003444. KG3334-333-564-0001. BS.
INTRODUCTION. (cof, cof, ahem)
The collection that is the topic of this exhibition takes its name from an inscription in one of the main pieces, which shows an inscription that says: “Procesion from the metropolis to the necropolis, and back again, in the city, which is the world”. ( Here pass slide 01 )
These types of event were accompanied by writing and musical pieces. By the information depicted in one of the pieces we know the name of the piece accompanying this one. Titled “ Symphony of the Red Bird”, it is composed of three main movements, “andante, “ allegro” and presto, with to indications on which key to be played, Mi major and Mi minor, according to the suitability of the interpreters (and their instruments). A version with keynote of Fa has been suggested (To not forget: Project your voice, the room might be dark, so probably you don't know how many people is there, shapeless but present, diffused in the darkness. Speak loudly for them. Somebody out there coughed, some particles of dust appear, crossing the light of the projector, interrupting the clean flow of the light).
The pieces is by now lost (would they believe you on this? does she believed you? do you believe yourself? do you?), so we just can imagine how it was by fragmented information recoiled here and there. The structure of the piece is at some moments resembling one of a fuga, sometimes a contrafuga, and sometimes the theme and the motive are not clearly defined, which betrays an origin of a not renowned second-tier author, relying in some well known, stereotyped formulas and tricks of the usual craftsmanship of the time (if you are near the projector and fill the heat, have a glass of water next to you; it has been a long week preparing all these pages, full of doubt and insecurities and you never speak a lot so by now you would be feeling the effort in your vocal cords, so, take a drink).
Probably the product of a workshop ( like when we read that book about an old manuscript Shahnameh, edited by the Met museum: because they did not know the names of the hands, they name them author A, author B, C and so on), something corroborated in the uneven results that shows the use of hands of very diverse skill, since its discovery in a soon-to-be-demolished villa (like some villas here, from the seventies, lost in the desert? or like some villas in the avenida Arequipa, transformed into stores and divided over and over?), part of the private collection of a wealthy misanthropic owner, the group of pieces has had a diverse fortune, some pieces has been lost, other abandoned to the harshness of the urban development or teared in pieces for domestic use, without much care of the elements/or content; some even where repainted by other artists in the times of the Greater Depression (not to confuse with the Great Depression of 1929 - do we need to clarify this?Lets not get personal here. Although how personal can this be? Everyone got struck within four walls during the last years, mirroring the emptiness with themselves, dissolving the belonging of a mind to a body in the meaninglessness of featureless days, like the half-erased pages of a confused Shrerezade. ).
Some of the missed pieces were later reconstructed based on references found by few researchers, if that name can be applied to these re-collectors of information of the clandestine and the forgotten (on the dark alleys where abandoned books are sold? on the dusty abandoned rooms of a house? on a lost page on social media?), and some by the imagination of some sparse but enthusiastic fans, that, as writers that, with more passion than craft, take a romantic approach to the story of the discovery of these works. ( by this point some in the audience may be finding this tiresome; would you make a joke?, a non-partisan, sensitive one, of course).
But most importantly, many aspects of the subject in each of the paintings do not have, should not have, or must not have, according to each one’s point of view, a specific, determined symbolism linked to the overall scheme that goes further than the ones we just talked about; that does not mean the interpretation is constrained to what is written here, but on the contrary, that they are part of the general scheme, but they are also more than that, in the same sense that any communication attempt, has meanings or interpretations that escape the general structure of the intention for which it has been made.
For the explanation of the content of these works, there are two hypothesis taken by the specialists. Every entry of this dictionary* has different interpretations that mainly can be reduced to three choices by the reader. First, we start with the mere description of the subject the entry is about. We talk about its relation with other entries...
(N. of E: this text looks incomplete. Please complete following the tone, style and topic.)
__________________________________________
*As you, dear reader, can sagaciously guess, this is the introduction text for another, probably irremediably, lost work.
003444. VHA0000034-333-564-0002. BS. HLVSM.
Tampering here and there with some chemicals in one French morning of the December winter in 1827, Monsieur Joseph Nicephore Niepce achieved the feat of catching the light within the boundaries of a metallic plaque, and with it, the shape of the house in front of his window. Truth be told, it took him not one but many days to fix what was still a work in progress, and even then, this was not called photography, but a "heliograph". But what is in a name? or for that matter, what is in an image?.
