I’m beyond excited to announce this collaboration with my old friend Shepard Fairey. As some of you know I built the first version of obeygiant.com way back when and have spent countless late night hours with Shepard in various cities climbing on rooftops for [reasons]. I’ve shown his work in my gallery, he’s shown my work in his gallery, but this is the first time we’ve collaborated on a piece of work together. This is my original photo the work is inspired by:
My work is observational, not documentarian. I try to capture moments, feelings – less how things are, more how I experience them. Years ago, while in Paris, I came upon several heavily armored cops standing over a kid in a t-shirt who they were detaining, forcefully, aggressively. A blatant and grotesque display of the imbalance of power which reminded me of similar situations my friends and I have experienced first hand all too often. Of course, sadly that isn’t a unique experience. Shepard wields his art like weapon, relentlessly fighting for for a better tomorrow. With this image, I’m honored to have the chance to provide some ammo for that fight. Shepard’s voice has always been thoughtful and poignant, as an artist and as a friend. This collaboration gives an amplified voice to a silent image, injecting an enduring message into a fleeting moment.
Shepard adds: Punk rock ignited a lot of creative and philosophical things for me, and punk principles continuously remind me that speaking truth to power and questioning authority is paramount in life. The Dead Kennedys, The Clash, Black Flag, and the Circle Jerks are just a few of the groups that referenced injustices such as police brutality and abuse of power in their songs, inspiring me to speak out about the same subjects through my art. I have made a lot of lasting friendships through punk rock and its cultural offshoots. One of those friends is Sean Bonner, who began ordering my prints in the ’90s while he was art director for punk label Victory Records. Sean designed the package for the Bad Brains “Omega Sessions,” among others. Sean is a great designer, writer, activist, and photographer. Sean and I have worked on many projects together over the years, but this is our first art collaboration. I love Sean’s photography, and he said a while back, “if you see anything you dig on my Instagram, you are welcome to make an illustration based on it.” After the protests for racial justice and against police brutality this past summer, I remembered a pic of Sean’s I liked. It turns out the photo was taken in Paris but could be from any city where the police do whatever they want to people – NY, LA, Minneapolis, Moscow, London, Berlin, etc. To me, Sean’s image conveys the fairly universal problem that those who speak up for justice are often beaten down by the police for standing up. We need to demand accountability from those with power and demand consequences when that power is abused.
There have been consistent protests in France over the mistreatment of refugees and the erosion of the social safety net for low-income people. Since Sean’s shot is actually from Paris and those French protests have been met with a lot of police brutality, we thought the poster should raise some money for a French charity called Les Restos du Coeur which provides services for the most marginalized populations. Thanks for caring!
(for easy reference this post can be found at the domain: nftwtf.art If you want just the spreadsheet platform comparison go to nftart.lol If you want to see newer posts I’ve written on the subject, start here)
If you’ve been anywhere on the internet in the last few weeks or months you’ve probably been hearing about NFTs. Like scores of others, you’ve probably been wondering just what an NFT is and if you should bother caring about them or not. Valid questions. I’d argue that you should, especially if you are involved in any kind of arts or creative work.
The Basics: NFT means Non-Fungible Token. Fungibility essentially means interchangeability and in economics that means that all dollars are basically the same. If I take $10 to my bank and deposit it, and then wire transfer it to you and you go to your bank and withdraw $10 you technically have a different $10 in your hand, but because “a dollar” is fungible that doesn’t matter, because $10 is $10. The “value” changed hands, even if the actual physical representation of it didn’t. Now lets say I drew a little sketch of my cat and wanted to give it to you but you live on the other side of the world. I can’t just give that sketch to someone who then tells someone else near you to draw a sketch of a cat and say it’s the same thing, because the sketch is non fungible. You need the actual sketch I drew for it to have value (financial or emotional). Now, if you think of digital items then they are basically all fungible. If I send you an email with a photo attached, you aren’t reading the exact thing I wrote or seeing the exact photo I sent, you are reading a copy of it. But what even is original in terms of digital? That’s where NFTs come in, using the blockchain (which is the technology behind things like Bitcoin) this is a way to ensure that a digital file is the original and not a copy.
One of the hesitations towards and criticisms of digital art has always been that it has no rarity, as anyone can make a copy of it as many times as they want and it’s no different than the original. The same argument is used to denigrate photography and video art, though usually there’s some physical element (a signed and numbered print for example) that specifies the uniqueness. That isn’t typically a concern with a painting or sculpture which is obviously one of a kind. Of course there are forgeries, but they take a lot of effort and experts can usually spot them quite easily. An NFT is a cryptographical way to create that rarity and uniqueness in a digital item and prove that something isn’t a copy.
An artist can “tokenize” a piece of work and then sell it, and the buyer can prove that what they just bought is the original thing sold by the artist. And because the blockchain is public, every time that artwork changes hands it’s recorded in a public ledger and at any point someone can verify the piece is legitimate and trace the chain of custody all the way back to the artist who originally released it. (Or the impersonator, as the case may be) Like an old library check out card, the blockchain records who owned it for how long, and if it was given to them or if they bought it, and if they did how much they paid. Which is a fascinating way to track value fluctuation (hopefully appreciation) over time. In this example of the library book, the stamped library card is the NFT – it’s something that accompanies digital file (often an image or a piece of media) to verify the provenance of that file.
