Since the start of the new year, the JPG community has been collaborating on populating the Conceptual Canon, a token-curated registry (TCR) of NFT projects where conceptuality “takes precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, or material concerns.”
To shape this decentralized directory, contributors ranging from artists to scholars have taken to the forums in the JPG Discord to propose and hash out which projects should meet the criteria. In an effort to preserve these incredible conversations, the JPG team is now editing some of the best discussion highlights into blog posts.
The selected quotes below happened in our Canons Proposal Discussions forum channel through the first two weeks of January 2023. Except for light and sparse editing for the sake of clarity, the quotes have been taken as-is from the Discord.
💡Conceptual Canon — Discussion Highlights💡
Re: What Shouldn’t Be Included in the Conceptual Canon
✍️Writer: Mitchell F. Chan 🗣️Quote: “I think one of the lazy hazards that a lot of NFT culture falls into is labelling any damn NFT that purports to have an idea behind it, reason for existing, or narrative about its creation as ‘conceptual art.’ So I would try to exclude anything that is like ‘ah yeah, but the idea is that it’s ONLY photos of Twins and you gotta hear the story about it to know why that’s deep!’ As definitely NOT conceptual art.” (🔗 Link)
Re: Centering Around ‘Blockchain as Medium’
✍️Writer: Chainleft 🗣️Quote: “My opinion on this canon: The type of conceptual art that goes into this canon should be those that use blockchain as a medium. The type of conceptual art that's only possible through the use of blockchain.” (🔗 Link)
Re: The Self-Awareness of Conceptual Art
✍️Writer: Sam Spike 🗣️Quote: “Another thing about definitions ... I'd argue that conceptual art, proper, is generally highly aware of its status as that socially defined group of objects (an idea being a type of object) which is Art, with a capital A. It explores and often exploits that, let's say protected or special, status to make its point. It's generally highly self-aware of its material form. A conceptual painting is never a painting of the sort that simply portrays something with paint—never just an image. It's a painting that deliberately and consciously uses the notion of ‘Painting’ (including all of the associations and history that accompany such a concept) to communicate an idea.” (🔗 Link)
Re: The Ratio of Conceptualness to Thingness
✍️Writer: jgc 🗣️Quote: “Interesting idea [...] it suggests something being conceptual art is about the ratio of conceptualness to thingness as much as it is about the quality of the conceptual thrust — because there is a lot of meat on the conceptual bone for Terraforms, but it stands alone as a good artwork without that meat so it is conceptually engaging but maybe it isn't 'conceptual artwork.'” (🔗 Link)
Re: The Spirit of Conceptualism
✍️Writer: pixlpa 🗣️Quote: “At the risk of complicating an already long and rich thread, I want to insert a crucial element of historical conceptualism in art that I think isn’t fully engaged with here yet — its spirit. Conceptualism in it’s earliest stages was driven by a desire to challenge the boundaries, institutions, and structures of Art, and was often quite playful and silly in its approach. Over time, I think the playfulness of conceptualism’s roots has been largely stripped away by academic analysis and over-serious MFA programs.” (🔗 Link)
Re: Being Against the Visuality-to-Concept Ratio
✍️Writer: pixlpa 🗣️Quote: “I would also push back against treating visuality and concept as a ratio where there is some threshold that qualifies a work as Conceptual. One way to interrogate work is to ask whether your own thought processes, or something happening beyond the work in front of you are an important part of completing the work. Fluxus boxes were interesting (and now precious) collections of objects, but the artists’ intention was for the viewer to interact with the objects and ideas contained in them, and not simply stand back and look.” (🔗 Link)
Re: The Importance of Projects Like JPG
✍️Writer: Matto 🗣️Quote: “Yeah […] this is why I think communities / protocols like this are so important, it's a way for us to collectively make meaning around the work without succumbing to pure trad-art credentialism, MoMA plz notice me etc etc.” (🔗 Link)
Re: The Performative Gesture of the Unseen
✍️Writer: Aesthetica 🗣️Quote: “The key thing for me when I think of conceptual art is a performative gesture that points at something (largely) unseen/unheard/unthought. So Cage's 4'33 points at the sounds in silence […] Rhea Myers and Pak hit this space easily with their work. The performative gesture that strikes me as most relevant to blockchain conceptual art is one that points at the market/underpinnings of blockchain and what does (or doesn't) exist in the contract, market etc.” (🔗 Link)
Re: Relational Aesthetics
✍️Writer: troels 🗣️Quote: “With regard to relational aesthetics, one of the things that I was originally interested in with smart contract based works was how I'd be able to visualize relations. Like in the case of 77x7 on latent.works the visual side of things were maybe less important and the primary investigation was to see if any of the 77 works would ever go through all their 7 possible iterations. So comparing that to, I don't know, something like Jeppe Hein's Invisible Labyrinth or something, it might fall in the category of relational aesthetics, in the sense that there is no work without the participation. But it also could be lumped as a sort of conceptual work about shared ownership or maybe the unearthing of knowledge, and then of course it's all onchain, so there's also that.” (🔗 Link)
Re: Art History + A Terraform’s Clarification
✍️Writer: Matto 🗣️Quote: “With regard to the earlier convo about relating to history, and without succumbing to excessive hunger for trad art approval I do think there’s a value in relating to art history and creating some surface area (on our own terms) that’s legible to people coming from outside our scene and with an art history background. They can then see ‘ah ok this stuff is seen as relating conceptual art’ and then agree/disagree whatever [...] As much as I have iconoclastic feeling towards trad art institutionalism I do think there’s value in documenting that this scene is also interested in being legible to art history, especially on our own terms / protocols / institutions [...] And re: Terraforms, I asked 113 and he said ‘I think there are conceptual art aspects to Terraforms, but probably other pieces are more explicitly in that tradition also.’ (🔗 Link)