And yet, undeterred, I see a third picture that shows Nestorius s electoral paper. Nestorius appears there, better defined, with a big moustache, with the hair divided by a line in the middle, watching the camera with his eyes wide open. This man once had a horse. And many lawsuits. With his brothers, because of the inheritance from his father, Antonius, who at some point had a metal foundry at the outskirts of the old city, near an open square next to the old city's prison, La Penitenciaria, built in times of Ramon Castilla and demolished almost hundred years later. I still remember the leather suitcase, packed to the brim with sealed, typed and handwritten papers, yellowed, passing evidence of those fraternal procedures. Brother against brother and sister, back and again, back and again. Nestorius also was a divorcee, or a separated husband. My grandfather never accepted the stepfather who replaced him. The strong temperament of Marcus' mother, Nestorius' wife, didn't help either. She took the reins of the house and the existences of her children far beyond their childhood and far beyond her death. They never left the house, neither married. But not my grandfather. He left his house to live with his elder sister, already married, to start his own life. Does the first picture belong to these early years? How to know?
My grandfather kept all these objects jealously hidden, until the last day of his life. My mother couldn't wait to get rid of them; at year, on New Years Eve, among the sound of distant explosions and fireworks, she took them out, and put them to the fire for all the night in along and silent exorcism. What I described to you are the ones I rescued in a hurry that night. Yet for some of all these facts, and others, I only have some other evidence on yellowish paper, handwritten or typed, that I have been able to rescue from oblivion, and I realize that everything I know about him fits into these small paragraphs. What I will left when is my turn? Sometimes is so easy to dissapear.
TFJS003444. VH/MINST34-333-564/COCO 0003. BS. HLVSM.
One dry winter morning, a person enters a gallery of non-fungible-tokens. Maybe it is Sunday, maybe the afternoon of a weekday-Wednesday- or maybe is the opening of the exhibition, full of drinks, smiles and snacks, consumed with the appropriate amount of safety measures and social distancing.
It is most likely that this person has not the slightest idea about what a non-fungible-token is, even less what HEC was, or what do these abstruse names mean: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tezos, Cardano, etc. Why should they? after all, it is still 2022, there is still oxygen available, Antarctica still exists, people write in English. Mad Max/ Blade Runner place the world it is not, neither one of the Back to the Future 1-2-3 predictions.
Anyway, the person starts walking around these screens hung on the walls, seeing all these animated images, that are, however, not movies: they are not necessarily telling a story other than the one implied by its symbolism or gestalt. They are images that continuously loop, their endless movement visible th
anks to the electric energy behind the devices.
Do not despair, because as well as these planimetric cages of tumultuous light, there are physical objects. Physical objects, yes, like the ones you saw a while ago in the consecrated books at your local library. Objects made of bronze, stone, marble. Objects made of metal, paper, spread pigment on stretched fabric. There are portraits, landscapes, still lives and other genres which you, oh visitor, most probably are familiar with.
The person that entered the gallery is familiar with them too and soon is absorbed by the tridimensional contemplation of such tangible objects to such degree that in the momentum of affection, aesthetic fog and impulsivity, decides to buy one of the pieces. Wait, didn't you say this was a gallery of non-fungible tokens? Well, yes, but it happens that now they are doing a hybrid exhibition of digital and virtual objects. Or no contradiction there, they are, it just happens that they are selling physical objects as well. Via NFTs.But how do you buy/sell an NFT? How do I consume an NFT? That is a place where we are not quite yet. Or are we?
You see, the person in the gallery has these same questions floating around, and this is noticed by the gallery assistant, which kindly approaches to quell any question. The person wants to buy a beautifully framed drawing made on paper because still thinks a tangible object is something else. Nevertheless, this is an NFT gallery and they deal with cryptocurrency transactions, so the payment should be made in such a manner. But the person only has dirhams, aka fiat money. What to do? (note: in this scenario we assume the token is minted -created digitally- but not listed -priced publicly- until the transaction takes place.)
The gallery assistant says no worries, please come with me and take the person to a nice room where there is another member of the gallery staff, seated at a desk with three computers
The teller, a digital-savvy person, receives your money, maybe through a swap of your credit card, and proceeds to type on the keyboard of the desktop computer.
