explores the very concept of sanity. The goal he seeks is what he refers to as Quality. The work itself is structured as a novel, but this thin veil barely conceals some of the deepest postmo...
PageDAO’s Story
Life has gotten weird lately, and this piece of writing will also be somewhat weird. It has to be - it is the story of an incredible, weird, fun organization, and the struggle we’ve all faced as we’ve birthed it. Let’s dig in. This is the story of the PageDAO. I have to explain a bit about myself, my own weirdness, for this to work. But I will keep it brief because I’m just one person, and PageDAO is composed of many people. My name is Thomas Dylan Daniel, and I go by epicdylan (a username I ...
Philosophical Suicide In The Myth of Sisyphus
What does the great French philosopher Albert Camus have to say to us about philosophical suicide?Before we begin, perhaps a bit of background on me is important. I’m a philosopher of language and morality, originally. But when I went to grad school, I took a class in cognitive neuroscience that opened a few doors for me. I worked in labs, read science books, etc. And oh, could I bore you with the details. My most recent “real jobs” have included research and teaching college and starting sta...
https://dylan.cent.co
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Recently, I had the privilege of connecting with an old friend in a new way. Marjan Moghaddam, a famous digital artist I’d actually been friends with for several years, is a deeply fascinating person. I reached out to her about NFT art to see if she had heard of the medium yet. I had seen posts about her digital and AR (augmented reality) art, and was impressed with it. Over time, I became familiar with the trials and tribulations with the technology despite having a state of the art studio.
Though I’d vaguely had a sense that she was involved in some cool and interesting projects, I was both surprised and quite pleased to learn that she had already generated over 26ETH in sales on Superrare in the 4 months since she has been on the platform. I immediately told her I wanted to interview her for the NFTWriter magazine, and she agreed. During our conversation she raised an interesting question: Is crypto art today a new Renaissance, or is it instead another Rococo?
One of the first things that came up during the conversation was the potential of Crypto Art, and Marjan pointed out that many NFT evangelists are fond of calling it a new renaissance, mostly as a figure of speech. The point she made was simple: if the Renaissance (of Art History) was all about visual spectacle it would need to be called the Rococo. The movements, she explains with a comfort level that suggests a lot of practice, were quite different in character.
The Rococo was about an up-and-coming merchant class of people who commodified art with an excess of visuals, filigree, and embellishment that eventually became highly kitschified; whereas the Renaissance was about the resurrection of the ideals of Greek Philosophy and Liberal Humanism through the humanities, arts and sciences, which has endured the test of time as a great moment in civilization. She further explains that in fact the whole concept of High Art, as opposed to art that is merely decorative or visually appealing, was born during this time. Michelangelo, who was more well versed in Greek Philosophy than many of the top scholars of his time, would have been horrified by the idea of creating art in order to get eyeballs for our current attention economy, and “he would’ve ranted about it in his diaries for days” she emphasizes. She concludes, “In fact he exercised a great degree of visual restraint not just in terms of Mannerist posing, but also color, composition etc. in an attempt to avoid merely appeasing the eye in order to deliver for a higher Neoplatonic type of an “eye” and level of contemplation.” I’m deeply enjoying it.
The fun of this call for me, as a philosopher, was to have the experience of beholding an honest-to-god practitioner of what is in some sense the practical side of the day’s philosophical zeitgeist. Marjan teaches mostly studio based CG classes, not Theory, but deals with theory and philosophy extensively in her own decades long art practice. Her works fetch a high price because they represent over four decades of respected and innovative digital art and animation practice. Marjan knows the value of her work, primarily because it is situated within this history, which she describes as continuing “the trajectory of art history” aesthetically and philosophically.
What Does 4 Decades In High Art Mean? Prior to crypto, Marjan had an established collector base, had won top awards, was widely exhibited in galleries, art centers, museums and top festivals. These included the world’s premiere Computer Graphics and Animation Festival Siggraph a total of 4 times. Marjan exhibited AR at the Smithsonian, had seminal digital art projects funded by the likes of the Rockefeller Fund, was selected for the top AR Art list from Forbes, was an Artist-In-Resident for Adobe, went viral with her work multiple times, was an influential featured artist of the early Internet 1.0 era. The list of accomplishments goes on and on. She is even a Tenured, Full Professor of CG, Animation and XR at LIU/Brooklyn campus. Her value amongst traditional and crypto collectors is also derived from her unique style. As Crypto Artist Stellabelle observed in a video segment on her favorite 3d CG artists in crypto art “If Picasso was around today he would be doing Marjan’s 3d CG style”. Marjan’s award-winning style of animation is globally recognized as original and unique, adding to the value of her work.
