Miserere

by Art For Anarchists

28 min readJul 29, 2021

PREFACE

Miserere: a Latin word that means have mercy. Mercy from tragedy, misery, suffering, injustice, pain, loss…. My collection titled “Miserere” is a dialogical revisioning of Georges Rouault’s collection by the same title “Miserere”.

Rouault lived and worked through both World Wars. He was haunted by the devastation to life and habitat caused by them, the destruction of humanity by humanity. Rouault was a peer of Matisse and for most of his working life was considered a Fauvist, who, helped launch the technicolor movement of German Expressionism but for Miserere he turned only to BLACK and this was his life’s greatest artistic achievement .

Black and shades of grey! Rouault’s deeply spiritualized gaze into the abyss of human peril produced a drawn out sequence of visualized prayers. Rouault’s “Miserere,” begun around 1922 was a early modernist usurping of modernity, that presaged what would become the existential century of endless war. What is lost and what will be lost in a singular vision — loss made manifest .

My MISERERE is not an homage to Rouault’s collection, it is a dialogical bridge between suffering then and suffering now. Now and then artistic visions integrate across time and space — that has happened. I intend for my MISERERE and Rouault’s MISERERE to foment and form a binary relationship in service to suffering and mental health awareness in the 21st century and finally, to meditate on humanity’s existential crises now that has not devolved across the generations but worsened without differentiation.

The visual vocabulary here follows a direct line from Georges Roualt and Picasso to Jackson Pollock and Gene Dubuffet to DeKooning and Georg Baselitz to Basquiat. The primitive line manifests rage and protest. The voice is awkwardly loud and the lack of finesse emits a clear sense of frustration and even hopelessness.

Miserere stands as an interpersonal indictment in the tradition of confessional poetry. An impatient look at the grossly unique human circles/cycles of personal hell, the finger prints we leave on the unraveling lives of others around the world. They are created in a relentless way, refusing all self-consciousness or critique. They are raw and laden with layers of witness content unfolding in a symbolic nature, sometimes obvious.

Titles are vital and should not be separated from the experience of visual phenomena.

Section 1: ORIGINS

While in Paris for a Solo show at the Arcima Gallery for my Documentia(s) Portfolio in 2011 — I visited the Center Pompidou Modern Art Museum. Not far from Yves Kline’s Monochromatic Blue masterpieces in a set apart room hung 5 modestly proportioned works by Georges Rouault:

L’apprenti ouvrier 1925

Juge 1949

Séraphine 1949

Clown à la fleur rouge 1958

And most importantly to my eventual discovery of His Miserere collection:

Though Rouault had planned 100 Intaglio Etchings as aquatint prints for the final Miserere he completed only 58 before his death. Most of the 58 were made between 1922 and 1927. His heavy signature line work that would stay with his work for the remainder of his life was developed fully during the creation of the Miserere Collection. It was this remarkable, moody, almost painful line work that I discovered in the work Dura lex sed lex at Center Pompidou!

A typical introduction to Rouault’s Miserere reads as follows:

The Miserere is a profound, expressive meditation on suffering and the promise of redemption. Created in 1922 — 27 (though not published until 1948), it remains one of the 20th century’s seminal print portfolios and Rouault’s most ambitious graphic project. Across his cycle of 58 monumental prints, a selection of which is displayed in this gallery, Rouault powerfully conveys his deep empathy for humanity in response to the destruction and misery he witnessed during World War I (1914 — 1918). Masterfully combining many intaglio (incised into metal) printmaking methods, he pushed the medium’s technical boundaries to achieve expressive tonalities and painterly effects that evoke the thick contour lines and luminous qualities of Medieval stained glass.

My life was beset by multiple tragedies before my discovery of Rouault’s Miserere Collection. I had been searching for a voice to identify with as a peer and mentor and friend. In the Miserere I found all three. In the abstracted figuration of the Miserere I saw clearly a commentary on human suffering. Every panel registers in the gut like a broken heart from loss and death.

I would not be ready to start my Miserere for another decade, finally beginning this year in late July. The reason being I could not fathom or configure my own voice directly on the metal works (Atrophographs / Documentias). The chaotic, transformative, and even violent aesthetics of the metal process lacked an element of control — perfect for pure abstraction but out of reach for articulating a mode of figuration.

