I Miss Turtlenecks 2021. Acrylic on canvas board, 14 x 11" One helluva, real, non-fungilble token
The power of stories in human being dramas never ceases to amaze. Life abundant behind and in front of our eyes, but none of it telling stories, we assume, more sophisticated than, “Hey Maple over the hill, hope you get this pheromone. The humans are sawing off my limbs, and you’re next!” Dogs sniff butts to read what any human can get from the first three lines of profile on a dating app, but dogs can’t tell stories about Fido whose humans feed him steak au poivre every Tuesday night. Not unless he decides to share his prize among canines, which is highly unlikely.
No life besides human tells intricate stories among its species above and beyond “I love you, care for you, dominate you, am proud of you, want to make offspring with you”. For us the power to embellish is both a blessing and a curse, but I believe the latter is more often the case. Dolphins share complex relationships, however, not a single pod of the species suffers a maniacal Henry Kissinger dolphin-killer. The number two animal killer of human beings after malaria-carrying mosquito is human being. Stories of woe, misfortune and fright hold the attention. Bad news begets bad news, and none of us feels quite truly human and alive without monkeys on our backs. Preferably those monkeys on other people’s backs. Basically we crave those fantastic stories of others. Few of them good, or even lucky. Some of them incredibly trite and inane, which can be useful for the state propaganda machine. Twelve inches of rain and a flash flood is better story than two inches and a mild case of muddy shoes. The tale of a janitor as the sole casualty after a school shooting in Tennessee won’t even last an afternoon on Kentucky news feeds. However if Taylor Swift has a birthday, National Public Radio announces it every hour on the hour for listeners craving stories from coast to coast. Many human stories begin with roaming shadow killers like Henry Kissinger and end with the murder of 150,000 Cambodian peasants. Nobody seems to care about the “in between stuff”, the “leading up to” what made such a marvelous story materialize. Who raised the monster? Where did he attend school? As a boy did he torture cats? There was this kid in my middle school who was rumored to be a cat torturer, but his stories didn’t break out beyond the cafeteria. Kid stories don’t matter, until, as would be in the case with Henry Kissinger, they grow up and kill.
Henry Kissinger Graduated Summa Cum Laude and Tortured Cats 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 16"
The best story of all, the one that seldom gets told, ends in wonder of how come a living Charlie Manson-type mass murderer of Cambodian families gets honored by a contemporary President of the United States? That’s the kind of story that could start a revolution. But then there’s a bigger story within the story. One where every adult American living is unwittingly mentally afflicted by its government’s hegemony, racism, ethnocentrism, and cultural imperialism. Few of the folks checking in on the NBA scores are gonna pay attention to a story about their own pathologies. The great majority of our tales are intricate, infinite gossip about nothing that matters.
Taylor Swift turns 32 on December 13. She’s a Sagitarius!
Here’s another: In the United States, a man named Stephen Curry (birthday: March 14), ran up and down a wood floor tossing a ball through a hoop for half a lifetime and acquired 160 million dollars to spend on whatever he desires. Most likely Stephen did not desire the story to be told of a war criminal who bombed a few thousand babies out of their high chairs in 1971, so last August he opted to purchase a funny monkey NFT for $180,000. If, like me, and the majority of earthlings, you have no idea what an NFT is, please follow along while we get to the bottom of why people suck so very, very much. Then I will generate my first crypto-funded NFT for the sake of any sanity I have left as an artist.
First, here is a perfectly legal sharing of Stephen Curry’s funny monkey:
It’s digital art. That means a person’s fingers and hand moved a cursor deftly across a computer screen, and with the help of sophisticated programming built by hundreds of college graduates near San Francisco, USA, was able to create this indifferent-looking monkey in a suit jacket that a celebrity basketball player purchased for $180,000. Not this one, but the original one. This one was free. I took it from cyberspace to share with you. Stephen Curry does the same on his Twitter and elsewhere. Perhaps he had a giant glossy print of it pasted along the wall of his private court, and the servants polish off the sweat stains every Monday morning. After completing his Ehtereum transfer to the computer doodler, Stephen received a high resolution image all his own. No one can touch it. Not even Stephen theoretically. It’s his bits and bytes property until he sells the monkey .png to another earth-hating investor in the grand narcissism scam. At present, according to my nephew who keeps abreast on the latest NFT news, the monkey image is worth over 2.5 million dollars.