What is the teller doing? Is creating a virtual wallet for you, maybe a Metamask or a Temple. The teller writes down the seed phrases, the magic sesame words that warrant access to the digital wallet, and creates a password for you. You might be asked to choose such a password.
The teller then takes note of your wallet address and proceeds, maybe in another computer to avoid confusion, goes to a second wallet, the wallet of the gallery, loaded with cryptocurrency.
The teller calculates the amount of fiat money paid, and transfer the equivalent cryptocurrency quantity to the created client's wallet.
From this wallet, the teller accepts the transfer and goes to the marketplace/virtual gallery where the NFT is being sold, and buys it, returning to the gallery's wallet to accept this last transaction.
Alas, now the token that is the NFT belongs to the customer, assigning with it the ownership of the physical work that was the original aim of the transaction.
All this while the customer, still seated there, unaware of such technicalities, check some paintings on the wall. The teller smiles and says:
- We are done. Congratulations!
While doing this, the teller extends the customer a paper, printed with all the details of the transaction made, token number, wallet numbers, the title of the work, etc, etc. under the title: "certificate of Ownership", a paper signed by the owner gallery.
The person goes to see the assistant to coordinate the delivery of the artwork.
Here there are two things. One is about art, the other about the economy, and the two are linked. There is some confusion about what an NFT is, and how it relates to cryptocurrency.
First, the selling card, the impulse of NFT in the art world, as opposed to other areas, was to be a solution to a problem, namely, that artists dealing with animation CGI and other virtual creation techniques had a hard time selling their works in a way that was similar to the traditional market. Their art was not necessarily recognised as a value in itself. NFTs happening in the digital/virtual world. Then it expanded to more traditional art practices.
This spontaneous process led to a lot of confusion about what is an NFT. Is it video art? Is it animation? Is it web art?. Yes, sure. Oh so trendy. Well, I guess.
A painting can be an NFT? Yes. A drawing? Yes. A sculpture. Oh yes.
Whaaaaaaaaat?
Yes, because NFT as well as a monetary thing is also a notarial, evidential thing, which are two inherent aspects of the economy.
The blockchain experiment, born of cryptocurrency experiments, is about decentralised consensus and network understanding via the trick of encoding your ticket number in the non-stopping train of the blockchain, based on the postulate that such things are -almost -forgery-proof.
Think of all the transactions and how sure you are the how you spend your money and that the bank back you in the registry of all of them. And the thing is that a transaction, once defined as a proposal that operates within a system, could be anything. Physical, digital-physical, only digital: what matters is that the transaction is registered and made with tokens, be those made of metallic circles with a sovereign stamp on them, carefully on printed paper notes or electronically embedded in digital codes. The proposal is defined by the seller, given the assessment made of its potential, assumed value. Will people agree that it has value? Is it fair? is it logical? is it sensible?
Now, let's say you buy an only-digital NFT, how do you, for the lack of a better word (world), how do you consume it? Where do you store it? After all, is your money, invested. Then the question is, who will think such a thing has value? that is fair, logical and sensible to pay for a digital image to be consumed, observed, enjoyed and reflected upon only through electronic devices.
Who indeed? The jury is open on this, but we can guess that the upcoming generations of digital natives, that is who.
But why are we in a gallery? isn't the decentralizing aim of the crypto-movement to over-jump gatekeepers such as banks- or art galleries?-welcome to the blockchain trilemma.
The image of the new media, the movement, the flow, the colour and the electricity fascination; yes, you have to like it to buy it, and still then, this is not for everyone. The creators of these new images have found a way to rate and validate their art in a community. The economy gets fluid, mixed with other criteria: society, aesthetics, environmental concerns- in the definition of transaction and trust, in a game of electronic prisoners guessing the other nodes' moves, entering the fraught space of social conventions delimited by the boundaries of the consensus, considering the market as an instrument of information, where the basic data point is the offer made and accepted. Against the fluidity of digital reproducibility, the market asks: what is your price?
I was in a Flemish winter, on a second floor, waiting in a, possibly, Christmas night, waiting in a night, waiting alone with just a dim light at the end of the room, just looking trough the window the streets full of snow, the dark trees and some houses of slopped roof.