Until the last and greatest tragedy of my lifetime — my brother’s suicide in February of 2018. I walked away from my traditional art career for good. Turned my studio into a family room and walked away.

Then & Now

I insist every artist is figuratively born into the processes AND unique pathways of their creativity. A life may be lived within these processes and along the pathways of art in general. But there is no guarantee one will reach the eventual day of death with the symbolic brush in hand.

Art — for the artist — is basically an entanglement with a matrix of psychic vulnerabilities. One may lead with the sure foot of philosophical, spiritual, or emotional inquiry, but always the foot which drags behind is a splayed mess of exposed nerve endings — a wound exposed to the world.

My art life is now a distinctly then/now experience, the before and after my brother’s suicide February 3rd, 2018.

(Excerpt of artist statement written about my art before his death)

The impetus from the beginning was to create mediums that could be Ecto-Genetic Extensions — Material as metaphorical equivalent of flesh, body, consciousness in order to meditate on critical existential questions. A primary goal being that the artistic process approach would stand as legitimate Philosophical Inquiry. The primary inspirational theme has always been the presence of the mystery of death, to better understand how mortality functioned in creative process, to elaborate upon the belief that death is itself a dynamic creative force that left unattended and misunderstood becomes the force behind the atrophy of psychic and spiritual health.

Death is itself a power apparatus, a machine with infinitely destructive potential if ignored. So Death Force became the subject of meditation, through acts of mental and physical attention, engagement, interaction and interpretation enabling the artist to explore and better understand the complex network of affects in order to better control and manipulate the powerful negative output and influence on personhood. This process of engagement and discourse with Death Force is understood as the Interpersonal Apparatus — a system for controlling the impacts of a population of influence.

All mediums developed by necessity function as live, nearly organismic Fields that allow for the cultivation of energy that will undergo real transformative change in a fleeting span of time and in conformance with Life-Death Cycles they grow and change and achieve full bloom of meaning and message before faltering into decay and ceasing to be at death.

True to the nature of perception aesthetic values blossom in reaction to light and all ambient components captured at peak life moment during process-memory documentation are a function of Life / Light Energy. Color being largely a function of Life-Energy. The simultaneous transformation of matter in synergy with light, that conform to all laws governing physical properties of matter across the arch of birth, growth, decay, and death that texturize the Field in service to the illuminating aspects of Life Energy, which manifest to perception as Signatures of Energy are referential in binary to Death Energy.

The act of creating these environments necessitates on multiple levels the act of documenting the peak life moment of process application which exists as art object only through diligent acts of Mindfulness, the nexus point of which establishes the absolute nature of Moment, which positions whole Nature as possessing hierarchical advantages over the mortal component of human flesh / life, while establishing Moment to be a function of universal consciousness which exists as a synergy of life-death energy and is not subservient to time.

Man is Nature and not of Nature and Nature is the only possibility of original self with man being a function of the selfdom of Nature. This awareness dictates an art object that exists because of man’s relationship with Nature and to a universal self. Such a vital awareness being true to the nature of transformation can only be documented as Moment…a moment that ceases to exist in order to exist, leaving in its wake the Death of the Original and the presence of Void. It is the death of the original that substantiates the importance of Memory in interpersonal discourse with Nature in establishing the links and hinges to potentiality for new meaning, symbolic or otherwise. The photographic document — Process-Memory Document — is not the original but a visceral, tangible proof of the original’s existence like a mathematical equation insisting on the existence of God, it is a symbolic register with the resonance of sign capable of new signification.

It is in the Abstraction which manifests in accordance with natural laws which holds the greatest potential for the development of new systems of langue. And in accordance with how signs accumulate greater significance by their associations with other signs it is important to develop not individual works / abstractions but extended series that meditate on centralized organic themes of aesthetic value.

That was BEFORE.

“After” is tricky. After his death there is only after-ness, a being constantly aware of what’s missing. I am in a state of aftermath. There is no aftermathamatical probability curve.

The end of the probability of my art making went something like this:

I’m at a dining table opening a bottle of IL Poggione Rosso di Montalcino. It’s 10:47 on a Saturday night. The phone rings and it’s my father (unusual). I walk out side and answer. “What’s up Dad?” He replied, “Your brother…your brother is dead. Come to your Mom’s house.”

