Value (n.) Network; Value (v.) Network
Earlier this week, the idea of Blockchain networked art as Mail Art came up (shout out to Eva). And I haven't gotten the idea out of my mind.
In 1943, American artist Ray Johnson started sending small-scale works through the postal service to friends and fellow artists. In the mid-1950s, he started offering simple instructions on how to respond and expand the network.
Artists who answered Ray's call valued the direct personal connection with other artists and saw the movement as an egalitarian way of creating and distributing artworks without the official systems that the art market, museums, and galleries provided. Instead, it flourished through an outsider network of rag-tag artists and enthusiasts.
But they had fun, and the work was given away for free. These artists connected through shared interests and a sense of humor via the postal system. Anyone with access to a mailbox and stamps could participate; artists were free to decide who to send mail to and whose mail they chose to reply to. There were no deadlines, no real rules, systems, or restrictions beyond those of the postal system.
In 1970, Ray Johnson and Marcia Tucker (American art historian) organized the New York Correspondence School Exhibition at the Whitney, the first significant public Mail Art exhibition.
In November 1971, the catalog Mail Art – Communication à Distance – Concept was released to accompany an exhibition that was a part of the seventh Biennale de Paris. There, the movement was given the name "Mail Art." The show highlighted the postal service's role. Coincidentally, 1971 was also the founding year of what we now know as the United States Postal Service, USPS.
In a video from 1977, the French artist Robert Fillon coined and defined the phrase "Eternal Network." He described it as a web of artists and their production, among other things. Members of the system exchange with each other, creating an "art world" energized by artists and their actions, connected with a web of ideas and operations instead of being centralized in a single location.
The Mail Art movement is global, and it would be impossible to encapsulate its history here. But I want to focus on one aspect—the Value Network.
Value (n.) Network:
The value of the Mail Art movement was not the price of the artworks. Artists were not financially or contractually obligated to send out, receive, or respond to Mail Art they received. They were not required to join the movement and did not have to announce their departure. There was no limit on how many works they had to produce or reply to.
An informal and laissez-faire arrangement would've been a nightmare for a gallery, museum, or dealer. What if an artist can choose not to produce a single work for a show or produce 1000? What if they deliver it years before the show or ten months after its closing? What if they send the works to another gallery or institution? What if they decided to give it away to a stranger at the street corner?
While good faith means a lot in the art world, and many arrangements are gentleman's agreements. The art world largelyfunctions as a Value (n.) Network where participants are motivated by their monetary and contractual obligations. The Mail Art system, for its lack of formal agreements, is everything that the Value (n.) Network is not.
Value (v.) Network:
As the Biennale de Paris show demonstrated, the postal service itself is integral to the movement, and the system exists because the exchange of ideas energizes artists. Artists participated in Mail art because they value the network they're now a part of.
Mail Art has persisted after Ray's passing in 1995. The experience of participating, sending, and receiving artworks, the community of artists it created, and the sense of belonging is what allows Mail Art to thrive even today.
If you search Mail Art Open Call, there are dozens of websites still actively soliciting mail. The web of activity became more decentralized and nuanced, with open calls defined by geographical location, subject matter, time period, art genre, age, etc.
Even now, monetary value is absent from the conversation in contemporary Mail Art.
Mail Art reminds me of the early days of on-chain digital art. Works like Cryptopunks, Autoglyphs, early editions by XCOPY, Beeple, etc., were either free to claim or require a nominal fee/donation to charity. The creators and participants of on-chain digital art valued a sense of community in the spirit of experimentation and exploration, and many of us still do today.
The CryptoPunks marketplace allows for easy exchange, and back in 2017, Punks were traded for cents and dollars as early adopters communicated and engaged with each other through transfers, purchases, and negotiations. The money was not the central focus, at least not initially.
Many, if not most, of the artists I've spoken to and respect, found a home in the on-chain and crypto art movement because they value (v.) the network of like-minded artists and collectors it provided. It's an "outsider" group, just like Mail Art. It felt like a world without the criteria, rules, and restrictions of the old guards from the "trad" art world. No gallery, museum, curator, or dealer controls what artists can or cannot distribute through the World Computer.
The creative conversations and exchange of artworks, ideas, and theories allowed technological innovation and artistic advancement. The world of digital art would not be what it is today if not for the participants who value the human network it created.
But somewhere along the way--perhaps it was the financial adoption of Cryptocurrency, the curve of supply and demand driving up the price, or the participants who entered the network with only financial goals in mind–the Value (n.) Network started to dominate the narrative surrounding digital art, at least from the outside in. Artists, of course, benefitted from it financially, and rightfully so.
It was wonderful to see how the sale of the Masquerade benefitted Sam financially. But my sense of fulfillment comes from seeing how he values his art and family and how his work enables the community to join him in doing so.
It's always fun to see CryptoPunks sell from one owner to the next. In 5, 10, 100 years, who profited or lost money in which sale will be irrelevant. It'll be a century's worth of stories about these punks, as told by the collectors and the blockchain, that capture the future's imagination.
On-chain digital artworks, the networked objects with few dependencies, depend on the artists. They depend on the joy of creating, storytelling, gathering, collecting, and corresponding and on humans who Value (v.) Conversation, Value (v.) Connection and Value (v.) Network.
Value (n.) Network is the necessary component that can't give art its soul.
Add. Reading…if you're so inclined:
https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/history-of-usps-mail-art-1234571946/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BgOfsG7J0Q
Ray Johnson, Untitled (Dear Robert Pincus), 1970s, Mail art, dual layer photocopy