Since 2016, Marjan has pioneered yet another form with her internationally acclaimed #arthacks on Instagram which have been featured in dozens of publications. She started the #arthacks as a way of redefining form for digital art, radicalising curation, and democratizing the exhibition space, by hacking her original and unique style of figuration and animation which she hashtags with #digitalbodies using a new artform she has termed #ChronometricSculpture, into found and shot exhibition footage along with her artistic dialog. But mostly she adds, “to hack is merely transgressive, but to do so with a critical discourse is transformational”, and this is what she’s mostly after.
I ask a loaded question: “What is art?”
Marjan defines everything from a design created by a child with ketchup and mustard on a plate, to the latest monumental installation by Anselm Kiefer, and everything else in between as art.
“I worked as a production artist doing computer animation for various studios in NYC for many years, while doing Fine Arts work for exhibition on the side, so I respect the Applied Arts, probably a lot more than many people in the Fine Arts world do, because of my many years of work in the industry. But I don’t believe they’re the same, and delineation and distinction matters within the greater umbrella term of art.”
So, what Marjan refers to as Capital-A Art or High Art is art which utilizes, to the greatest extent possible, the aesthetics and technology of its day to express and convey the highest and most important ideas, philosophies, and reflections of its time.
Marjan is a fan of the sublime in Art, and the various philosophers who have championed it from Kant and Schopenhauer, to Eagleton and Lyotard. She knows the aesthetics here far more deeply than I do, and I actually used to teach college philosophy. I’m no aesthetics expert, but I know enough to recognize one. Marjan offers the juxtaposition of 2 artistic depictions of women from the middle of the last century (below). On the Right is De Kooning Woman from MOMA, and on the left is a Vargas Girl that recently came up for auction. Both are considered art.
Marjan explains that the Vargas Girl totally represents the ideals of beauty for her time, it’s designed to appeal to the eyes, while addressing the sexual longing and desire for which it was intended.On many levels it is considered as an illustration, as a point of distinction from the pictorial composition of painting. Meanwhile, De Kooning’s is an unapologetic, bold, and complex depiction of a woman as a painting that allows for a layering of complex ideas based on the high art aesthetics and ideas of its time. One limits the meaning to specific functions, the other expands it until it encompasses many ideas causing contemplation and reflection about greater meaning and Being. One will get respectable prices today in auction within a certain type of a collector market that collects pop ephemera from various eras, the other will fetch the highest prices from the world’s top collectors and collections which go after the greatest works. Guess which is which? We know that the Vargas Girl or its contemporary equivalent would fetch bids in the crypto art space, but what about the De Kooning or its equivalent? Which will get the highest Crypto bids? That’s the question that the crypto art ecosystem may be answering in the next few years, one way or another.
Is there a Marjan work that is more in line with De Kooning, than a Vargas girl? Yes. Her #Lordess, see the next tweet.
Marjan believes that most new media technologies start with a basic formula for bread and circuses entertainment and monetization. As significant as radio was, as an innovation in the 20th Century, it did not produce the greatest artistic works of the 20th century. Neither did it produce the most enduring resellable works. “You don’t see Sotheby’s auctioning anything from any point in radio history for over $65 million,” she says. And she proves her point: early TV used a G-rated Burlesque formula of musical comedy, until the greater, more substantial works ushered in the Golden era of Television, which also coincided with the highest dollar amounts it earned. So what a medium or media produces as an innovation isn’t always the greatest cultural capital of its time.
There is a relationship between a lasting work of art and appreciating value derived from merit and the financials.
-Marjan Moghaddam
The point here, dear reader, is that art prices are a complicated but functioning market whose purpose is to effectively and efficiently allocate value! It sounds familiar to me, because this is what we’re beginning to see in the NFT art market — the only problem is the noise. So many people are interested, and curation is so broken, that people are actually buying art they don’t like. Noted collectors are, with Marjan, observing the trends in terms of valuation as they decide what to think of the opportunities available. And many people are extremely excited about these opportunities!The issue is that, at the highest levels, intentionality needs to become more established.