After some hours, my brother (he looked like Barzola's son) arrived, later my sister, later our dad.
He looked like Yazad.
We had lost the book, and just then, the office I noticed it was a sleek, modern office, an empty one in the morning. And then we knew that the person who was carrying the book in a chained suitcase, ahs lot is in the middle of the financial centre, just as he was going trough the escalator.
The book was a long sheet we a Chinese ink written word, with a meaning that I forget.
It is done.
INTRODUCTION. (cof, cof, ahem)
The collection that is the topic of this exhibition takes its name from an inscription in one of the main pieces, which shows an inscription that says: “Procesion from the metropolis to the necropolis, and back again, in the city, which is the world”. ( Here pass slide 01 )
These types of event were accompanied by writing and musical pieces. By the information depicted in one of the pieces we know the name of the piece accompanying this one. Titled “ Symphony of the Red Bird”, it is composed of three main movements, “andante, “ allegro” and presto, with to indications on which key to be played, Mi major and Mi minor, according to the suitability of the interpreters (and their instruments). A version with keynote of Fa has been suggested (To not forget: Project your voice, the room might be dark, so probably you don't know how many people is there, shapeless but present, diffused in the darkness. Speak loudly for them. Somebody out there coughed, some particles of dust appear, crossing the light of the projector, interrupting the clean flow of the light).
The pieces is by now lost (would they believe you on this? does she believed you? do you believe yourself? do you?), so we just can imagine how it was by fragmented information recoiled here and there. The structure of the piece is at some moments resembling one of a fuga, sometimes a contrafuga, and sometimes the theme and the motive are not clearly defined, which betrays an origin of a not renowned second-tier author, relying in some well known, stereotyped formulas and tricks of the usual craftsmanship of the time (if you are near the projector and fill the heat, have a glass of water next to you; it has been a long week preparing all these pages, full of doubt and insecurities and you never speak a lot so by now you would be feeling the effort in your vocal cords, so, take a drink).
Probably the product of a workshop ( like when we read that book about an old manuscript Shahnameh, edited by the Met museum: because they did not know the names of the hands, they name them author A, author B, C and so on), something corroborated in the uneven results that shows the use of hands of very diverse skill, since its discovery in a soon-to-be-demolished villa (like some villas here, from the seventies, lost in the desert? or like some villas in the avenida Arequipa, transformed into stores and divided over and over?), part of the private collection of a wealthy misanthropic owner, the group of pieces has had a diverse fortune, some pieces has been lost, other abandoned to the harshness of the urban development or teared in pieces for domestic use, without much care of the elements/or content; some even where repainted by other artists in the times of the Greater Depression (not to confuse with the Great Depression of 1929 - do we need to clarify this?Lets not get personal here. Although how personal can this be? Everyone got struck within four walls during the last years, mirroring the emptiness with themselves, dissolving the belonging of a mind to a body in the meaninglessness of featureless days, like the half-erased pages of a confused Shrerezade. ).
Some of the missed pieces were later reconstructed based on references found by few researchers, if that name can be applied to these re-collectors of information of the clandestine and the forgotten (on the dark alleys where abandoned books are sold? on the dusty abandoned rooms of a house? on a lost page on social media?), and some by the imagination of some sparse but enthusiastic fans, that, as writers that, with more passion than craft, take a romantic approach to the story of the discovery of these works. ( by this point some in the audience may be finding this tiresome; would you make a joke?, a non-partisan, sensitive one, of course).
But most importantly, many aspects of the subject in each of the paintings do not have, should not have, or must not have, according to each one’s point of view, a specific, determined symbolism linked to the overall scheme that goes further than the ones we just talked about; that does not mean the interpretation is constrained to what is written here, but on the contrary, that they are part of the general scheme, but they are also more than that, in the same sense that any communication attempt, has meanings or interpretations that escape the general structure of the intention for which it has been made.
For the explanation of the content of these works, there are two hypothesis taken by the specialists. Every entry of this dictionary* has different interpretations that mainly can be reduced to three choices by the reader. First, we start with the mere description of the subject the entry is about. We talk about its relation with other entries...
(N. of E: this text looks incomplete. Please complete following the tone, style and topic.)
