“Crypto-Art vs. Paper” by Richard F. Yates

Howdy citizens! Today, I am making available to the universe FOUR UNIQUE WORKS OF CRYPTO-ART! Each of these pieces will be available as an edition of ONE, and no more will ever be tokenized. The reason I’m doing this is because I’m evil. I think the torture of knowing that there’s only ONE of these pieces in existence---and someone else OWNS it, not YOU---will drive everyone mad!!!! (Or madder! Or, perhaps, so mad that they all become SANE again, which is something I miss…when the world was sane…)

ANYWAY, I’m also making paper versions of these bits, in one form or another, as well, but these paper copies will TECHNICALLY (because I’m saying so right now) be FAKES! They will be MERE COPIES of the true works, which are the aforementioned CRYPTO pieces… (Declaring things is fun!) Here are the works in question (with the corresponding written bits from my MakersPlace store included for context and flavor):

“Angry Old Guy Digital Tender – Three Thirds of Nothing (Uncut Sheet)”

According to the Smashing Pumpkins, the world is a vampire. I hope you all understand exactly what that means. (I don't but I like the sound of it.) Value is subjective. Vampires value blood and black capes. Crypto-folk value bits and bytes and all things digital. I am an artist inspired by Existentialism, Ray Johnson's Pop-Art, and the song "Nothing" by Depeche Mode, so I value NOTHINGNESS... So I'm making (and printing---for real world distribution) paper tender in the amounts of .33333 of nothing. The unique piece of digital art being offered to YOU, right here-right now, (there will only be ONE---there can BE only one---I think I hear Queen playing in the background) is a composite piece made by my having super-imposed the "fronts" of my tender notes onto the back pattern that I created so that the notes aren't just blank when you flip them over. (I want the nothingness to be symbolic, not literal by having nothing on the back.) Think of it as an upside-down airplane on a sheet of stamps, if you like! (An intentional mistake!) For one lucky human, this tokenized bit of digital tender(ness) will make you a more complete human (or A.I. or alien or, perhaps, goblin---if goblins are finally online) than any other human (or A.I. or alien or goblin) on the planet! It will help you achieve endarkenment, which is something I just thought of, but which sounds like it should already be a thing... (I looked it up. It IS already a thing that a lot of new agers have written about. Foiled again!!!) Anyway---Congratulations on your purchase! I'm sure you'll be very happy together! Meanwhile, I'll use the funds RAISED by the sale of this unique item to pay for (a small portion of) a yacht, in which my family and I will escape to the Bermuda Triangle and live with the other underwater alien intelligences that inhabit that area---and we'll occasionally have rave parties on our boat---because I like techno! Thanks for contributing to the dream!!!

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“Epic Drama! (Eaten?)”

SOMETHING HUNGRY is stalking the waters, making ghosts out of jellyfish and divers and other folks who venture into the DEEP WATERS! (The fools...) I've become, somewhat recently, enamored with the concept of BAD COMICS. I want to see how sketchy, how nonsensical, and how BAD a comic can become but still work as a comic. (I'm inspired here by things like Scott McCloud's UNDERSTANDING COMICS, which stated that simplification of an image can make it more relatable for the reader. Is this necessarily true? I don't know, but it's fun to play with the ideas!) (Plus, I like to draw ghosts...so there's that element, too.) I'm only making one edition of this piece available as a work of crypto-art, but I'm printing a handful of the pieces (on paper) to sell in my front yard during my summertime "yard art" sales, which I put on every year. (But we all know, the person who buys the CRYPTO piece has the REAL work!!! We all know that, don't we?) Okay. Thanks for playing!

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“Shades”

So....at what point does art / poetry / humor / biography / and crypto-art collide and become one unified THING??? RIGHT HERE! RIGHT NOW! (That was a song by Jesus Jones! Remember???) I'm no computer scientist, but I do love the POSSIBILITIES that are afforded by the digital art world... Is this nonsense? Sure. Bad art? You betcha! Deeply amusing, poetic iconography? Yes---to me, at least... (And it kind'a reminds me of Van's shoes AND the 2-Tone ska movement---performers like The Specials and Selector and Madness... Great stuff...) This is another piece that I'm making available as a single, unique work of cypto-art, but which I'm printing paper copies of (fakes!!!) to sell in the yard. (My yard has become a temporary gallery space during the summer months, and business has been pretty good! The ice-cream man seems particularly interested. He's bought one big painting and several t-shirts!!!) Meanwhile, for those folks who can't come visit me in my yard, you can still get your digital mitts on some crazy crypto-art!!! And that's pretty nifty, if you ask me.

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“We Don’t Know What We Need…”

Monsters gotta band together sometimes for mutual safety. The world is a tough place and gettin' tougher by the minute. Meanwhile, the human creatures, who seem to think they're in CONTROL of the situation, are living weird little circular lives, spinning and spinning and spinning, without going anywhere. So what should us monsters do? Do we just EAT all of them humans? There is some research, from our monster psychologists, that suggests SOME humans have rudimentary intelligence, although they aren't forced to USE it very often, so a rather vocal minority of MONSTER-HUMANIST-ACTIVISTS are saying it wouldn't be right to just chomp down all the humans, since they might be semi-intelligent... But they're real shitheads, so it's a difficult argument to maintain! We really just don't know what we need to do... If you have an opinion about this (or any important) topic, then open your window, lean out, and start shouting your thoughts as loudly as you can out into the ether. (Or just make a zine about it.) When enough people hear you, maybe the world will get better!? [P.S. - This propaganda poster was created using ink on found cardboard, then colored using a free digital app on a human phone device. It's meant as a rallying point for monsters who don't know what they need! Which, I would argue, is most of us...]

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So that’s the new stuff! The concepts behind the images are expressed in the descriptions of the individual pieces, but the POINT is that TOKENIZING a work of art, making it into a digital asset, is a way for an artist (however lackluster and / or eccentric) to take CONTROL over their work, to say “THIS IS MY WORK! THIS DIGITAL IMAGE, RIGHT HERE, IS SOMETHING I MADE AND I CONTROL…” Copies of the image might be floating around the interwebs (I’ve seen people offering cell phone backgrounds of MY drawings and people using images I created for their band’s Faceboot page!!!!), but thanks to tokenization, a VERIFIABLE means of saying, “This art is MINE” now exists in the digital world. And that’s super-keen, in my view…

So, if you want to support a starving artist (however absurd and / or lackluster and / or eccentric), I know just the place for you to visit! MY MAKERSPLACE STORE, where you can find REAL artwork by a humanoid who genuinely cares about this stuff and is excited by the possibilities of it all (possibilities for connecting to folks on various continents, for propaganda, for satire, for spreading the LAUGHS…) Yeah, just give it a look. It’s like if a punky, old, zine-guy decided that he wanted to make crypto-zine-punk-junk art to sell online, and then (oddly enough) he DID it! It’s an AWFUL lot like that… (‘Cause he did…)

---Richard F. Yates
(Primitive Thoughtician and Holy Fool)

SUPPORT INDEPENDENT FOLKS WHO ARE JUST MAKING STUFF BECAUSE THEY LOVE IT!!!

https://steemit.com/@richardfyates
https://primitiveentertainment.wordpress.com/read-a-damn-book-list/
https://makersplace.com/store/richardyates/