Must We All Become Meme Artists? Memes, Art and Financial Modes of Cultural Production

This article reflects on the relationship between digital culture and crypto-currencies, examining early forms of NFTs and other digital collectables to ask how artists are using financial technologies in the production and distribution of their work.

The creative industries discourse, while simultaneously resisting pessimism that frames cultural production reductively as merely an epiphenomenon of neoliberal capitalism. Instead of simply assuming the existence of a critical distance (to society at large) within the field of culture and the arts, what is at stake for Making & Breaking is the theoretical and practical search for forms of cultural production that contribute to the creation of social betterment: an emancipatory vision of planetary futures that dissolve the debilitating wealth, power and representational inequities of our present. To put it in the words of Mark Fisher, whose work served as an impetus for this publication in many ways, what we are reaching for is “a new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving”. As Making & Breaking addresses cultural producers as well as students and academics across a variety of related fields, it aims at being accessible in its language while intellectually rigorous in its arguments.

• https://makingandbreaking.org/article/mu...