__________________________________________
*As you, dear reader, can sagaciously guess, this is the introduction text for another, probably irremediably, lost work.
003444. VHA0000034-333-564-0002. BS. HLVSM.
Tampering here and there with some chemicals in one French morning of the December winter in 1827, Monsieur Joseph Nicephore Niepce achieved the feat of catching the light within the boundaries of a metallic plaque, and with it, the shape of the house in front of his window. Truth be told, it took him not one but many days to fix what was still a work in progress, and even then, this was not called photography, but a "heliograph". But what is in a name? or for that matter, what is in an image?.
One night in the balmy summer of March of 1993, my grandfather left us a handful of pictures of his life and his world. Then- as now-there was not much information I could have about them. In black and white or sepia tones, those images come from other times, so different from the selfie-stream-live-share world of today. Here, briefly and somehow, I would like to describe three -maybe four- of them, for reasons that will become evident.
Incognito portraits, of the several that remain, unknown, forgotten, among the things I brought with me when I left home, like Greek heroes and unemployed men in search of a job do. I don't know who they were: names, relations, professions, locations. If I remember correctly, my grandmother told me they probably belonged to a family linked to my great-grandfather, the Berruyz. There are, therefore Cadmus-Berruyz and Berruyz-Cadmus. Some of their traits, as always, remain scattered among us, subtle but present in our faces, maybe in the shape of our eyes. Is someone in that group from my grandfather's family? Maybe.
One picture is taken in open daylight, probably outside a porch, somewhere in probably Lima, in those years probably still a small city surrounded by agricultural lands. My grandfather, Marcus, son of Nestorius, grandson of Antonius and born in 1913- just before the Fist World War and at the end of the European Belle Epoque and of what was called in Peru the Aristocratic Republic-looks here incredibly young, tanned by the sun, in the company of three women I still haven't identified - except perhaps the woman who puts his hand on her shoulder: it could be my grandmother, but I couldn't be sure, which makes it more frustrating - in what probably was a family photo, from which the context has been lost, perhaps irretrievably. This frustrating ignorance of a past, that was lively as these seconds and minute assigned to me right now, is one of the reasons why I posted the image on social media, with an uncertain hope of preventing the image, like everything -like me-from disappearing.
One picture is taken in open daylight, probably outside a porch, somewhere in probably Lima, in those years probably still a small city surrounded by agricultural lands. My grandfather, Marcus, son of Nestorius, grandson of Antonius and born in 1913- just before the Fist World War and at the end of the European Belle Epoque and of what was called in Peru the Aristocratic Republic-looks here incredibly young, tanned by the sun, in the company of three women I still haven't identified - except perhaps the woman who puts his hand on her shoulder: it could be my grandmother, but I couldn't be sure, which makes it more frustrating - in what probably was a family photo, from which the context has been lost, perhaps irretrievably. This frustrating ignorance of a past, that was lively as these seconds and minute assigned to me right now, is one of the reasons why I posted the image on social media, with an uncertain hope of preventing the image, like everything -like me-from disappearing.
This is important, because I didn't know it, and now I experience it, that memory is fragile, blurry and easy to fade. As time passes, I saved and shared them, before the sands and waves of time erase them in a way that is slow, oscillating, quiet.
In another picture, printed on a badly twisted metallic plaque, a grown child poses quietly, seated and dressed in a middle toned suit, like a grown man but with short pants. In the background, a painted landscape is blurred. He is probably Nestorius my great-grandfather, is my kind of informed guess, posing for posterity before adolescence was invented. Next to this plate, pockmarked and rusted, was a glass negative print, a rare thing. Both were hidden in the thick wooden trunk that my grandfather kept under his bed, all full of memories and vestiges of the previous generation, perhaps as a guardian of those paternal memories that were banished by the rest of his siblings from family memory. Perhaps if he read these lines he would be upset by my indiscretion. I hope not.
In another picture, printed on a badly twisted metallic plaque, a grown child poses quietly, seated and dressed in a middle toned suit, like a grown man but with short pants. In the background, a painted landscape is blurred. He is probably Nestorius my great-grandfather, is my kind of informed guess, posing for posterity before adolescence was invented. Next to this plate, pockmarked and rusted, was a glass negative print, a rare thing. Both were hidden in the thick wooden trunk that my grandfather kept under his bed, all full of memories and vestiges of the previous generation, perhaps as a guardian of those paternal memories that were banished by the rest of his siblings from family memory. Perhaps if he read these lines he would be upset by my indiscretion. I hope not.
