few of u may know i studied art history in college but haven't done much other than reading and appreciating art the last several years so i thought I'd bang out a quick little piece on @muratpak's recent collection The Title from @niftygateway https://etrent.medium.com/muratpaks-the-title-brings-digital-art-into-the-neo-avant-garde-8887b8659571

i've been casually watching the cryptoart space for a while, but i'm no great expert.

i love Mr. Fox's "Burn Before Reading" on @snarkdotart and obvi cryptopunks, but nothing else has really interested me critically.

this is largely because pretty pictures don't get me off, i like conceptual continuity of medium and aesthetic, and interesting ideas here are often what i find most engaging

i think @beeple is the only kind of "pure" visual crypto artist that tickles my fancy, because the content of his work is so meme-y, so internet native it builds self-awareness of the media directly into the visual components

but i think The Title is one of the first pieces of crypto art that begins to question the medium itself in a way similar to the work of artists like Duchamp in the 1920s and John Cage/Merce Cunningham/Robert Rauschenberg in the 50s and 60s

it also explicitly reminds me of Yves Klein's "Proposte Monocrome: Epoca Blu", which was an exhibition of identical blue paintings sold at various prices

not only did people buy the identical pieces at different prices, people actually **experienced** them differently

it posed the question 'what effect does price have' and showed that it was fundamental to the the experience of the work.

klein proposed a hypothesis, the reception proved it out, and **we learned a new thing**. context matters, context is part of the work.

. @muratpak's The Title is 9 identical works, each with a specific method of obtaining the piece

the catch is that all of them link to the exact same ipfs file

so who owns the file? all the collectors? do The Expensive holders own more than The Cheap holders?

. @muratpak is asking a fundamental question relating to cryptoart: what is ownership? how does it impact the piece?

this is the type of interrogation i've been waiting to see from the crypto art space

digital art hasnt had the opportunity to investigate fundamental questions regarding its nature. its been a craft, forcibly relegated to commercial or derivative roles

unlike ceramics, textiles, illustration, it hasn't had its fine art moment, because ownership wasn't possible

the opportunity is two-fold: elevating a craft to the status of fine art, intertwined with the potential of an entirely new medium in cryptography

@muratpak's tackling of the ownership question is the first of many deep, thoughtful, and playful conceptual pieces we will see