The exact moment I lost my art.

(Excerpt from my diary about that night)

You are laid out in Mother’s house naked beneath white cloth, a jut of monolithic stone beneath a blanket of snow and seeing you there is how I know that nothing left and nothingness have nothing in common with the ache in my chest. There isn’t a single voice among these stones. I don’t know where I’ve gone but I know I’m all alone. I know sadness is the ignobility of circumstance at odds with fate because the addict was also a brother, a son, and a father — it’s too late. Grief becomes a storm, powerful and cunning, that rips off whatever roof we call shelter. And it’s not for us to stay dry in this dark time, but rather to survive whatever span of hours the heart feels itself exposed to such violent elements. So many predatory questions. Was it suicidal? Weren’t we as companions to you vital enough? Why was your end so rough? Is it even possible that just memory is viable? Can’t this be instead estranged sleep upon a stage, and you are wearing a death mask, telling a tale of Noh? Don’t tell me no! No, tell me anything! Your raging silence fills me with silent rage because it’s not a mask, no, it’s death’s task of taking the tax and leaving nothing left but a nothingness shaped like you, a cage full of what’s missing about you — voice. I no longer have the choice to listen and you no longer have the choice to speak, so listen while I speak — the journey is a teacher. In your body here I feel a radiant knowledge, how quantum aspects are folding into mystical contexts. I sense I bear witness to a unique origin of some spontaneously erupting eternity; a primordial state of infinity. In your immaculate stillness I remember somehow that before your birth and nearer, before even your conception, you moved in a flow of potentialities at the speed of absolute darkness, because life is for light and life commences and expands and finally contracts at the speed of light that is the speed of life. In your unsullied stillness I remember somehow that the soul is born into death, when the speed of light is burning brightest, so bright that it blinds life and shifts it again to darkness and again the speed of dark, unrelenting, releases the conflagration to weightless ash as each singular time of brilliance returns to the flow of before and after the self of mind. I am where we aren’t and you are where we will be and between us I see a ripple in the continuum of we. I am by your side, our parents watching us again because they cannot look away from us children at play in the yard. Like the moon pulling back the sea I pull back the white cloth so I might see. I brush the snow off your stone face and behold the ancient marbling of your grace. Your hair awash like seaweed churns in me a melancholic need to touch, and tangle my helpless limbs. I pray I forget how to swim. Never while you lived did I run my fingers through your hair. The act is my heart breaking against you in waves. And now, four kisses for you, four desperate gestures of lonely love: one on the lock, one on the door, one on the key, and this last kiss on your forehead is for setting us free. Thank you — North, South, East, and West. Thank you — whatever came before, after, in between, and all the rest. You are there and I am here and what lies between, a river to everywhere. Our time is all time, forever in every hour left. Even never will be a pleasure to unwind as the tributaries of time will be kind. The journey is our teacher, the one who will help us truly reach each other. So hold my hand, I’ll walk you to school. We have busy roads to cross and creeks to bend, there will be forts to build and brushes with dangerous men, and I want to revisit along the way what made you equally great as grave on this, your last day. We must let the aftermath be a hunt for measures of next comfort: that which is beyond the hard truth in the depth and extent of fact. Because, when the original chaos retreated from death’s pronouncement, a gross confusion remained, fattened by the garrulous whispers of your unnamed endgame that became our endless name-game of who is at fault. The collaterally damaged ethos of your decisions was hoisted on the stretcher of our failure to see and seek out your living pain — to intervene. Now, everywhere is your shadow’s stain, like a black mold of regrets infiltrating. Larger than life, in death also, you left an impression — in the fiber. With Jacob’s ladder I could climb down into the crater and survey the fray of sin and solemnity, I could measure the weight of your continental plates in that moment before your drifting, but I’m terrified there is no bottom to your depression. On second glance the death bed is more nefarious, more a treason, how a day in February could find reason to call it your last. That the cupped hands of light could see fit to let go of a wounded body of water. But you did spill out and the earth absorbed. The siren that tore the night in half to save you went silent. The readied gatch was turned back, the white gowns exchanged for black, and your hollowed form and bleached face were entombed in a clutch and shallow space. The cold mystery of your breath stoked the scalpels ire and the valley of death opened your chest and set the white room on fire. It appears Mother will wait for your blood to speak the answers already found: packets of powdery darkness in every soiled pocket, black spoons and tourniquets hidden in your sickbed like secrets in a locket. Your room was an alternate dimension. Mother’s world is safe — so clean. Behind your door an acrid otherness, terrible air; yellow chancres from cigarette smoke everywhere, blistered walls; window blinds choked by oily soot, ratcheted down to meaningless slits. Nothing in and nothing out — a scream suspended in subterfuge. This was the world of your five senses? Not riverbed, not a lakebed, not seabed, not a rock bed, not a flower bed — but a sickbed!