And yet, undeterred, I see a third picture that shows Nestorius s electoral paper. Nestorius appears there, better defined, with a big moustache, with the hair divided by a line in the middle, watching the camera with his eyes wide open. This man once had a horse. And many lawsuits. With his brothers, because of the inheritance from his father, Antonius, who at some point had a metal foundry at the outskirts of the old city, near an open square next to the old city's prison, La Penitenciaria, built in times of Ramon Castilla and demolished almost hundred years later. I still remember the leather suitcase, packed to the brim with sealed, typed and handwritten papers, yellowed, passing evidence of those fraternal procedures. Brother against brother and sister, back and again, back and again. Nestorius also was a divorcee, or a separated husband. My grandfather never accepted the stepfather who replaced him. The strong temperament of Marcus' mother, Nestorius' wife, didn't help either. She took the reins of the house and the existences of her children far beyond their childhood and far beyond her death. They never left the house, neither married. But not my grandfather. He left his house to live with his elder sister, already married, to start his own life. Does the first picture belong to these early years? How to know?
My grandfather kept all these objects jealously hidden, until the last day of his life. My mother couldn't wait to get rid of them; at year, on New Years Eve, among the sound of distant explosions and fireworks, she took them out, and put them to the fire for all the night in along and silent exorcism. What I described to you are the ones I rescued in a hurry that night. Yet for some of all these facts, and others, I only have some other evidence on yellowish paper, handwritten or typed, that I have been able to rescue from oblivion, and I realize that everything I know about him fits into these small paragraphs. What I will left when is my turn? Sometimes is so easy to dissapear.
TFJS003444. VH/MINST34-333-564/COCO 0003. BS. HLVSM.
One dry winter morning, a person enters a gallery of non-fungible-tokens. Maybe it is Sunday, maybe the afternoon of a weekday-Wednesday- or maybe is the opening of the exhibition, full of drinks, smiles and snacks, consumed with the appropriate amount of safety measures and social distancing.
It is most likely that this person has not the slightest idea about what a non-fungible-token is, even less what HEC was, or what do these abstruse names mean: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tezos, Cardano, etc. Why should they? after all, it is still 2022, there is still oxygen available, Antarctica still exists, people write in English. Mad Max/ Blade Runner place the world it is not, neither one of the Back to the Future 1-2-3 predictions.
Anyway, the person starts walking around these screens hung on the walls, seeing all these animated images, that are, however, not movies: they are not necessarily telling a story other than the one implied by its symbolism or gestalt. They are images that continuously loop, their endless movement visible th
anks to the electric energy behind the devices.
Do not despair, because as well as these planimetric cages of tumultuous light, there are physical objects. Physical objects, yes, like the ones you saw a while ago in the consecrated books at your local library. Objects made of bronze, stone, marble. Objects made of metal, paper, spread pigment on stretched fabric. There are portraits, landscapes, still lives and other genres which you, oh visitor, most probably are familiar with.
The person that entered the gallery is familiar with them too and soon is absorbed by the tridimensional contemplation of such tangible objects to such degree that in the momentum of affection, aesthetic fog and impulsivity, decides to buy one of the pieces. Wait, didn't you say this was a gallery of non-fungible tokens? Well, yes, but it happens that now they are doing a hybrid exhibition of digital and virtual objects. Or no contradiction there, they are, it just happens that they are selling physical objects as well. Via NFTs.But how do you buy/sell an NFT? How do I consume an NFT? That is a place where we are not quite yet. Or are we?
You see, the person in the gallery has these same questions floating around, and this is noticed by the gallery assistant, which kindly approaches to quell any question. The person wants to buy a beautifully framed drawing made on paper because still thinks a tangible object is something else. Nevertheless, this is an NFT gallery and they deal with cryptocurrency transactions, so the payment should be made in such a manner. But the person only has dirhams, aka fiat money. What to do? (note: in this scenario we assume the token is minted -created digitally- but not listed -priced publicly- until the transaction takes place.)
