The last month and a half, an increasing number of super cool people have landed in the JPG Discord, where they have been exchanging knowledge about conceptual art, net art, dynamic NFTs, art history and so much more.
JPG has become the Cedar Tavern for NFT geeks, and we can’t be more excited about it. In an effort to try to preserve these incredible conversations, we’re trying to summarize in blog posts.
This is a summary of part of the conversation that happened in our voice channel on Tuesday, January 10th, pertaining to the JPG Conceptual canon that’s recently been launched.
The conversation has been moderated by Trent, William and MP from the JPG team.
The introductions
Tim: I was a net artist doing digital art and sort of relational and participatory art, the sort of mid-'90s up through the early teens. I worked with a collaborator with a group that we called MTAA. Recently I've been working at 1stDibs, which is a high end luxury design and art and furniture e-commerce site that's launched an NFT venture. We've been selling one-on-one NFTs on 1stDibs and having different exhibitions.
I started collecting NFTs in early '21, I think. Before that moment, I had been paying attention to the technology for a long time, and was very excited about it. Selling digital art back in the late '90s was almost impossible, so when I saw a mechanism developed to sell it, I was sold. As NFTs grew in adoption, digital art reached stardom.
This is amazing. This is great. This is exactly what it should be.
I am all in on NFTs, and also riding out this crypto winter like everybody else. In spite of the bear, I see a lot of energy happening, especially around the art segment of NFTs, and it feels like a great place to focus your energy in.** **
Loucas: I'm a visual artist. I mostly work with images, but I've worked with other things in the past. And I was part of the initial exhibition at JPG, Deep Time. We had the Gift Shop side-exhibition, that sold the SALT collection I co-created with 0xmons and JPG, in July 2021. I loved being part of that, and I’ve continued to make NFTs ever since. ** **
Andrew: I have been working as a digital artist and experimental video artist since the early 2000s. And so, a lot of my practice is kind of really rooted in the sort of history of experimental media, experimental video, audio, visual stuff, computer, music, which I think in a lot of ways has, like, a very kind of shared history with conceptualism. In a lot of ways, the growth of experimental media was really informed by the experiments in conceptualism in the 20th century. So, although I tend to work in a mostly sort of material-driven way, I have a sort of strong filial relationship to conceptualism and the history there.
I started working with NFTs in early 2021 along with the launch of Foundation at the time, later breaking off from working on their (Foundation’s) contract and I did one series called "Wavelet Pools" on OpenSea, which totally annoyed me afterwards, because now I'm sort of stuck with this great project that is stuck on their shared contract. So lately I've been doing a couple of things on my own contracts, the "Grinders" series and the "Shadow Flora" series. It's really sort of the time is right to have these kinds of conversations and to start heading into how we connect all these dots and sort of define some of these overlapping ways of thinking about the work that's being produced.
Kalen: I am a conceptual crypto writer and artist, working at the meeting point of kind of conceptual writing and conceptual art and the blockchain, exploring what writing and publishing might look like when we really take seriously the affordances of the technology. For instance, using smart contracts to introduce different reading and writing or collecting mechanisms, or having a performative aspect to the work, or writing with seed phrases, etc. ** **
The parallels between conceptual art and writing
Kalen: Conceptual writing's a kind of writing in which the idea or concept behind the finished text is more important than the text itself. The resulting text is usually the final result of a certain process, like a constraint or a procedure that actually determines the writing process. It’s very similar in many ways to conceptual art.
As for my practice, I don't limit myself to one literary genre or one literary form. I don't write just poetry or just microfiction. I choose what literary form I use based on what is the best expression of the concept.
In terms of conceptual writing, I'm a huge fan of Christian Bök, who I've been really fortunate to kind of meet in space and become friends with. And for example, the Oulipo movement, in France they were, like, a really early example of what I would call conceptual writing, where they used kind of, like, constraints and mathematical formulas to come up with writing. There's George Perec, for example, who wrote a whole novel without using the letter E, which is extremely difficult in the French language.
I think conceptual artists can move between different techniques and different mediums because the concept is the ruling first and foremost important thing in the artwork.
Text is very important to conceptual art in general, from Fluxus and Joseph Kosuth, to Sol LeWitt writing instructions and Lawrence Weiner, conceptual artists use text on their work a lot. ** **
On the playfulness of conceptual art
William: Andrew, you had one of my favorite comments from the early discussions around this, and it was on the topic of the spirit of conceptualism.You wrote that in its earliest stages, conceptualism was driven by a desire to challenge boundaries, institutions, structures of art and etc, that was often quite playful and silly in its approach. And then you wrote, "Over time, the playfulness of conceptualism's roots has largely been stripped away by academic analysis and overserious MFA programs." How do you see that relationship between silliness and overserious playing out today in NFTs? Is that tension still there? Is it mixed up? What's your take on that?