Re: A Challenge to Pak’s Conceptualism
✍️Writer: Mitchell F. Chan 🗣️Quote: “My take on Pak has always been that I'm highly suspicious of the work. Largely because of its aesthetics but also (rightly or wrongly) because of the way it's financialized. Prelude to this: I still haven't seen any evidence that Pak is actually trying to point to any specific idea or ideology through his work. Their own dismissal of the designation between art & design kind of reinforces this. At best, the only mechanism that Pak's work ever seems to point to is the mechanism of its own sale. And this is where the financialization mechanism of (any) work deserves to be scrutinized in order to evaluate the intentions of the creator. Like ... are you making this $ASH system because you think it's a statement on or analogy for something else you were thinking about? Or are you just dropping semi-random experimental financialization models because you can make a LOT of money doing that? I genuinely don't know, but Pak has never said anything that leads me to believe that his art is in service to anything besides Pak. I view his conceptual "puzzles" the same way I'd look at shows post-'Lost...’ I'm following this elaborate mystery that just keeps getting bigger and bigger, but I've been burned before, and I'm becoming increasingly suspicious that the author of this mystery actually has no idea how it's supposed to end. And this brings me back to the aesthetics. If I were a middling-talent pseudo-intellectual who wanted to people to think I was smart and deep, you know what I'd do? I'd probably throw on a black turtleneck, render a bunch of monochrome Platonic Solids, and pretend to dig poetry. THAT IS THE EXACT PLAYBOOK WHEN YOU HAVE NO CLUE WHAT YOU'RE DOING. [Source: I did exactly the above while I was an undergrad in Architecture School. I know what the fuck I'm talking about here.]” (🔗 Link)
Re: A Proposed Rule for the Canon
✍️Writer: Mitchell F. Chan 🗣️Quote: “Maybe a good rule for the canon: ‘The Conceptual Art must definitely, fr fr, no cap, contain a concept!’ This rule also does the good work of eliminating a lot of the bad art!” (🔗 Link)
Re: Loot as Conceptual NFT, Not Conceptual Art
✍️Writer: Tim Whidden 🗣️Quote: “FWIW I don't see Loot as being conceptual art. But it is a conceptual NFT — a collectible — which does an incredible job IMHO of revealing mutable aspects of collectible NFTs that haven't been explored fully, yet. What I mean by that is that the actual visualization (and every other attribute) could change from platform to platform. Think of a game where an ax looks different in one game to another. It could even have 10x damage (or whatever) in one game but not another. When you think of NFTs this way, just like symbolic pointers, then every NFT is completely conceptual — and slippery — as all its attributes could possibly change from context to context.” (🔗 Link)
Re: The Conceptual Provocativeness of Loot
✍️Writer: Sam Spike 🗣️Quote: “The conceptually interesting thing about Loot for me is that it describes a type of game that’s already been built hundreds of times before. It’s the tokenization of an archetype, a cliche, and asks interesting questions in that respect (even if unintentionally), in a way that’s actually not too dissimilar to Rhea’s Tokens Equal Text imo, notwithstanding the comparable text aesthetic. It’s somewhat paradoxical and provocative as a CC0 work in that its content is already in the public domain.” (🔗 Link)
Re: The Question of Sincerity
✍️Writer: kevbot 🗣️Quote: “Must the artist be sincere in their declaration of the work's status as art? If so, how can we tell? What if they're trolling? In the NFT world, art and meme culture are inextricably bound, and as a consequence troll jobs have been pervasive. I think we see a lot of people creating and calling things art because to do so has become trivial. To Duchamp's credit, I think he was at least sincere in his declaration of readymades as art. The troll will try to make it difficult to ascertain their sincerity, but I think it's generally possible. My criteria then would be that the artist declares the work to be art AND that they're sincere in their declaration. Maybe you implicitly held this criterion of sincerity in your definition, but I'm curious to hear what you think.” (🔗 Link)
Re: Placing Work Into an Art Context
✍️Writer: pixlpa 🗣️Quote: “Regarding a creator placing work in an Art context, the complicating part of that in our case is that the ethereum blockchain is the context of all of this work, which is decentralized by nature, despite the efforts of platforms (like JPG!) to create something akin to an Art context. This means that we are working backwards from the trad art world in some cases because the work is created and displayed outside of any specific context, and it's only through discourse and curation and the artists's own statements that we can arrive at the idea that it operates in an Art context at all. IMO, this is one of the wonderful parts of the NFT/Web3 space, that something can coexist with a heterogeneous set of other creations in a non-hierarchical way, in any number of contexts, and those contexts can be shuffled around after the fact.[...] To my mind, there's a lot of power in the kind of context overlap that can be articulated through Canons, that it is not just a sorting system where a project gets designated as one thing that is exclusive of other things it might be, or other meanings it could have in relation to other work.” (🔗 Link)
The Conceptual Canon has currently entered its second proposal cycle. Browse through the canon to discover the amazing diversity of conceptual NFTs in our ecosystem. You can also join the JPG community in debating, proposing, and voting on NFT lists — learn more by hopping into our Discord!
Lastly, to commemorate the first month of collaborating together on the inaugural Canons registries, I created a celebratory free mint for the JPG community. There’s still two days left on the mint, grab yours here if you’re interested! 🤝