After lasted forever. Forever came to a halt this year when I heard people arguing that NFT art can’t be valuable because it’s immaterial.

My brother is now immaterial. His life has never been more valuable to me than now having lost it. Death punctuates life, it validates a life lived, and it initiates the next phase in lives left behind — memory keeping.

In the aftermath of his loss I need to make an aftermathimatical art, an art that says 1 + 1 = 3 (my sister + me = his memory) else there is only 2 drowning in a truth of less than 3

So then…what is my art now?

It is abstract(ED):

Death is the model for all abstraction: What is more abstract than death?

Abstraction is post-intuitive and pre-qualitative.
Abstraction is a graceful organization of the innate processes that make Nature out of preternatural nothingness.

An Abstraction is full of a singular truth regarding human obsession with order and containment: order cannot be attained. This is the undertow of all surfacing ability / capacity to perceive.

“Abstraction” is a linguistic assignation with the equivalence of architectonic shifts in the infrastructure of eco-semiotioc / primordial mind.

AbstractionISM is the archetypal notion of the (A)PATHETIC FALLACY: human capacity to identify and apprehend the outcome of being wrought from organic matter, descending as one ascends with simultaneity: being the growth (of) entropy; blossoming into death’s black flower. Abstraction is our ability to utilize emotion and sensation to articulate a unique relationship with death instinct.

Pathos and Ethos are hinged by a functionality of abstraction. Abstraction allows the mind balance on what is like a churning sea of chaos between these antiquated aspects of Self. But chaos is complexity; the order of disorder is the same order of abstractions to manifest (in the mind of the perceiver) compositions which expose / comment on / materialize the beautiful necessity of process oriented confusions / problems to be solved.

Art is Death-Application and abstraction is the figuration of death.

When confronted by Abstraction the mind leaps to connect and we ask what is the “point of view?”

And for individuals deeply connected (not in denial) to the sinuous aspects of death instinct, Abstraction immediately offers up the necessitated contingencies of character, dialogue, action, setting and other events which reinforce that a narrative is presently communicating. First person narration being the voice of consciousness, second person (as commentary) the voice of a subconscious drive to empower the first person device, and finally, third person is the voice of instinct to defer the probability of death away from Self / unto the “other” — Aye! Omnipotence…

Abstraction is the intrusive narrator. Realism in art is unintrusive, full of narration that does not evaluate mankind’s primal motivator. — Death!

Abstraction’s strength is the poetic license of Death. Death is poetic justice for Abstraction.

Death is a rare pun — equivoque. Word that defies words, meaning both: life’s value and life’s cessation. Death: a portmanteau and a word; a bag of bones carried through life stolen in a final moment of laughable abstraction.
Abstraction is being in-blur. In-blur is being in-spirit.

Kandinsky thought of [abstractions] true works of art: “Born from the ‘artist:’ a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation.” And that, “art in its entirety is not a goalless creation flowing into nothingness.”

Abstraction is the fringe of human capacity to manage the power and truth in spirit.

The world does not need more ART it needs more communication, deeper access systems, and if this activity has the aesthetic look of ART that is not, in this system, indicative of aesthetic art but of the elegance of the system.

It is reverent toward the great mystery and power of color:

Black — death energy, anxiety of survival instincts, origins of the mark of access systems required by human nature to maneuver the human condition allowing us to utilize higher brain functions; presence of langue, that which enables contrast, presence of the deep — the ghosts of our unique psychology, origin of language (the primal mark), masculine aspect of memory.

White — life force, will to manifest, presence of the possible, of potential, the origin of making / becoming, the nascent field, the feminine part of the apparatus of creativity / the uterus tool, feminine aspect of memory.

