Decided to write about this cuz I think some people don’t quite understand my beef with Sotheby’s. What’s not to love, right? You’re gonna be at Sotheby’s! Isn’t that exciting?
Well it would be … if so much of what the crypto art scene wasn’t built on destroying upgrading the shady, cloak and dagger, often inept business model of the 3 auction houses – Sothebys, Christies, and Bonhams (who knew there were 3, right?).
Now you may be thinking wait, why would you even want to challenge the laundry business like that? Don’t you know they have /pəˈnaSH/? Don’t they have old furniture and Balenciagas they’re trying to pawn off on the unsuspecting passersby on the Upper East Side in between the hastily thrown-together Buschemi-with-a-skateboard style of COOL web3 “art displays”? Didn’t they resell some goose to help cover some of the scam money that *oops*, went into the original purchases in the SKU-heavy business of flipping genart?
Well yes, I’m saying they’re not ALL pomp, pretentiousness, and hiding money for the uber wealthy. Sometimes they do charitable things like putting up some dross for some no talent ass clown dad’s hack son because his mom fucked some other guy and everyone knows it but now it’s a whole thing.
But all ascerbic jokes aside, the bigger issue is the precedent we’re setting for future generations and the raison d’etre of web3 and cryptoart in the first place. Which contrary to popular belief was not created to assuage beeple’s childhood fantasies of self-aggrandizement and blowing up poop jokes to 100x their original screen size (while apparently other people are quite into that). It was also not created so Madonna’s manager could bribe some Biebers and Fallons to launch a (maybe? racist adjacent) theme monkey slinging business as a cover to burn a bunch of dudes’ eyes out in Hong Kong.
I’m actually not quite sure what the purpose of what we created was, now that I think about it. Probably the same reasons the caveman left the cave. Pussy and bison. And boredom.
This essay has quite derailed from whence I started it. Perhaps I can throw in a “tableau”, a “concordantly” or a “weren’t Pablo’s curtains so quaint last Basel?” to re-elevate the discourse to fine art appreciation and pretending to give a shit about art instead of using LACMA as a tax haven for talent agency mirages moonlighting as collectors.
If you bare with me for a second, maybe I’ll even come up with a battlecry worthy of a retweet that I can put into a pullquote while I languish in a sea of tired, burnt out contemporary compatriots who also believed in a revolution for fairness, decentralization, royalties, or whatever else we all used to care about in this little ole sphere…
worthy of a retweet that I can put into a pullquote while I
– me
Now before my detractors accuse me of having thrown in the towel or not wanking the trashman off enough like the rest of the PR-puff-piece-puffed brigade, I’ll say this: No Blackrock EFT, shitty Samsungs on chicken wire, Schacters blacklisting me, some Emptess nor Christie’s genart temptress will sway me from my main mission at hand. Which, I can finally reveal:
Pussy.
Bison.
and avoiding boredom by minting and distributing millions of $FLY’s to freeloading shit chain hoarders while waiting for SR to change their background back to what you traditionally associate with a high end art gallery that serves cheap wine in SoHo. Adieu for now.
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