Cecret03

Posted on May 07, 2022Read on Mirror.xyz

2/NFT Spirit History: 15 Minutes of Heroic Dreams of Cans, Frogs and Ordinary People

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(1) Andy Warhol

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

In 1968, the line appeared on a promotional page for the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. That year, there was no internet, no iPhone, no TikTok, no Bitcoin, no Telegram.

But the core script that shapes today’s world has fully emerged. The person who said this was the “Pop Art Pope”, Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol

In 1961, Lato, a fat erotic writer and gallery owner, said to Andy Warhol, who was worrying about what to draw: Is there a possibility that you can draw the canned food you eat at noon every day?

Andy Warhol thought the idea was way too rad and cool, so he gave Lato a “creative fee” of $50. Since then, he has been out of control, painting soup cans, Coke bottles, Marilyn Monroe, and the head of a certain country. (The $50 creative fee was worth it, as one of his later paintings would sell for $100 million.)

Campbell’s Soup Cans 1962

Flavor Marilyns 1962

No matter what he draws, Andy Warhol almost always hides a mathematical logic behind it, that is: repeating subjects + random variables.

Notice! Although human artistic creation contains the element of “repetition”, most of them are “repetition of themes”. For example, many medieval painters painted Jesus and the Virgin, and elementary school students each painted “House Tree People” in school, but Andy Warhol’s repetition was a very straightforward “image repetition”.

Image repetition requires very little aesthetic ability. When I first saw the Marilyn Monroe picture when I was in the second grade of elementary school, I could see the mystery and feel the rhythm at a glance. This is a repetition that only a machine can produce. (In fact, his method of painting is also industrial “screen printing”.)

Andy Warhol’s paintings can sell for as much as Van Gogh, and I think one of the reasons is that it captures the most pervasive mass mentality of the industrial age.

What is the state of the masses in the industrial age?

Let me tell you a piece of Andy Warhol’s original words, you can experience it: You know the president drinks Coca-Cola, Elizabeth Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and you think about it, you can drink Coca-Cola too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can buy a better Coke than the homeless man on the corner. All Cokes are the same, Elizabeth Taylor knows it, the president knows it, the tramp knows it, you know it. You replace Coca-Cola with “iPhone”, “Tik Tok”, and Elizabeth Taylor with Dilireba, and the statement stands still. Gone are the days when the rich daughter of a rich family wore a patch and the poor girl wore a patch. Even Sanhe God the homeless can buy a pair of clean pants for 2 dollars.

Andy Warhol once faced the camera and ate a hamburger in over four minutes. It became a great metaphor for the industrial age. But this may not be a good thing for human beings who naturally pursue “inequality”.

Attention, here comes the point! So far, I have quoted two Andy Warhol quotes that seem to contradict themselves:

If in this era, no matter the rich or the poor, everyone is drinking Coke, eating McDonald’s, using iPhones, and swiping TikTok, just like cans standing side by side in a painting, then what can make you different and make you stand What about enjoying the crowd in the spotlight, even if it’s only for 15 minutes? I’m afraid the trick is in that tiny “variable”. In the environment of industrial production, the simplest and crudest way to artificially control variables is “limited production”.

All my classmates wear AJ shoes, but yours are ordinary, mine are limited to 500 pairs worldwide. Then, when we meet in class, your attention must be “stepped on” by me. So, I have “Famous 15 Minutes”.

Although we are legally equal, a variable in me is scarier than your variable, and I create an artificial inequality. It’s a tried-and-true trick, and half a century since Andy Warhol pointed it out, people still enjoy it. And it’s getting worse.

Andy Warhol debuts in TIME magazine, May 11, 1962

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This article is translated from《NFT精神史:罐头、青蛙和平凡人的15分钟英雄梦想》written by a Chinese tech journalist Max Shi ZHONG and published on Qianhei.net. I translated it to pay my tribute to the author, it’s a legendary piece about NFT, even could be recorded in a history book. It is quite long, but 10000% worth reading it.

NFT