Back in the heyday of NFTs, the government was giving out COVID stimulus checks, and a large amount of people were using their free money to speculate on Bored Ape Yacht Club and NBA Top Shot collectibles.
The majority of these collectible NFTs were JPEG images used for pfps. The novelty of these illustrations was that their ownership was tracked through financial records kept on a decentralized crypto blockchain (mainly Ethereum).1
This business case led to a lot of funny interactions on Twitter. People would spend tens of thousands of dollars on little JPEGs, and then for clout, would post their new piece of art on Twitter for everyone to see. They would announce to everyone, “I own this now.” People would then screenshot the tweet of the person’s announcement, imply that they just created an NFT of someone’s twitter post, and parrot: “I own this now.”2
Saying that you owned the tweet, of which someone else’s pfp was a significant element, implied ownership of the pfp itself in a weird, infinity mirror, nested path. Screenshotting someone else’s art was a little, tiny bit of healthy rebellion for eople who, like a bird on a wire, or a drunk in a midnight choir, were trying in their way to be free.
While I am unsure of the legality of this type of creative theft, I have always been a fan of the other, more acceptable form of creative theft popularized by Steve Jobs, and attributed to Pablo Picasso: Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal. The idea being that if I take one element from over here, and another element from over there, and combine them together, I’ve created something new.
This idea was being debated on my twitter feed last week when someone posted a Satoshi Kon interview in which he expressed dislike for Darren Aronofsky stealing some of his shots from Perfect Blue for Requiem for a Dream.
Here’s a tweet that shows the two shots side-by-side. Kon calls this theft. Aronofsky called it an homage. (It looks like you’ll have to click the link to actually go watch the videos. It looks like the videos aren’t embedding in my post.)
All this idea of ownership, and copying, and taking, reminds me of another old, popular meme from a long time ago:
![TOMT] [MEME] the original source of the "I made this, you made this, I made this" image : r/tipofmytongue](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VyoD!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbc4d56c1-bbaa-49b6-b271-37c7951fde51_375x750.jpeg "TOMT] [MEME] the original source of the \"I made this, you made this, I made this\" image : r/tipofmytongue")
I do believe, though, sincerely, in homage, and references, and influence, and placing oneself in a tradition of artists / writers that came before you. In that vein, I tried to steal as much ideas as I could for the book I’m self-publishing on September 1, Neither Fear Ye Their Fear.
Here’s an excerpt from my book’s Chapter 41: Triumphal March:
200 talents of silver in bars, coins, and ingots, shining brightly in the sun,
20 talents of gold, laid on beautiful rugs, shimmering like water,
800 talents of tin,
An unmeasured weight of iron, heaps and piles of it.
All these metals and treasures of the earth pulled from its mountains, refined by the hands of artisans, stolen by the hands of soldiers, cheered by the hands of the crowd.
15,000 grain-fed oxen, large and strong,
15,000 calves, small and subservient,
12,000 sheep of the stable,
100,000 trader sheep,
I stole this idea from two places. One, a T.S. Eliot poem I love, which is also called Triumphal March.3 Here’s an excerpt from that poem:
5,800,000 rifles and carbines,
102,000 machine guns,
28,000 trench mortars,
53,000 field and heavy guns,
I can’t tell how many projectiles, mines and fuses,
13,000 aeroplanes,
24,000 aeroplanes engines,
The second place I stole from was the actual records the Assyrians kept of what they took from kingdoms of the Levant after they destroyed them. Here’s an excerpt of that:
Another place where ideas and influence were very clearly borrowed, copied, combined, and stolen, was in the creation of my book’s cover. Here’s that cover:
And, here’s the influences:
You can see where the cover designer, Rannia Makigrianni, really picked elements from different sources. She took the large, red rectangle from Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (which itself feels like an Ellsworth Kelly drawing). The block lettering came from Margaret Atwood’s Hagseed (which lettering feels like a Matisse cut-out). The watercolor / silk screen / transparent quality of the shapes and images came from most of these covers. The color palette, too, is obviously similar to the color palettes of all the book covers.
The point is, no one is getting sued. It’s not copyright infringement. It’s borrowing ideas. Ideas are important to borrow. I’m pretty extreme on this idea, though. I don’t even have a problem with AI gobbling up all the art and text and ideas and spitting them back out in new ways. It’s a nascient form of creativity. AI steals from us. I steal from T.S. Eliot. Eliot stole from Shakespeare. Shakespeare stole from Ovid. Everyone should do it. Everyone is stealing from everyone. Come on in, the water is warm. Its turtles all the way down.
Some of the NFTs went beyond pfps. I really like an artist named zancan who did (still does) generative art. Printing one of his pieces requires verifying ownership through an NFT. I actually tried to buy some of his NFTs a month or two ago, to get some prints, but the entire NFT / cryptochain product is so horrible, I couldn’t figure out how to get my money into the right coin, on the right blockchain, on the right version of the blockchain, and quit.
Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, actually put his very first tweet on the blockchain and sold it as an NFT for $2.9 Million.
I’m sure T.S. Eliot wouldn’t mind. This poem is 1 of 2 in a series of poems called Coriolan — poems inspired by the Shakespeare play Coriolanus. So, if I’m stealing from Eliot, he stole, first, from Shakespeare. But, who doesn’t steal from Shakespeare. I talked about stealing from Shakespeare in my substack post Hang It on a Spine a few weeks ago.