“With the internet, the problem gets much more complex, because the internet produces more forgettable and dispensable ephemera per minute than entire periods in history,” she explains. “take the Annoying Orange for example, 10 years ago it had awesome metrics, but do we really consider it as something that expressed the highest values of its time?” I agree, quickly. I want to hear where she’s going next: “So there is a relationship between a lasting and appreciating value derived from merit and the financials.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Much of history bears this out. I enjoy speaking with artists because they approach these problems from a perspective which is complete, despite the inadequacy of language to create completeness. As a philosopher of language, this fascinates me. As an investor, the markets’ emerging behavior patterns fascinate me. My mind is racing as I struggle to keep up with the tremendous volume of information Marjan can cite to support her conclusions — and it’s mainly evidence I was familiar with. I may have spotted the trend eventually, but this conversation has shortened that journey for me by months, I feel certain, listening.
“Are NFTs and Crypto Art just a new way of collecting baseball cards, psychedelic posters, celebrity merchandising, editorial illustration, album cover art, and the ephemera and memorabilia of our time, or will it expand to also include the highest artistic expressions of our time which can change the course of history?”
-Marjan Moghaddam
The Emerging Crypto Art Community
It sounds like an amazing time to be a crypto artist. I gather that we’re not in the midst of a new Renaissance yet for a different reason, but the camaraderie that emerges from the transparency that blockchain builds into all of the interactions is something Marjan has a positive view of. I’ve noticed that as well. Marjan’s #GlitchGoddess of Art basel Miami 2018 with Picasso and Wood #arthack, a clearly feminsit digital art piece went viral in 2018, alongside her Baiser at Mary Boone in Glassish Waxish which she will be tokenizing for Valentine’s Day 2021 on Superare The animation was additionally also selected for Nowness’ Cultural Programming, Pioneers in Media Arts. She notes that there is more reason for optimism: serious conceptual feminist art is seen as acceptable content online these days and has an audience, the Internet has matured. So, while this represents progress and while we do see this on a variety of fronts, “we’re not seeing a heavy focus on the highest expressions of the culture,” in the NFT art world yet, according to Marjan. Although she has been deliberately, slowly and intentionally releasing some of her best works in the NFT space, as she finds her way in this new art ecosystem.
Marjan’s own work, some of which has already appeared on Superrare, is about having difficult conversations during our troubled times. In a way which smacks to me of Simone de Beauvoir, her pieces deal with questions of beauty and time, of identity and race and color. She claims to avoid the superficial Identitarian layers of meaning derived from these constructs, and is more interested in the deeper and more profound aspects that go beyond the triggering aspects. “It’s in the deeper layers of meaning that humanity is revealed as a far more unified phenomenon than our tribalism denies”, she explains. The project for Marjan that emerges is at the root a humanist one. It can be challenging at times and for some reason Nahuatl terms such as pachacuti are the ones that spring to mind here; that back-and-forth conception of progress somehow reflects the ultra-thorough thought process which governs the changing images of beauty and ugliness, ultimately reinforcing both notions enough to conjure something lifelike and communicative from them.
Marjan’s first sold piece on Superrare was Taking the Knee with GAN generated paintings. Derived from her June 4th Art Basel 2020 #arthack, the piece spontaneously celebrated the global protests in solidarity with #BLM after the George Floyd tragedy. She does the #arthacks during the artfairs as they are happening in a spontaneous and improvisational manner. “It was a beautiful and important moment that I wanted to capture, people of different nationalities and races showing their solidarity, a truly transcendent moment in our world”. Capital with GAN-Generated Paintings was designed to show a difficult birth and transition as art financials and cultural capital moves to Ethereum, in part as a result of the pandemic, which itself acts as commentary, what is cultural capital in the 21st century? Her #Lordess with Blue and Green Voxelized GAN Paintings plays with ideas of beauty derived from the physical world and sexual longing, by combining it with its polar opposites in her signature fluid style of Chronometric Sculpture which blends the ideals of animation with that of sculpture. “How do we depict a woman, if truly freed from the physical and its boundaried confines when moving to the digital?” she asks. “Here the juxtaposition of desired and undesired ideas in a new way is the expansion of the potential not just artistically but also intellectually.”