The gallery assistant says no worries, please come with me and take the person to a nice room where there is another member of the gallery staff, seated at a desk with three computers
The teller, a digital-savvy person, receives your money, maybe through a swap of your credit card, and proceeds to type on the keyboard of the desktop computer.
What is the teller doing? Is creating a virtual wallet for you, maybe a Metamask or a Temple. The teller writes down the seed phrases, the magic sesame words that warrant access to the digital wallet, and creates a password for you. You might be asked to choose such a password.
The teller then takes note of your wallet address and proceeds, maybe in another computer to avoid confusion, goes to a second wallet, the wallet of the gallery, loaded with cryptocurrency.
The teller calculates the amount of fiat money paid, and transfer the equivalent cryptocurrency quantity to the created client's wallet.
From this wallet, the teller accepts the transfer and goes to the marketplace/virtual gallery where the NFT is being sold, and buys it, returning to the gallery's wallet to accept this last transaction.
Alas, now the token that is the NFT belongs to the customer, assigning with it the ownership of the physical work that was the original aim of the transaction.
All this while the customer, still seated there, unaware of such technicalities, check some paintings on the wall. The teller smiles and says:
- We are done. Congratulations!
While doing this, the teller extends the customer a paper, printed with all the details of the transaction made, token number, wallet numbers, the title of the work, etc, etc. under the title: "certificate of Ownership", a paper signed by the owner gallery.
The person goes to see the assistant to coordinate the delivery of the artwork.
Here there are two things. One is about art, the other about the economy, and the two are linked. There is some confusion about what an NFT is, and how it relates to cryptocurrency.
First, the selling card, the impulse of NFT in the art world, as opposed to other areas, was to be a solution to a problem, namely, that artists dealing with animation CGI and other virtual creation techniques had a hard time selling their works in a way that was similar to the traditional market. Their art was not necessarily recognised as a value in itself. NFTs happening in the digital/virtual world. Then it expanded to more traditional art practices.
This spontaneous process led to a lot of confusion about what is an NFT. Is it video art? Is it animation? Is it web art?. Yes, sure. Oh so trendy. Well, I guess.
A painting can be an NFT? Yes. A drawing? Yes. A sculpture. Oh yes.
Whaaaaaaaaat?
Yes, because NFT as well as a monetary thing is also a notarial, evidential thing, which are two inherent aspects of the economy.
The blockchain experiment, born of cryptocurrency experiments, is about decentralised consensus and network understanding via the trick of encoding your ticket number in the non-stopping train of the blockchain, based on the postulate that such things are -almost -forgery-proof.
Think of all the transactions and how sure you are the how you spend your money and that the bank back you in the registry of all of them. And the thing is that a transaction, once defined as a proposal that operates within a system, could be anything. Physical, digital-physical, only digital: what matters is that the transaction is registered and made with tokens, be those made of metallic circles with a sovereign stamp on them, carefully on printed paper notes or electronically embedded in digital codes. The proposal is defined by the seller, given the assessment made of its potential, assumed value. Will people agree that it has value? Is it fair? is it logical? is it sensible?
Now, let's say you buy an only-digital NFT, how do you, for the lack of a better word (world), how do you consume it? Where do you store it? After all, is your money, invested. Then the question is, who will think such a thing has value? that is fair, logical and sensible to pay for a digital image to be consumed, observed, enjoyed and reflected upon only through electronic devices.
Who indeed? The jury is open on this, but we can guess that the upcoming generations of digital natives, that is who.
But why are we in a gallery? isn't the decentralizing aim of the crypto-movement to over-jump gatekeepers such as banks- or art galleries?-welcome to the blockchain trilemma.
The image of the new media, the movement, the flow, the colour and the electricity fascination; yes, you have to like it to buy it, and still then, this is not for everyone. The creators of these new images have found a way to rate and validate their art in a community. The economy gets fluid, mixed with other criteria: society, aesthetics, environmental concerns- in the definition of transaction and trust, in a game of electronic prisoners guessing the other nodes' moves, entering the fraught space of social conventions delimited by the boundaries of the consensus, considering the market as an instrument of information, where the basic data point is the offer made and accepted. Against the fluidity of digital reproducibility, the market asks: what is your price?