Cryptocurrency investors could bypass aesthetic gatekeeping and inflate outsider art value

Evidence

Beeple, an outsider to the traditional art world, curated Everydays as a montage of five thousand sketches and digital images. It included a “gender-swapped Captain Crunch rebranded as ‘Cap’n Bitch’ ” and graphic renderings of a large-breasted Donald Trump in S&M gear dominating an anthropomorphized COVID virus. One of its buyers, Anand Venkateswaran, admitted he hadn’t even looked through the images before purchasing. For Venkateswaran and his partner Vignesh Sundaresan of the Singapore-based cryptocurrency company Metapurse, the content was irrelevant. They saw Everydays as a milestone in the burgeoning world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a digital format they believed would revolutionize art ownership. “This is going to be a billion-dollar piece someday,” Venkateswaran claimed. Thanks to these crypto investors, Beeple joined the ranks of the world’s most valuable living artists, alongside Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, and David Hockney. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 719

Categorization

• QUESTION: The buyers admitted they never even viewed the content — is this the purest expression of the era’s meaning-vacated value, and does it support or complicate the ‘death of the sellout’ thesis?
• XREF: Buyers who ignore content entirely is a startling endpoint to the status-and-signaling analysis across the book — the total dissociation of value from meaning.