Red — the emotional self, naked and primordial urges, the instigator of fears, presence of threat, access to passion, the blood and flesh of vulnerability. Awareness of the potency of white.

Yellow — focus of mind on the metaphysical, illumination, skepticism, critical awareness of circumstance, critique of harsher realities within the casua sui project, awareness of the entanglements of all present forces. Awareness of the potency of white.

Green — awkward distance between human nature and Nature, psychic response to geography (place, land). Awareness of time unfolding in space, awareness of the life death cycle, awareness of the elements and their impact on the mind en route toward some understanding. Awareness of the potency of black.

Blue — the possibility and simultaneous impossibility of god. Critique of the spirit of man in the face of moral and ethical dilemma, awareness of goodness and kindness in the midst of evil and injustice, awareness of the potency of black.

After (in-the) Math of what is forever missing now, for-always amplifying notions of impossible unknowns, I begin every work with questions in mind. I seek the asking not the answer. I dwell in the hunger, the searching, the feeling my way through the dark recesses of memory. I begin every work with one assumption — something in my past has prepared me for this moment of seeking. The activity of asking is a process of sifting through memory now. Now is wrought from instances of then. Now the works are composites, collages, sewings, a tongue of then into a grove of now.

I ask through my working process directly:

What color is murder? What color is cancer? What color is anxiety over becoming homeless? What color is the burden of hunger? What color is the tension between estranged lovers? What color is the hope we will survive another day? What color is the black man’s plight? What color is poverty? What color is the suicidal tendency? What color is fear for another man’s life? What color is disgust at the execution of innocents for not converting? What color is a woman’s anger who must face a forced marriage? What color is a man who hurts children? What color is a hand that steals from the poor? What color is doubt that god exists? What color is the loss of a child to a passing car? What color is finding your lover with another man? What color is addiction? What color is a loss of dignity? What color is rage at the system that oppresses you? What color is the word of the man who abuses you? What color is the sun that rises over massacres? What color is the moon that bathes the dead on the fields of war? What color is the animal you struck down in the road? What color is your father on the day he passes? What color is our inability to get ahead? What color is the dream deferred? What color is unrequited love? What color is the hate crime? What color is a lie that ruins you? What color is the decision to leave? What color is the decision to stay? What color is the indecision?

MISERERE tries to understand the HUMAN condition, which is to say the condition of being OF Nature and not feeling only IN Nature.

the work cannot escape figuration, it cannot ignore the presence of a human form now. My brothers death stole his form and that void must be filled by a study of flesh and bone and blood and hopefully the radiant spirit of man.

This new obsession with figuration makes sense of a reoccurring dream that is rooted in notions of death anxiety. In the dream I am in a museum that resembles the majestic halls of the Louvre. I am lost. The lights go out. There are footsteps near by. Around a corner is a strange exhibit I explain this way:

(A)

This exhibit is designed to kill

You

stand where you are

place your hand on the black

box

press the red button

someone will clean up after you

and inform your next of kin

(B)

This exhibit is designed to maim

You

stand where you have always been

place an extremity into the black

box

with the hand you have left

press the red button

someone will aid in your transfer

to a better place

(C)

this exhibit is designed to confuse

You

stop…stop please. don’t move

reach your hand into the bucket

which most appeals to you

and remove ONE small object

swallow this item but first note

the PLU # on the capsule

wait 15 minutes before calling 911

(D)

This exhibit was designed for

You

Step forward into the black room

feel along the sides

notice the signature particulars

reach down by your feet

and realize the amount

of money that surrounds.

don’t forget the doorknob

is solid gold

and don’t forget the next man

to approach will sense

the same opportunity

as you now possess

there is a gun at exhibit 1

please hurry

In many ways Miserere is about configuring the whole being that is partly or completely missing.

I see figures that suffer as inconvenience as a situ of tireless seeking; non beings reminiscent of feelings; images suffocating from vastness remaining still and alone.

Figures that recede into a space not unlike memory, in proximity with shadows perhaps, cast in cold light and voluminous nondescript textures.

Figures attempting to avoid identification presented with human context, with hints of anatomical insinuation with geological indications. All shapes are of nature, emergent and inevitable, lost in the continuum of time and space.

Figures appearing with traces of a name while suggesting namelessness.

