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Art In The Age Of Information


Creation is inherently sacred.


Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.
Proverbs 18:21


Every word is an act of creation. The work of art originated in the world of worship. The work of art originates from the eternal. Oral cultures worshipped the eternal by repeating the spoken word. With reading and writing came textual culture, and the eternal Word was codified.


Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
Matthew 24:35


At the same time, the advent of the image tore man from direct experience of his surroundings and introduced the experience of mediation. Those things experienced or perceived in the world and the divine could now be represented and referenced even when they were not present.

At its inception, the visual image was nonetheless scarce, and thus the sacred nature of creation was preserved. With limited space for display and artistic creators, there was a natural incentive for those things expressed and represented to be of divine importance. Thus early visual art retained a significant “cult value”; representing the sacred, and displayed in contexts where the sacred was to be venerated.

Early human creative expression was decisively shaped by the difficulty of its creation, reproduction, and dissemination. With limited bandwidth for transmitting information, and high cost of reproduction, our early cultures focused on creating symbols of those things of utmost importance: truth, beauty, divine awe, and the aspirational values of life lived as it should be.

Technology is continuously introducing efficiencies in the creation, reproduction, and dissemination of information. As it does so, it has a “shredding” effect, tearing down the grand oeuvre and grinding it into pieces. The Holy Book is replaced by novels, then by newspapers and blog posts, then by tweets. The LP is replaced by the EP, then digital singles, then 7-second loops. To make consumption more efficient, and thus profitable, all content is shredded by technology into easily digestible chunks. And with these pieces, we can construct a “feed”.

We move from deliberate creation to ad hoc creation; and from measured, deliberate consumption to excessive, mindless consumption. As the work of art moves further away from its original in the eternal, it becomes desacralized. We also see the quality of works suffer for a lack of purpose: when a work is just one item in a feed, quick to pass away, what incentive is there to produce a something deliberate of high quality? The algorithm selects for what will engage you just for a moment, and so selects against what may engage you for life.

It is no surprise that the “world of art” has been slow to embrace the internet. Fine art simply cannot compete in the internet’s informational landscape. Everything technology touches is subject to shredding: text goes from books to tweets, and music from albums to viral loops. So what of art, as a product of focused, deliberate creative expression? It will get shredded too; and we have seen this happen already, with the meme.

Defined most simply, a meme is a “unit of culture”: so art as complex, deliberate cultural creation gets shredded down to its most basic unit. The meme is created, reproduced, and distributed ad hoc; it is ultimately meaningless; it is low-effort, low-quality, and created in the knowledge that its quick death is near-certain. It is designed for an instant reaction and nothing more. This process of “meme-ificiation” can be observed in any mode of expression that has touched the internet.

As we drown in ever-growing waves of information, it becomes impossible to craft a cultural narrative or produce great works of culture.


Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay.
Marshall McLuhan, 
“The Medium Is The Message”


Counter to the prevailing technological force of the internet exists another force: the increasing adoption of blockchain technology. Here we see rather different incentives: creation and transmission are costly, not free; and reproduction is strictly controlled. Recently, we have seen developments in “blockchain art” as creators and collectors are keen on blockchain enabling verification of provenance and ownership. However, blockchains introduce technological realities which are far more interesting: verification of time, costliness, immutability, and permanence. These reverse the incentives and forces we have traditionally seen with technology, and create an opportunity to reintroduce great works of culture. Despite the pressures of instant communication, we can once again “build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step”.

To nourish this seedling and create an environment for great art, we must understand the effect of the medium on the message. A misinformed application of blockchain technology to art will simply create a trade in memes. Art will be commodified, reduced to “token” collectibles, answerable and aspiring only to the market and the moment.

We have the chance to once again create eternal works. To do so, we must have a medium capable of hosting them.