The thing which stands out to me about the position Marjan has taken here is that it supports the NFT art movement while challenging the people producing these works to think more, to put more into it, and to create better art. This is the role the ideals played during the Renaissance the historic movement, as opposed to a renaissance as a figure of speech. “the Medicis didn’t fund crap. Free and uncorrupted critical evaluation of artworks is something that has fallen off these days, most art press has too chummy of a relationship with the galleries to be truly objective and authentic as opposed to spammy. And everything in our world is increasingly spam, as opposed to a living authenticity with being and presence,” Marjan elaborates. There’s a walk-the-talk taking place here which I find quite interesting: Did Marjan just show us how to approach art criticism in a healthy way, at scale?
What Would NFT High Art Look Like?
Asking this question involves a sort of Renaissance-esque restraint on the part of the artists and their collectors that rightly situates the work. Of COURSE NFT art can produce the highest expression of our culture! we want to exclaim, but then we catch our breath and realize that it is possible that things could go another way. Another few deep breaths and we can understand that in fact things have been going this way for awhile. “NFT art has the potential for expressing the highest levels of our culture, or becoming a more efficient way of monetizing eyeballs through the blockchain”, Marjan claims.
The core challenge facing the NFT art world today is a question: can NFT artists accomplish things artists using other mediums are not able to replicate?
Put another way: Will the NFT art community produce the highest expression of our culture?
My tribulations in the traditional publishing industry are a sore contrast to the rave reviews my works have gotten from the handful of people who’ve chosen to read them. I know there are others out there, skilled and qualified, yet disenfranchised by the broken curation system of the day.
At the moment, it’s still possible to hear about collectors buying art they don’t actually even like all that much just to complete a set of tiles, or drawings, or whatever the case may be. I would even go so far as to argue that some of the algorithmically generated art fits into this category too; the trick is that people have to make it communicate something to others. Right now, the entire industry is rose-colored and cleaning your glasses won’t help. It may stay this way for some time, and that’s not even necessarily a problem.
But, if crypto art is to truly unseat other mediums to host the highest expression of today’s culture, it has a ways to go yet. “Art has much higher to go,” Marjan says, as we wrap our call. She ends by explaining that commercialization and a lack of public grant funding has resulted in a lack of freedom for the best artists of the day and a monopoly on power for those who can afford to purchase the commodity that the artist’s heroic journey has become.
In the patronage we see in the NFT space, however, Marjan sees the potential for a long-overdue Renaissance to restore some texture to our flattened culture. “Patronage has brought about the most important works in art history,” she says.
I nod in agreement.
I am hooked.
NFT art has the potential for expressing the highest levels of our culture, or becoming a more efficient way of monetizing eyeballs through the blockchain.
-Marjan Moghaddam
Digital Embodiment Part 1
Part 2
All thanks to Marjan Moghaddam for making this beautiful piece possible. @TheMarjan
Originally published at https://www.voice.com. (now defunct
Recently, I had the privilege of connecting with an old friend in a new way. Marjan Moghaddam, a famous digital artist I’d actually been friends with for several years, is a deeply fascinating person. I reached out to her about NFT art to see if she had heard of the medium yet. I had seen posts about her digital and AR (augmented reality) art, and was impressed with it. Over time, I became familiar with the trials and tribulations with the technology despite having a state of the art studio.
Though I’d vaguely had a sense that she was involved in some cool and interesting projects, I was both surprised and quite pleased to learn that she had already generated over 26ETH in sales on Superrare in the 4 months since she has been on the platform. I immediately told her I wanted to interview her for the NFTWriter magazine, and she agreed. During our conversation she raised an interesting question: Is crypto art today a new Renaissance, or is it instead another Rococo?
One of the first things that came up during the conversation was the potential of Crypto Art, and Marjan pointed out that many NFT evangelists are fond of calling it a new renaissance, mostly as a figure of speech. The point she made was simple: if the Renaissance (of Art History) was all about visual spectacle it would need to be called the Rococo. The movements, she explains with a comfort level that suggests a lot of practice, were quite different in character.
The Rococo was about an up-and-coming merchant class of people who commodified art with an excess of visuals, filigree, and embellishment that eventually became highly kitschified; whereas the Renaissance was about the resurrection of the ideals of Greek Philosophy and Liberal Humanism through the humanities, arts and sciences, which has endured the test of time as a great moment in civilization. She further explains that in fact the whole concept of High Art, as opposed to art that is merely decorative or visually appealing, was born during this time. Michelangelo, who was more well versed in Greek Philosophy than many of the top scholars of his time, would have been horrified by the idea of creating art in order to get eyeballs for our current attention economy, and “he would’ve ranted about it in his diaries for days” she emphasizes. She concludes, “In fact he exercised a great degree of visual restraint not just in terms of Mannerist posing, but also color, composition etc. in an attempt to avoid merely appeasing the eye in order to deliver for a higher Neoplatonic type of an “eye” and level of contemplation.” I’m deeply enjoying it.
