[NetBehaviour] conceptuality and apologies all the way down

[Alan Sondheim]

I hesitate to bring up issues here which themselves are problematic, but 
here goes.

First, to the extent that art is a Foucauldian discursive formation (at 
least as I taught it at RISD in the 70s), labor, in the form of reading/ 
writing/conversation/declamation/discourse is involved.

Second, at least again at that point, there was a tendency to associate 
the value of a work in relation to the labor necessary to produce it; in 
other words, an artist would be paid according to the labor she put into 
the creation of a work, real or invisible, substantial or insubstantial.
(I remember Adrian Piper talking with us about this, but I may be 
mistaken; this was early in her career.)

And third, there was within conceptual a discourse of the invisible or 
non-existent work, vide for example Lucy Lippard's The Dematerialization 
book.

There was of course a heavy critique from Haacke and others of the 
commercialization of art (also of course in music, tv (Radical Software) 
etc.).

So the value of the non-existent work here might well be based on the 
discourse; one can imagine a work which is not being discussed to 
blockchained, which no one knows about, possessing a labor value close to 
the null set itself.

For me, what's new in the work being discussed here is its relation to 
blockchain, and this places it within economic strata and habitus that 
makes me uncomfortable. Not that that matters at all, but the point is the 
embracing of invisibility and non-existence in relation to blockchain and 
(economic) value, doesn't this also relate problematically to 
neoliberalism? If one is going to work in this direction, is it worthwhile 
to consider breaking the chains of blockchain (in a way somewhat related 
to breaking the chains of the male domination of the artworld, vide 
Guerilla Girls etc.)?

I'm sick of the terms 'value,' 'transfer,' etc. - you can find them in the 
model contract drawn up by Seth Siegelaub and (I believe) Adrian Piper 
among others way back then - and then the critique seemed paramount.

In other words, how to turn blockchain against itself in the realm of the 
invisible? (Or at the least invisible or non-existent work of art?) And 
then as well, what of the labor taken up in the production of the 
discourse which forms the habitus or white walls or architecture of this 
emptiness (which oddly relates the South Sea Bubble or subprime mortgage 
crisis) -

Where is the gender, the criticality, the labor value in this? Not only in 
other words Marxist exchange but also use value; otherwise is not this the 
machinery of capital in another guise?

I hope this isn't too ignorant/offense/naive/stupid on my part. A 
disclaimer - I don't understand the machinery itself of blockchain etc. 
(i.e. the coding/storage issues) so I may be missing the point, in which 
case apologies.

And in the real world, today I literally cut open my ear, recoiling from a 
non-exitent fungus, and am trying to forestall blood on the sheets in the 
motel Azure and I are staying in for a week, trying to escape the violent 
American environment, in the search for long-tailed duck calls and their 
(the calls) relation to polyphonic music.

Best!, Alan