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Invest on Digital Art Infomercial

Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/permanent-collection?collection=0xfbeef911dc5821886e1dda71586d90ed28174b7d&token=126982&page=3

Source Link: https://opensea.io/assets/0xfbeef911dc5821886e1dda71586d90ed28174b7d/126982

Date Minted: September 21, 2020

Artist Description: Learn how to make easy money on digital art! Dear crypto natives, want to level up your finance game? Learn how to use digital marketplaces to buy provably authentic NFTs, build a collection, and make trades $$$$$$An easy online course that teaches you how to assess artists and individual works, how to collect and trade crypto art and how to connect with the community!!!

  • 915% GAINS

ZERO EFFORT GUARANTEED NO BANK NEEDED< Become cool, start today and CALL NOW”

CohentheWriter’s Commentary:

Irreverence is sorely lacking in high art. There’s, I think, a sort of automatic ingrained, socialized desire to be taken “seriously,” to be put on the level of the “masters,” which pulls artists towards highly-serious works, the attempt to capture beauty at some ideal, sublime level. It was Pop Art which really first destroyed that notion, and though artists have fleetingly engaged with that Pop ethos in the ensuing decades, it was Crypto Art that amplified their initial jaunt into devil-may-care artistry. Irreverence has evolved into a prime motivator for many Crypto Artists, and even when turning their sights on the conceptual, there’s an overall feeling of disrespect for many of the systems —financial, artistic, political— that most artists either avoid commenting upon or otherwise  approach with incendiary motives. Crypto Art is often childish, but in a good way. Crypto Art often displays similar emotional motivation to the punk rock movement in the late 70’s and 1980’s. It’s the equivalent of the Sex Pistols shouting “I am an antichrist!” It’s bold, energetic, and rowdy. And you feel that impulse clearly in Abysms’ piece Invest on Digital Art Infomercial, which may set aside the punk rock anger but clearly embodies the punk rock verve. 

According to the artist, “This piece is part of a series that is thematically set up as an ode to 1980s-1990s late night infomercial and home-shopping shows. It discusses the currently rising debate on quality, substance and originality in the contemporary crypto art community. Exploring the questions about the post modern consumer society, consumer behavior, crypto influencers, the future and the dangers of nft speculative businesses.” But even that description is perhaps too scholastic for the piece they’ve created. I’d argue that the real spirit of the piece is demonstrated elsewhere in the artist description, where Abysms says “Learn how to make easy money on digital art! Dear crypto natives, want to level up your finance game? Learn how to use digital marketplaces to buy provably authentic NFTs, build a collection, and make trades $$$$$$

An easy online course that teaches you how to assess artists and individual works, how to collect and trade crypto art and how to connect with the community!!! 915% GAINS ZERO EFFORT GUARANTEED NO BANK NEEDED< Become cool, start today and CALL NOW!”

Now that’s irreverent! Taking the infrastructure of otherwise straight-faced and straight-laced “As Seen on TV” ads in the late 20th century, Abysms comments on the growing attitude towards Cryptocurrency and Crypto Art as a “get rich quick scheme,” one populated by gaudy influencers and self-absorbed, presupposed millionaires. 

Which as anyone in the Crypto world can tell you, is demonstrably false in reality. The joke is rarely about “How much money have I made” and almost always “How much money have I lost.” Nevertheless, there are stories galore, like that of the $70-million Pixelmon saga which took the Crypto Art world by storm in the weeks before this writing, in which foolish or otherwise prideful minds, looking to capitalize on what they believe to be is a gold rush in the Crypto World, sunk huge amounts of currency into scams and under-researched projects, because they saw the Crypto world as the equivalent of an infomercial: They wanted to make easy money, have guaranteed gains, and, yes, put in ZERO EFFORT.

The piece itself is a looping video structured like one of these obsolete infomercials, the kind populated by men like Billy Mays, who’d talk VERY LOUD and VERY QUICKLY about the ABSOLUTELY NEW and COMPLETELY REVOLUTIONARY WAY to, who knows, plug a hole or clean your dishwasher or vacuum your floors or preserve the heat inside your garage. Taken to the Crypto world, Abysms’ video pulsates in blue and purple hues as a glitchy diamond vibrates and twitches over by the left side of the image. A white man’s (stock image?) ever-smiling face takes up the center of the video while, on all sides of him, various buzzwords and persuasive phrases hover and flash and capture attention. Build a Collection. Connect with a Community. Make Trades. Good Value. Provably Authentic NFTs. Things of that nature, just empty promises or otherwise empty sentences designed to entice. But just as that revolutionary plunger won’t actually make unclogging your toilet a breeze and just as the SlapChop won’t completely reshape how you cook dinner for your family, the idea of “getting rich quick in Digital Art” is an exaggeration, and in the bad hands of opportunistic marketers, like those that Abysms mocks here, it can have disastrous consequences.

Abysms doesn’t really seem too interested in wrangling with the real life fallout that overinvestment into NFTs or susceptibility to scams cause. There’s instead a fascination with the age-old techniques being applied once again to a new technology. It’s not the outcome or even the impetus that the artist seeks to explore but the actual mechanisms behind the manipulation. The flashiness. Bright lights and constant movement and hyper energetic composition. The enticing verbiage. The subconscious-tickling imagery: smiles, and stacks of cash, diamonds. Psychological manipulation on a grand scale, similar to the kind used by casinos glistening with screaming slots. Abysms has put together quite a clever critique of cryptocurrency and Crypto Art cash grabbing. What they’ve created is something unique, interesting, fun, but nevertheless unnervingly familiar. 

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