The fun of this call for me, as a philosopher, was to have the experience of beholding an honest-to-god practitioner of what is in some sense the practical side of the day’s philosophical zeitgeist. Marjan teaches mostly studio based CG classes, not Theory, but deals with theory and philosophy extensively in her own decades long art practice. Her works fetch a high price because they represent over four decades of respected and innovative digital art and animation practice. Marjan knows the value of her work, primarily because it is situated within this history, which she describes as continuing “the trajectory of art history” aesthetically and philosophically.
What Does 4 Decades In High Art Mean? Prior to crypto, Marjan had an established collector base, had won top awards, was widely exhibited in galleries, art centers, museums and top festivals. These included the world’s premiere Computer Graphics and Animation Festival Siggraph a total of 4 times. Marjan exhibited AR at the Smithsonian, had seminal digital art projects funded by the likes of the Rockefeller Fund, was selected for the top AR Art list from Forbes, was an Artist-In-Resident for Adobe, went viral with her work multiple times, was an influential featured artist of the early Internet 1.0 era. The list of accomplishments goes on and on. She is even a Tenured, Full Professor of CG, Animation and XR at LIU/Brooklyn campus. Her value amongst traditional and crypto collectors is also derived from her unique style. As Crypto Artist Stellabelle observed in a video segment on her favorite 3d CG artists in crypto art “If Picasso was around today he would be doing Marjan’s 3d CG style”. Marjan’s award-winning style of animation is globally recognized as original and unique, adding to the value of her work.
Since 2016, Marjan has pioneered yet another form with her internationally acclaimed #arthacks on Instagram which have been featured in dozens of publications. She started the #arthacks as a way of redefining form for digital art, radicalising curation, and democratizing the exhibition space, by hacking her original and unique style of figuration and animation which she hashtags with #digitalbodies using a new artform she has termed #ChronometricSculpture, into found and shot exhibition footage along with her artistic dialog. But mostly she adds, “to hack is merely transgressive, but to do so with a critical discourse is transformational”, and this is what she’s mostly after.
I ask a loaded question: “What is art?”
Marjan defines everything from a design created by a child with ketchup and mustard on a plate, to the latest monumental installation by Anselm Kiefer, and everything else in between as art.
“I worked as a production artist doing computer animation for various studios in NYC for many years, while doing Fine Arts work for exhibition on the side, so I respect the Applied Arts, probably a lot more than many people in the Fine Arts world do, because of my many years of work in the industry. But I don’t believe they’re the same, and delineation and distinction matters within the greater umbrella term of art.”
So, what Marjan refers to as Capital-A Art or High Art is art which utilizes, to the greatest extent possible, the aesthetics and technology of its day to express and convey the highest and most important ideas, philosophies, and reflections of its time.
Marjan is a fan of the sublime in Art, and the various philosophers who have championed it from Kant and Schopenhauer, to Eagleton and Lyotard. She knows the aesthetics here far more deeply than I do, and I actually used to teach college philosophy. I’m no aesthetics expert, but I know enough to recognize one. Marjan offers the juxtaposition of 2 artistic depictions of women from the middle of the last century (below). On the Right is De Kooning Woman from MOMA, and on the left is a Vargas Girl that recently came up for auction. Both are considered art.
Marjan explains that the Vargas Girl totally represents the ideals of beauty for her time, it’s designed to appeal to the eyes, while addressing the sexual longing and desire for which it was intended.On many levels it is considered as an illustration, as a point of distinction from the pictorial composition of painting. Meanwhile, De Kooning’s is an unapologetic, bold, and complex depiction of a woman as a painting that allows for a layering of complex ideas based on the high art aesthetics and ideas of its time. One limits the meaning to specific functions, the other expands it until it encompasses many ideas causing contemplation and reflection about greater meaning and Being. One will get respectable prices today in auction within a certain type of a collector market that collects pop ephemera from various eras, the other will fetch the highest prices from the world’s top collectors and collections which go after the greatest works. Guess which is which? We know that the Vargas Girl or its contemporary equivalent would fetch bids in the crypto art space, but what about the De Kooning or its equivalent? Which will get the highest Crypto bids? That’s the question that the crypto art ecosystem may be answering in the next few years, one way or another.
