Hokusai’s Great Wave fascinates me because, unlike almost every other artwork in that bracket of fame, it was never a bespoke piece that was only later reproduced. It was a commercial print right from the start, and while versions of it can be identified as belonging to different print runs, there is no meaningful ‘original’ aside from the long-since-discarded printing plates.
Even better, this state has been imposed on artworks that were once unique. In 2021, the art collective MSCHF bought an Andy Warhol sketch at auction for $20,000, made 999 meticulous forgeries of it, shuffled them to destroy any record of which was the original, and sold each piece for $250 as Possibly Real Copy of 'Fairies’ by Andy Warhol, by MSCHF.
As with many smartass art collectives, MSCHF’s projects range from eye-rolling to kinda clever to brilliant, but I think this is their magnum opus. It has exactly the kind of unwieldy literal title I adore. The original work has been arguably destroyed, but in a way that Warhol would applaud. It’s the most pointed way to ask art buyers, do you care about the actual artistry of the work or just the bragging rights of owning the original?
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Artistic domains where reproduction is trivial are often prone to the Superstar Problem: Why would I listen to the world’s 50th-best cellist when I can stream all the Yo-Yo Ma I want just as easily? NFTs were pitched as a solution to this, marking the original or master copy of a natively-digital work to let it retain value. But even if the crypto market didn’t have its own 2008 every few weeks, I don’t want fine-art auction houses to be the future of digital art, especially when there are already plenty of existing ways to mitigate the problem. A fursona, a tabletop-game character, a niche Blorbo, etc. are all bespoke value-adds that enable a much greater range of artists to get commissions. But these require a culture of art fans who don’t care about flipping it at Christie’s, often overlapping with fannish cultures where plenty of artists operate at all experience levels.
I don’t have any tidy conclusions for this, but I just want to say that an earlier version of this process - “paint me a biblical scene, and put me in it to flex my wealth and piety” - culminated in one of the funniest artworks I’ve ever seen, Francisco de Zurbarán’s Christ Crucified (With Donor):
sometimes in conversation i’ll say “delete tiktok” or “stop trusting people on tiktok” and it may sound like a joke in the context where i say it but im letting you know rn i 100% mean it every single time i say it and it has never been a joke
i’m just gonna pretend daft punk was in pacific rim. i’m gonna pretend that they pilot a jaeger called electroma bravo and they blast house music with the kaidonovskys and when stacker shows raliegh around the shatterdome he’s like, “that’s thomas and guy-man. french. they never take their helmets off.”
If I was filthy rich I’d buy so much art all the time. Not like old famous garbage but like Id have a whole room full of prints from different online artists. And comissions from every artist I see like, oooh you’re style is neat can I please put it on my wall.
Not just like 2d art but craftman stuff too. Like yo you carved this spoon out of driftwood??? I’ll take two and I’ll pay in cash so you can dodge taxes if you want.
Hello internet! My name is Tre and this is a blog, for lack of a better term. I'm a college student, a nerd, a writer, a musician and (previously) radio DJ, a technology junkie, a cartoon/comic book/vidyagam fan and a pop culture aficionado. This is where I keep all of the junk that fascinates, excites, confuses and intrigues me. (That's basically just a fancy way of saying I put memes and stuff here.)
I'm black, twenty-one, mostly male, and I use he/his pronouns. Feel free to poke around, or say hello.
