In Oct 2021 Facebook officially announced rebranding to ‘Meta’ and future plans to enter the metaverse; a strategy in the works for several years as they bought AR/VR start ups, investing billions into acquisition of brands like Oculus and Quest until they held a majority of global interests to bolster their plans.
Over the last 2 years we have watched what was predicted and anticipated with fear become a reality; celebrities and corporations elbowing their way in to the Crypto/NFT space, taking over and plundering a world which was ruled by, well...no rules. Rebellion, fantasy, freedom, and decentralization was a perfect environment for creative anarchists and rebels like Artists to flourish.
It was always to be the case that once the groundwork was laid, and heavy lifting done by creatives, it was going to be taken advantage of with those who had the means; mountains of money, finance equating power.
This commercialization began more subtly by supposing the confusing debate of ‘what is Art?’ in a landscape which at the time was heavily dominated by 3D renderings defining the NFT space and the ‘look.’ Lil’ Miquela, an artificially conjured teenage girl, was historically the first completely fictional social media influencer with 3 million followers on Instagram and a go-with of multi millions in brand deals:
https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/?hl=en
The studio behind her released an NFT in Nov 2021 which sold for USD 82,000. This is the first instance I recall of an established personality and/or property entering the space and people weren’t happy about it. Yet regardless of feelings it irrevocably changed everything.
It caused a heated debate amongst Artists up against losing everything they’d built thus far to the insurmountable; big business and branding. Had Lil’ Miquela crossed an as-yet-undefined line? Could she, if she wasn’t even ‘real’?
Yes, and this was just the beginning as it was followed by everyone from McDonalds to Gucci, Melania Trump to Emininem launching collections. Apart from the obvious technicalities of tokenization as carriage service, it forced a reassessment; what is an NFT if it’s not Art? NFTs had mainly been known as purely creative works of Art up until this point.
This rapid succession of events changed the known map dramatically and blurred perception. Was Damien Hirst’s HENI project legit Art NFTs by a famous Artist or simply a gross 20 million cash grab? Apart from clearly defining that there was now a distinct spectrum upon which Art and collectibles lay, more pointedly, it underlined blatant commercialization in a space that was precedingly driven by creatives; always the pioneers going in and popularizing a space then being forced out by big business (real estate is a perfect example).
Speaking of real (and unreal) estate this piece shows a monstrous Zuckerberg as part reptile, ghoul, or despot (pick one or all) delivering his imaginary manifesto keynote. It represents the violation of freedom and death of imagination via Zuckerberg’s ruthless social media machine, now taking over a boundless imaginary realm that Decentraland, Cryptovoxels and others have built from scratch. The thought of how this juggernaut could manipulate global perception and thought now via a completely artificial world of contained mind control is simply frightening.
To wit, this political spoof from SumofUs on Meta’s creepy and disturbing ‘Tiger & Buffalo’ advert concludes it nicely for me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZkmApNduTU
As Stored permanently on Arweave, minted on Manifold custom contract.