Is there a Marjan work that is more in line with De Kooning, than a Vargas girl? Yes. Her #Lordess, see the next tweet.
Marjan believes that most new media technologies start with a basic formula for bread and circuses entertainment and monetization. As significant as radio was, as an innovation in the 20th Century, it did not produce the greatest artistic works of the 20th century. Neither did it produce the most enduring resellable works. “You don’t see Sotheby’s auctioning anything from any point in radio history for over $65 million,” she says. And she proves her point: early TV used a G-rated Burlesque formula of musical comedy, until the greater, more substantial works ushered in the Golden era of Television, which also coincided with the highest dollar amounts it earned. So what a medium or media produces as an innovation isn’t always the greatest cultural capital of its time.
There is a relationship between a lasting work of art and appreciating value derived from merit and the financials.
-Marjan Moghaddam
The point here, dear reader, is that art prices are a complicated but functioning market whose purpose is to effectively and efficiently allocate value! It sounds familiar to me, because this is what we’re beginning to see in the NFT art market — the only problem is the noise. So many people are interested, and curation is so broken, that people are actually buying art they don’t like. Noted collectors are, with Marjan, observing the trends in terms of valuation as they decide what to think of the opportunities available. And many people are extremely excited about these opportunities!The issue is that, at the highest levels, intentionality needs to become more established.
“With the internet, the problem gets much more complex, because the internet produces more forgettable and dispensable ephemera per minute than entire periods in history,” she explains. “take the Annoying Orange for example, 10 years ago it had awesome metrics, but do we really consider it as something that expressed the highest values of its time?” I agree, quickly. I want to hear where she’s going next: “So there is a relationship between a lasting and appreciating value derived from merit and the financials.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Much of history bears this out. I enjoy speaking with artists because they approach these problems from a perspective which is complete, despite the inadequacy of language to create completeness. As a philosopher of language, this fascinates me. As an investor, the markets’ emerging behavior patterns fascinate me. My mind is racing as I struggle to keep up with the tremendous volume of information Marjan can cite to support her conclusions — and it’s mainly evidence I was familiar with. I may have spotted the trend eventually, but this conversation has shortened that journey for me by months, I feel certain, listening.
“Are NFTs and Crypto Art just a new way of collecting baseball cards, psychedelic posters, celebrity merchandising, editorial illustration, album cover art, and the ephemera and memorabilia of our time, or will it expand to also include the highest artistic expressions of our time which can change the course of history?”
-Marjan Moghaddam
The Emerging Crypto Art Community
It sounds like an amazing time to be a crypto artist. I gather that we’re not in the midst of a new Renaissance yet for a different reason, but the camaraderie that emerges from the transparency that blockchain builds into all of the interactions is something Marjan has a positive view of. I’ve noticed that as well. Marjan’s #GlitchGoddess of Art basel Miami 2018 with Picasso and Wood #arthack, a clearly feminsit digital art piece went viral in 2018, alongside her Baiser at Mary Boone in Glassish Waxish which she will be tokenizing for Valentine’s Day 2021 on Superare The animation was additionally also selected for Nowness’ Cultural Programming, Pioneers in Media Arts. She notes that there is more reason for optimism: serious conceptual feminist art is seen as acceptable content online these days and has an audience, the Internet has matured. So, while this represents progress and while we do see this on a variety of fronts, “we’re not seeing a heavy focus on the highest expressions of the culture,” in the NFT art world yet, according to Marjan. Although she has been deliberately, slowly and intentionally releasing some of her best works in the NFT space, as she finds her way in this new art ecosystem.
Marjan’s own work, some of which has already appeared on Superrare, is about having difficult conversations during our troubled times. In a way which smacks to me of Simone de Beauvoir, her pieces deal with questions of beauty and time, of identity and race and color. She claims to avoid the superficial Identitarian layers of meaning derived from these constructs, and is more interested in the deeper and more profound aspects that go beyond the triggering aspects. “It’s in the deeper layers of meaning that humanity is revealed as a far more unified phenomenon than our tribalism denies”, she explains. The project for Marjan that emerges is at the root a humanist one. It can be challenging at times and for some reason Nahuatl terms such as pachacuti are the ones that spring to mind here; that back-and-forth conception of progress somehow reflects the ultra-thorough thought process which governs the changing images of beauty and ugliness, ultimately reinforcing both notions enough to conjure something lifelike and communicative from them.