NFT stands for “non-fungible token”. I didn’t know what that meant either. It turns out to be just another literal obfuscation to make rich people richer. An original van Gogh is a non-fungible token. So is a Barbara Streisand used toothbrush. An NFT is something that cannot be replaced by something else. Only a freak would buy a Streisand toothbrush to brush his teeth. He wants to hold it and advertise it, until it rises in market value. That’s what Stephen Curry does because he’s a good basketball player and capitalist winner/loser.
A winner because he has fooled 15.5 million humans into believing he deserves wealth and fame for bouncing a ball on planet earth; a loser because he thinks he is good. “Humans love to look good for other humans while they eat potato chips and chop down trees”—Thessalonians 3:15
Anyway, much has been written already about NFTs. Here is an article with a little tongue and cheek to give you some general idea. My main purpose is to jump on the bandwagon and get stinking rich. Money makes money they (the dog capitalists) say. If a digital image purchased for $180,000 in August is worth 2.5 million in October (14 times the original purchase price), then why can’t I at least triple my investment as being the actual creator of a non-fungible token? I have acquired some minimal celebrity after 30 years of writing words and painting pictures. It’s time I make my first NFT and get what’s coming to me. I have read enough about the process (not nearly) to try my hand (don’t do it) at this emerging lucrative market. I believe Ethereum could have been my middle name if I was born among computer science geek chieftains poised to take over the world. I’ll generate an NFT and get rich(er), just like Stephen Curry and Sotheby’s Inc. It won’t get much, but it might be enough for an all expenses paid dinner at a medium-priced/medium expectation suburban restaurant.
First I need to set up an account with NFT and cryptocurrency payment platforms. I’ve chosen Rarible and MyEtherWallet respectively.
So first I need to buy some Ether (ETH) on MyEtherWallet. I can use my debit card to obtain the minimal amount. $100 (USD) will garner 0.02 ETH which is worth $88.42 after fees. This will go into my digital wallet which I connect to Rarible, the platform to generate NFTs.
Scratch that. I went through a long process on MyEtherWallet (and divulgement of personal details) to be told my information could not be processed. I guess spending a hundred bucks on crypto is a bigger deal than buying an equal value of nothing on Amazon. No one ever said an invisible currency takeover should be easy. Especially one to knock down a hegemonic United States from #1 superpower to “about average” geopolitically.
I tried Coinbase to be my crypto payment platform. Looks good so far, but I’m waiting on some banking balance information from my wife, who keeps that knowledge secret like a spy.
Meanwhile, let’s have another look at my non-digital (that is, real) NFT before it’s transformed into a digital (real if there’s electricity) NFT.
I Miss Turtlenecks 2021. Acrylic on canvas board, 14 x 11"
The face of a girl in a turtleneck. It’s got texture too, and the purposeful randomness of a human being. I would sell this real NFT (equal in its varying worth and subjectivity as a Barbara Streisand used toothbrush) for the price I set with my standard equation (soon, I hope, to be the art market standard for the whole wide world):
Price = (W x H) + M + Element “X” fee
W = wage
H = hours worked
M = material costs
Element “X” fee = 30%(W + M)
My wage is $24/hour and I worked on it for 2.5 hours. Materials (a frame included) cost $40, and the “Element X” fee is $26.40.
Total price for this framed real NFT: $114.40.
I’ll ask 0.013 ETH (about $54.00) as a starting bid for a three day auction and see what pans out. Rarible takes its cut of the winning bid, and then there are gas fees to consider. Gas fees for mining. I feel like I’m a live bystander in the memory of my youngest daughter playing Minecraft. I look over her shoulder as she piles blocks up high and knocks them down hoping for a Dragon Egg treasure prize.
Maybe in some alternate reality, Stephen Curry will change tastes and allow his capitalist deity to goad him to pay $180,000 for my real painting. But for now, in market dystopia, I’ll concentrate on getting I Miss Turtlenecks digitized to facsimile, so it has a chance to make more money than the real thing. Makes perfect sense. Bitcoins aren’t really coins at all, and Taylor Swift turns 32 on December 13. She’s a Sagitarius!
Check it out, my first digital NFT!
You can find past touchy-feeley non-fungible tokens at ronthroop.com.