Andrew: I sort of see the space of NFTs as being in some ways, like a revival of some of that playfulness, because I think that at the root of things, the reality is that it is hard to take yourself too seriously in this space, because you're operating alongside memes, basic forms of aesthetics, low brow humor and stuff like that.
I kind of see all of this as an opportunity to sort of reengage that kind of early playfulness and the humor that underlies early conceptualism.I think that in a lot of ways, conceptual artists were “trolling” the museums, the galleries and the curators. And there's a kind of embrace of that spirit, the space of crypto and in sort of NFTs in general. NFTs feel like an opportunity to discursively re-evaluate some of that. The NFT conceptualism feels fun. It's sort of willing to play at the edges and it's the opposite end of the spectrum in many ways from the art world, which is predefined as being really heavily invested in critical theory and these sort of framing mechanisms.** **
MP: Within the “trad” artworld, there's also this sort of tension towards making all artwork political. The NFT ecosystem is more removed from politics or taking them a little bit, like they're out of this realm. So, you know, the removal of politics and the, like, more humorous gestures in the blockchain conceptual art feel like a breath of fresh air into the pressure that conceptual art needs to be politically engaged and socially aware, rooted in real world problems. The internet can be very political, but also very apolitical and playful, and NFT Conceptualism in general is the latter.
Is conceptual art applied to NFTs an anachronistic term?
Loucas: Why are we trying to replicate art history? Right now we call them conceptual NFTs, like, because we just Scotch taped it from conceptual art. Conceptual art to me is only something that exists at a specific point of time in history many years ago. Maybe we would like to use another term? ** **
Trent: One of the things that I think is really interesting about digital art specifically is, like, it's a medium that just fundamentally, like, did not, like, the technology did not exist in really any form when the kind of initial conceptual movement was really going on.
When I think about the '60s and the new avant-garde and the kind of expansion of media that is currently called fine art, and this idea that really any different media could kind of claim that term and any type of act could claim that term, digital art didn't get to go through those same experiments. And then with net art in the '90s more of those things started to happen and we started to kind of investigate some of those conceptual ideas. Nowadays we also have mechanisms by which those artworks and concepts can actually be monetized, so there's this kind of second coming of some of those ideas.
Tim: I don't think of the term conceptual art in the context of NFTs as anachronistic. I think, particularly if you look at the initial three collections that were added to the canon, they very clearly into the traditional sort of idea and definition of conceptual art, without a doubt.
Even though conceptual art is mostly associated with work from the late 1960s and '70s, its roots go all the way back to the fountain, the urinal. Some of Duchamp's ideas about how art should function aside from something that was purely items and aesthetics.
I think a lot of artists working in media arts, be it NFTs, smart contract art, or net art, their work follows in that tradition. Conceptual art was defined in the '60s and '70s, but is still something that is completely legitimate to work in now. Even though conceptual art is not a medium, it's a strategy and sort of a technique, for approaching how to make art, which feels more legitimate with digital art and network digital art, and now particularly with AI art, it's almost as if the computer is the sort of actor who is creating the work on a prompt. It is possible to make the argument that that's how conceptual artists were working back in the '60s, they would just create prompts. And instead of computers making things, they would have helpers and things like that. But it was really the concept that did it.
Giving people a sort of foothold of, like, where to go conceptually or where to go with what's happening now, is important. And sort of in some ways, like, in order to create that bridge or that discourse that is kind of lacking, in some ways it's like you have to start from somewhere with, some shared language and be able to kind of situate people in order to invite them forward to the evolution of what's happening now. And I think that in some ways, it's really great to have this kind of space to be like: this is what conceptualism has been. And this is where we see it evolving and these are the ways that have emerged that people have embraced conceptualism within this space. And to ask ourselves: is there an evolution of that terminology at play as well in this process?
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
The Conceptual Canon has currently entered the second proposal cycle. Browse through the canon to discover the diversity of NFT conceptual art. You can also join the community in proposing and voting - more information here.
If you liked this conversation, there’s plenty more that we’re working on transcribing from our chatrooms, so we’ll be posting more soon. In the meantime, join the conversation on our Discord!