Figures attempting to compose a decomposition, to halt a procession, to be within from a distance, to be biological and anthropological and still manifest as assemblage.

Figures that are being born in the arbitrary manner of dying from certainty toward uncertainty, presenting a limited view of a limiting relationship with solitude echoing the omnipotence of death anxiety.

Figures not well balanced at all, that belie their suggestiveness, that bemoan any such thing as truth and for this reason cannot be forgiven.

Section 2: The Miserere Collection is metaphorical, paradigmatic and narrative all by design

But the story is nonlinear and out of time now. I feel no pressure to make sense of time. The immaterial nature of the NFT doesn’t struggle to hold value in my heart. Everything which is most valuable is immaterial. Love of family, faith in God, moral compass, trust, soul, consciousness…our lives are built out of extraordinary immaterial instances. I think my art now is the stories I can tell about these instances. My art now is my art then an now together.

The Rise Of The Immaterial

Now that my brother is gone, now that he is eternally immaterial, now that I must survive in the memory of our shared moments and the deeper details found in our recalled conversations (his voice) adventures (his actions) and those metaphysical realities of soul trace that did imprint on everything which remains; now that I have been gutted of his tangible love for me, left to identify and record its feel and function in my psychic and spiritual life I turn to the arts for help.

It happens that I finally understand the past and future have and will forever remain immaterial to now…and now…now. “NOW” commences upon “THEN” so instantaneously. Even as it feels we are eternally in now — eternity cannot apply here. Before birth and after death are unavoidable details that unmask our flawed logics about permanence. It holds that impermanence logically underpins the value of immateriality because the immaterial once identified and substantiated belies impermanence and defies mortality.

Enter the NFT and the immutable idea of meta-permanence in the meta-verse.

We have heard the old adage that art imitates life. The NFT revolution extends the metaphor to include death. Art imitates the materiality of life and the immateriality of death!

In life we have the manifestation of the embodied mind as externalized data extensions of self, which artfully represent our capacity to communicate, to develop greater access systems into soulful and sub conscious realms emanating psychic, emotive, spiritual, intellectual, ideological resonances defined as artist creation.

To create is a feminine attribute in Nature — as if to say the process of birth is a feminine quality of life whereas death’s greater strength and will to absolute power over all and it’s godlike determination to manifest appears as a masculine attribute of Nature. The NFT demonstrates both of these primordial qualities of nature. From the embodiment of mind to the entombment in a blockchain. The whole life-death cycle of humankind encapsulated by a revolutionary technological advancement. In a fantastical way the NFT seems to explore the ancient notions of afterlife…

The blockchain being a gateway to a METAVERSAL HEAVEN for the deepest stuff of human life, an ectogenetic immaterial extension of the notion of embodied mind and consciousness.

Critics of the Value of Immaterialism have not expanded their ideas beyond capitalistic modalities and historically normative definitions for systems known to substantiate value over time. Critics of this new conceptual approach to valuing immateriality are ignoring all the best tenets of the Humanist Doctrine. After all the the Cryoto/ Blockchain /NFT revolution is rooted in Humanism. Ignorance on the surface is nothing more than a mind closed to new ideas. New ideas are always old ideas that have evolved enough to break through macro cultural barriers by their evolved relevance to the moment of time in which we and said ideas find themselves entrenched.

Our over-populated world of unsustainable behaviors of consumption of material resources is driving the species to a brink of extinction.

Enter the Immaterial as ISM

As art has always been a primary source of evolving the species via expansion of knowledge disseminated as symbolic and metaphorical extensions of our greatest current need for understanding, it’s apropos that art again stands at the nexus of NEEDED and revolutionary change: to lessen human consumption on material resources.

Art is rising up today with a lesson, with an evolved message, with a set of radical principles that if understood will reshape our human value system to include the immaterial. Our species is literally tasked to understand this important moment gift wrapped and labeled NFT.

The Disentanglement

The critique states: that which is immaterial cannot sustain what is now only a speculative valuation.

