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Authentic creativity is born after knowing something so much that you need to take it apart and put it back together, but differently. This seems to be happening with the “realistic internet” of Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Leonardo, the so-called Web2 that is slowly changing towards the so-called Web3 and the Metaverse. And so is centralized or legacy finance being turned into controversial renewed avant-gardes (dadaism, futurism, expressionism, and cubism) of DeFi, DAO, blockchain, smart contracts, and cryptos, among other enigmatic innovations. What will remain of these chrysalises? Some beautiful butterflies or maybe many useless corpses.
The realist demonstrators of Web2 sought to replicate reality as it is in art, to identify art and reality almost inseparably. The artist was a mime, an imitator. He who is able to perceive the smallest details and capture them photographically in the work is the master of talent, the guide of the path and the maximum interpreter of creation. Thus, the windows of clothing stores and supermarkets were digitized, the paper newspaper was virtualized, the encyclopedia became widespread, and the seeds of gossip became hurricanes of false news. There was a transposition not creative but imitative. The “realistic internet” or natural fulfilled its function: to be a virtual copy of the real. The winners were the aggregators, the patrons (the Web2 nobility that are going to disappear like the Borgias, the Borghese and the Medici did) who made exorbitant, almost obscene profits, leaving the real artists with a few crumbs here and over there.
But as if he were a Pablo Picasso breaking the rules, changing the rules, and starting over, Satoshi Nakamoto appeared saying: Everything you can imagine is real. The new technological Cubism emerged. What is seen is not understood because space and form are confused, the front becomes a profile and vice versa, time is incorporated as part of the work. The artist’s art advances faster than the viewer’s understanding. Some of these looks with suspicion and mistrust at novelty, seek accesses to meaning, seek a known reference, but find it difficult to find it. They distance themselves and get closer and in this slow and distrustful dance some run away, but others remain. Those who stay bet, those who bet take risks and those who take risks, do they win? Maybe yes, maybe not.
With what gaze should one approach the novelty of the Metaverse? With a sincere look, free of prejudices and preconceptions, absent of misinterpretations and biases, pure and original. With the eyes of children. Every child is an artistThe problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. Many times, reality is not the truth but false human constructs that prevent seeing reality as it is. Reality can be as much a lie as art, but art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth. And the Metaverse is a sketch of a work of art, it is the process of building a change.
The traditional internet is full of empty words and distant hearts, complicated customs of distant rites of small dominant groups and accumulators of terabytes of personal data, voluntarily given away. There is no possible claim against bad personal choices, but there is an alternative: change the rules to live better, to dust off souls and immerse yourself in the artistic internet because art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
We arrive at 2022 with an incipient technological artistic expression supported by the blockchain. Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. Why follow the mandates of the old internet and not invent a new one? Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. The dominant hypocrisy of uses and customs, good taste… Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness and the addicted routine of sleepy gathering powers of innovation and creativity of sleeping rebels. The great artists of the 21st century are the sleepless coders, the developers, the engineers, the content creators.
The information superhighway that carries data cars hither and yon through big corporate toll booths dominates tech cities. Faced with the constant traffic jams with their consequent loss of time and environmental pollution, alternatives arise, some delirious and others creative. There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun. Old creatives are not synonymous with ineffectiveness or passivity because it takes a very long time to become young. Impossibility is the engine that drives creativity, the challenge to what is imposed and presented as reality. I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it. Meaning and purpose may come together in the Metaverse as a synthesis of the grandeur of life: The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
The true revolution of the Metaverse and Web3 is to break the norms of technological maturity to test the infant blockchain and its enormous potential. It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. It is not copying one block and another and another with no added value what will change reality, it is reconfiguring, rethinking, and stealing! Bad artists copy. Good artists steal. That is the difference between the projects that will be successful and those that will be forgotten, remembered only by the Way Back Machine. Bitcoin is a horse, nothing more and nothing less, but if I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse… but surely you will see the wildness! Each transaction is a painting by the artist and painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Finally, to navigate in this new, more decentralized, democratic, and plural water, all you have to do is draw and to draw, you must close your eyes and sing.
3minutosdearte.com [Picasso: “Aprende las reglas como un profesional, para entonces poder romperlas como artista”]
. +All words in are Pablo Picasso quotes.