Marjan’s first sold piece on Superrare was Taking the Knee with GAN generated paintings. Derived from her June 4th Art Basel 2020 #arthack, the piece spontaneously celebrated the global protests in solidarity with #BLM after the George Floyd tragedy. She does the #arthacks during the artfairs as they are happening in a spontaneous and improvisational manner. “It was a beautiful and important moment that I wanted to capture, people of different nationalities and races showing their solidarity, a truly transcendent moment in our world”. Capital with GAN-Generated Paintings was designed to show a difficult birth and transition as art financials and cultural capital moves to Ethereum, in part as a result of the pandemic, which itself acts as commentary, what is cultural capital in the 21st century? Her #Lordess with Blue and Green Voxelized GAN Paintings plays with ideas of beauty derived from the physical world and sexual longing, by combining it with its polar opposites in her signature fluid style of Chronometric Sculpture which blends the ideals of animation with that of sculpture. “How do we depict a woman, if truly freed from the physical and its boundaried confines when moving to the digital?” she asks. “Here the juxtaposition of desired and undesired ideas in a new way is the expansion of the potential not just artistically but also intellectually.”
The thing which stands out to me about the position Marjan has taken here is that it supports the NFT art movement while challenging the people producing these works to think more, to put more into it, and to create better art. This is the role the ideals played during the Renaissance the historic movement, as opposed to a renaissance as a figure of speech. “the Medicis didn’t fund crap. Free and uncorrupted critical evaluation of artworks is something that has fallen off these days, most art press has too chummy of a relationship with the galleries to be truly objective and authentic as opposed to spammy. And everything in our world is increasingly spam, as opposed to a living authenticity with being and presence,” Marjan elaborates. There’s a walk-the-talk taking place here which I find quite interesting: Did Marjan just show us how to approach art criticism in a healthy way, at scale?
What Would NFT High Art Look Like?
Asking this question involves a sort of Renaissance-esque restraint on the part of the artists and their collectors that rightly situates the work. Of COURSE NFT art can produce the highest expression of our culture! we want to exclaim, but then we catch our breath and realize that it is possible that things could go another way. Another few deep breaths and we can understand that in fact things have been going this way for awhile. “NFT art has the potential for expressing the highest levels of our culture, or becoming a more efficient way of monetizing eyeballs through the blockchain”, Marjan claims.
The core challenge facing the NFT art world today is a question: can NFT artists accomplish things artists using other mediums are not able to replicate?
Put another way: Will the NFT art community produce the highest expression of our culture?
My tribulations in the traditional publishing industry are a sore contrast to the rave reviews my works have gotten from the handful of people who’ve chosen to read them. I know there are others out there, skilled and qualified, yet disenfranchised by the broken curation system of the day.
At the moment, it’s still possible to hear about collectors buying art they don’t actually even like all that much just to complete a set of tiles, or drawings, or whatever the case may be. I would even go so far as to argue that some of the algorithmically generated art fits into this category too; the trick is that people have to make it communicate something to others. Right now, the entire industry is rose-colored and cleaning your glasses won’t help. It may stay this way for some time, and that’s not even necessarily a problem.
But, if crypto art is to truly unseat other mediums to host the highest expression of today’s culture, it has a ways to go yet. “Art has much higher to go,” Marjan says, as we wrap our call. She ends by explaining that commercialization and a lack of public grant funding has resulted in a lack of freedom for the best artists of the day and a monopoly on power for those who can afford to purchase the commodity that the artist’s heroic journey has become.
In the patronage we see in the NFT space, however, Marjan sees the potential for a long-overdue Renaissance to restore some texture to our flattened culture. “Patronage has brought about the most important works in art history,” she says.
I nod in agreement.
I am hooked.
NFT art has the potential for expressing the highest levels of our culture, or becoming a more efficient way of monetizing eyeballs through the blockchain.
-Marjan Moghaddam
Digital Embodiment Part 1
Part 2
All thanks to Marjan Moghaddam for making this beautiful piece possible. @TheMarjan
Originally published at https://www.voice.com. (now defunct
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