Let us agree first on the misnomer that NFT Art And Collectibles are in fact immaterial:

Note: material based arts currently include conceptual movements that require only the meta-data of conceptual ideas delivered as immaterial and dialogical content and these movements are being canonized
The function of a Non Fungible Token is to vault, authenticate, and transfer meta-data.
Meta-data is a material phenomena that presents only a singular irrelevant difference and that is scale. Data bits are not illusory or magical manifestations of our human imagination, they are material signifiers of information that are built into a micro-system of langue that utilizes organizational programs as a visual indexer or grammar that enables the exchange of meaningful communication across time and space.
The scale of material transacted has never in human history been a deterrent to value. Lack of rarity is the only legitimate destabilizer of value.
Physics and in particular the particle sciences have fully expanded notions of the complex value of infinitely small things. The meta-data of NFT art and collectibles is a particle format in the arts. It stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Jackson Pollack’s Autumn Rhythm or Richard Serra’s megalithic steel installations.
A subset of the intangible materiality of NFT that adds value is its public accessibility; how it moves along digital pathways across public domains at hypersonic speeds emboldening the transmission rate of its inner dialogical value. the organic nature of an NFT’s information set transmits parabolically by it nature.
Historically invention that solves longstanding problems for society gained exponential valuation at market for being a game changer. NFT specifically solves a long standing issue of authenticity in art. The solution has undeniable material impact and said impacts adds material significance to the NFT Art and will remain a market influence for the better indefinitely.

It is true that the NFT meta-data as such cannot hang on a physical wall in a physical house. But the data can be organized (framed if you will) by co-existing technological delivery systems to hang on a physics wall. And prior to this presentation the meta-data as art can hang on any digital wall made available — a wall which is also made of material data organized to be a wall. If we follow the logic of the critique to its last breath it falls flat and dies a disgrace. If we honor its ignorant and narrow scope that immaterial art cannot hold value we must presuppose that there are no examples of the immaterial holding value.

If you have a faith in God, a love bond with child or parent or sibling or friend, if you feel awe looking at a sunset, if you cry seeing a child born or an elder lowered into a grave, if you feel anything at all in life in such a way that your emotional or spiritual self is engaged you already understand how the immaterial holds and may increase in value over time.

That said it is important that the NFT community conceptualizes arguments and thought experiments that shut down the critique immaterial art.

It is to this end I present a noble thought experiment: Meta-Erasures.

Please read this essay

The Warhol Effect

It’s important to understand that the explosive success of AI generated icons / avatars has an art historical precedent: Andy Warhol and his use of screen printing to create variations on a pop cultural theme.

The Bored Ape is the Millennial equivalent of Warhol’s treatment of Marylin Monroe, Elvis, and Mao. The appearance of the Bored Apes is easily traceable to the animated cultural iconography of the past 2 decades that was steeped in irony and cynicism.

Warhol is defined as Pop Art because his art is about popular culture. If we look at across a full edition of a Warhol screen printed series we immediately notice subtle differences and aberrations in aesthetic causes by the generative process itself. Screen printing was the 20th century version of AI Generation.

Substitute “random selection” with “probability of chance aberrance”

What creates value in a Warhol Edition is to a large extent the presence of random / chance details that are rare across the series. This is known as variation on a theme.

Both Warhol and Bored Apes exist as prime examples of pop cultural iconography treated artistically through variations on a theme. And Both gain value by a rarity index caused by a generative art making process.

This is why I chose the Bored Apes for Erasure. Not only is there an art historical precedent for their value in how they materialized culturally and mechanically, they both stand as prominent examples of their category as collectibles.

The erasure of the supposedly immaterial ape is then an erasure of the argument of immaterialism. The inverse of immaterial is material. The permission to erase is a collaborative gesture extending the provenance of participating apes. That 100 apes alone will be erased further adds to the provenance and rarity of participating apes. Alas, to be erased, is rather to gain a shadow, and so is the rise of the shadow cast by apes — let’s us see the ape with his new shadow! Let us see the rise of the shadow apes!

Section 3: The Miserere In Conclusion

It has been a long 6 months partaking in this new Art Revolution. What began with a great learning curve, followed by a series of aesthetic breakthroughs (Genesis Graffiti Walls & Miserere) — I have arrived at a crossroads of Past and Future me.

30 years of literary, philosophical, ideological, spiritual, and art aesthetic development has come to bear on a single project: Miserere

At first I expected to stop at 58 works as Rouault died before 59–100 could be completed. I have since decided to explore those 42 missing works on behalf of my brother’s memory and in honor of Georges Rouault Legacy.