A Fashion Brand’s Media
EYES ON: Diesel + Public Pressure’s FASHION NFT
In partnership with Public Pressure, the brand Diesel released “Fashion” — an audio track by HoneyLuv with an accompanying artwork by Nic Paranoia. Sold through Public Pressure’s platform — a platform dedicated to “DIY music distribution” — the 1200 pieces were sold out in 4 hours. And this is only the first of 4 NFT drops in which Diesel will explore the cross-breeding between Web3, music and fashion.
Reminiscent of the times when music was always paired with art, like a CD and its album cover, the drop offers an updated, mixed media method of sharing music and culture with fair compensation for the artists — all under the Diesel brand.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
Diesel has a history of being forward-thinking and bold in communicating itself through its advertisements and collaborations. This is especially true since Glenn Martens was appointed as the Creative Director of the brand.
“I’d rather be somebody’s shot of whiskey than everybody’s cup of tea” – Jocke Jonason, (the advertising director responsible for many of Diesel’s most groundbreaking campaigns).
Whilst many traditional fashion brands are shying out from the Web3 space, or making moves so shy they might as well be out, Diesel maintains its identity and boldness through a true interest in digitally native platforms, but also by adopting a digitally native concept of its own brand.
Diesel is a fashion brand, but in this NFT drop there are no clothes. Instead, through coupling sound, image and fair artist compensation, a purchase of this NFT becomes a purchase of style. In blending creative borders and again breaking conventions, Diesel is rethinking fashion in the digital.
Paintings Seen Before
EYES ON: Michael Todd Horne’s show
The new show at Saatchi Yates in London brings the work of Michael Todd Horne (known as Bijijoo on TikTok) out of our screens and into a gallery setting. The show consists of works that delve into Bijijoo’s world of “monsters and characters”, the creation of which have garnered him a huge following on TikTok.
Labelled a cult artist, Bijijoo uses weird and wonderful painting techniques (both traditional and digital) to depict his even weirder and more wonderful creatures. Textured and 3D, his painting presents an unnerving, even sickly, look-back at childhood memories.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
More popular online than in the art world, Bijijoo shares his many painting techniques with his fans. His process is transparent through his platform. In an art world where processes tend to be covert and art galleries aggrandise them to the point of incomprehensibility, that’s refreshing.
Knowing how a painting is made from start to finish, following along throughout the process, creates a different kind of relationship between the viewer and artwork. Seen before on our own screens, we know these paintings already. A sense of intimacy, of shared interest, of nostalgia for their beginnings is well in place before we even make it to the gallery.
That pre-generated closeness with the paintings — provided by social media — marks a very real shift in how we increasingly relate to artists, and their work, online. Take one look at NFT Twitter. It’s full of personal odes to artists’ processes and their newest outputs. People are as invested in artists’ career trajectories, in who they collect themselves, and in what they do on the weekend. New kinds of relationships are being built through the sharing of creative processes online.
It’s Alive! And It’s Demanding
EYES ON: Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Good Morning
Good Morning is an NFT artwork that requires its owner to visit it periodically for it to stay alive. If 24 hours pass without it being visited, the artwork fades to a blank screen, and dies.
Good Morning is actually the complement to Good Night, another piece by McCarthy that flips that dynamic. In Good Night — “an NFT-based performance for one person at a time” — the artist is the one to check up on the collector. As McCarthy explains, the performance goes as follows: “Every night before I sleep, I will text you good night. The performance continues as long as I am alive. When you no longer want to experience the performance, you may transfer it to someone else.”
Like Good Night, the purpose of the Good Morning piece is to dig into the relationship between a collector and artwork.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
Conceptually rich, Good Morning is a real pain — it asks for time and consideration that most other pieces of art don’t. But in demanding such effort, the piece brings up many questions around the forces that give objects, especially digital objects, their value. Why visit the Good Morning artwork? because if you don’t it might lose its value? if you don’t it might die?
With the added potential of death, this so-called “living NFT” brings with it a whole lot of responsibility that pushes us to consider why we even care about digital objects in the first place.
WHOSE EYES: Sophie Stalder, Intern @ DRAUP