Apes are going from strength to strength with the average price hitting 180 eth on Monday, worth $450,000 dollars.
Even as bitcoin, eth and stocks see some red, apes keep booming with the market cap of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) nearing $1 billion.
That’s up from just $30 million last summer, making this a 30x in less than a year.
Few other projects have emulated this success, one based on superb marketing and big name backing.
From Snoop Dogg to Ashton Kutcher, Mark Cuban to Jimmy Fallon, even Pranksy is an Ape.
The Apes, a homage to WallStreetBets perhaps and that whole take down the hedge funds failed revolution, or a critique of man that has not evolved, still a tribal monkey, fighting over petty clay.
A new method of exclusive art/cultural clubs, or a collective delusion that some monkey jpeg can be worth half a million.
You’d definitely want one however, with all this being a very excellent case study on how you can create the illusion of exclusivity. Not that it is much different than buying a $100,000 Channel bag.
There are far more millionaires than Apes. Apes that just by holding them may well make one feel as if part of the aristocracy.
Because the in-joke writes itself: look at the apes, and there are plenty of them, Putin being the biggest ape of them all.
That’s perhaps a worthy message to transcend through time, to look at these apes and be reminded that we are not apes, while also knowing that actually we are, because there are still many apes.
Instead of a beautiful Mona Lisa, kids maybe well be taught about the revolution of the apes, how a group of men and some women, not knowing what they were doing, stumbled upon the ape nature of man.
And did they decide then to evolve? Well, not if the NFT story ends here. Not if these apes become lazy, which is one risk of exclusivity, of group think, or of tribalism.
As they can be satisfied with little, and worse, they can place themselves in the center with the rest then worshipping the apes in a complete apping of man.
Something that creates tension in this exclusivity model. You can mine your bitcoin, but you can only watch the apes.
Is that art? Seclusion, the formation of stratas, the apes and men? Or is that so unavoidable that the best way to achieve the inverse is to have such seclusion?
Nothing to strive if there’s nothing glorified to get if you can reach the top, and yet can you really reach the top if you don’t change the rules of the game.
Which may well mean our children will learn about the revolution of the apes, but it may be the revolt against the apes, the liberation of NFTs and digital art or code expression from the mind grip of a centered model thats risks making apes the categorical description of NFTs.
Not that it’s their fault. It’s more a challenge. Can you ape the apes? Can you unape the NFTs? Can man progress? Can art evolve?
The answer to that remains to be seen as for now it may well be this is the quiet period after an astonishing 2021 when the real work begins in answering some of these questions, including just what more can you do with NFTs?