I think this is one of the biggest and most important details – whoever originally creates the NFT is hard coded into the ledger and can specify a royalty that they should receive anytime the work is sold in the future. Traditionally secondary market sales happen like this: Andy makes a painting and asks Larry to sell it for him. Larry has a gallery and sells Andy’s painting to Kirk. Andy typically gets 50% of that sale. So if Kirk bought it for $1000, Andy just made $500. Larry did too, but that’s a different story. Anyway, say 10 years later Andy has become a much more popular artist and Kirk decides to sell that painting and asks Christie to sell it for him, Christie will take a 20% fee for doing that and 80% will go to Kirk. Andy gets nothing. So if Christie sells that painting for $1M, Kirk makes $799,500, Christie makes $200,000, but Andy gets nothing. He’s still only got that original $500 from Larry. However if that painting was an NFT, and Andy is the one who made it Andy could specify that anytime that work is ever sold in the future, he gets a % of that sale. (Make sure to read part 2 for important clarification of this point)
Artists! This is important. If a gallery or curator or someone has approached you about making NFTs of your work and hasn’t told you about this, chances are they are putting themselves in that royalty seat so they, not you, get paid off every sale.
Think of an NFT like your domain name or your email address. Some of you might know first hand the problems that can come from letting a business partner own or manage your domain or email. Or your bank account. This has the potential to be a million times worse, and it’s one of those problems that you won’t realize is a problem until it’s too late. Take steps to avoid it now by making and publishing your own NFTs. It’s really not that hard, and the effort is worth it.
One final thing: Like iPhones vs Androids, there are two common standards at play here though in this case they were both made by the same people. ERC-721 and ERC-1155. ERC-721 is the older standard used by everyone and is for absolutely positively one of a kind items. ERC-1155 is a newer standard (and thus still gaining adoption) and is more flexible as it allows you to make one of a kind items, or an edition (only 25 ever made). If you want to understand more on that, read this.
With that out of the way, let’s move on.
So how do you make (or “mint” as it’s called) an NFT? Actually how you mint, list, and sell an NFT are closely related. For the purpose of this I’m going to be talking about minting and selling on OpenSea which is the currently the largest marketplace for such things, and is the service I used to easily mint my first NFTs.
There are several sites that will help you make NFTs and also several sites where you can sell NFTs. As long as they are using ERC-721 or ERC-1155 standards the NFTs you create in one place can be transferred or sold in another place. But in the same way you can’t take one painting and sell it to 5 different art galleries at the same time, one of a kind items can only be sold on one marketplace at a time.
Some friends andI created a comprehensive spreadsheet comparing the top 30 platforms. Each site has different policies, practices, and fees. Some have strict curation and you have to apply and prove yourself worthy to sell things there, some require buyers use their own in house cryptocurrency rather than something more widely exchangeable and some have pretty high fees for that convenience so caveat emptor. Again, to keep things simple I’m only talking about OpenSea.
OpenSea also offers “free NFT minting” which is a little misleading in that you still have to pay to initiate your account (technical limitation that you have to pay anywhere) but while other sites will charge you a “gas” fee every time you mint a new NFT, OpenSea won’t. (Gas is an important thing to understand, I spend more time talking about it in part 2 )
You will also need a wallet to accept all the crypto you will be making from your sales. You might ask why you can’t just use paypal or something? Because paypal deals in FIAT currency not cryptocurrency which is central to this entire thing. On OpenSea most sales are done using Ethereum (which is the second most popular cryptocurrency next to Bitcoin) though you can choose to accept a different type of cryptocurrency if you want. Think of OpenSea like ebay, they handle the transaction but they don’t hold money for you because they aren’t a bank. And neither is OpenSea, which is why you need a wallet. Most people use MetaMask which is simple browser extension, others prefer Coinbase Wallet or Rainbow which is an app you install on your phone. There are other options which you’ll be prompted to choose from when you first go to OpenSea, but you need one to go any further. Any money you make on the site from sales will go directly to that wallet, and if you choose that wallet when you decide where future royalties are sent then will go there too. But keep in mind that isn’t something you can change later, so make sure to write down all your wallet recovery details. If you lose your wallet, you lose your wallet. Literally.
Once you’ve connected your wallet your account on OpenSea exists. Keep in mind the two are linked, so if you go to OpenSea and use a different wallet, you’ll end up with a new (different) account. The little circle icon in the upper left corer is your avatar, and that dropdown will allow you to set all the basic profile stuff you would set on any site. Next to it is CREATE and you guessed it, this is where you go to create NFTs. Choose “My Collections” on that dropdown and on the next page you’ll be given an option to create a new collection which you have to do first as your NFTs will be part of the collection. You’ll get a popup asking for a name, description and logo.
One thing I didn’t realize, the collection is independent from the user. I guess because you can invite other people to help you manage collections. But point being, the URL will be based on the collection, not the user. For example when I created a collection called “D5Kglitches” I assumed that would be nested under the user “seanbonner” but it’s not, and creating that collection resulted in a URL that looks like this:
https://opensea.io/collection/d5kglitches
And as you can see on this page showing one of the NFTs in the collection, the attribution is to D5Kglitches, not Sean Bonner. In this context that’s not a big deal, but it’s worth noting. I plan to make NFTs of some of my photography and I’ll be making a new collection properly named when I do. (Update: I did.)
Once you’ve made a collection you can click into it and “Add New Item” which is the option you’ll use to mint an NFT. Before that you should click the “edit” button though and you’ll have a chance fill in more information including any links or credits you want to add, as well as that royalty thing I mentioned earlier. All NFTs in this collection will conform to this, so decide what % of future sales you want and put in your wallet address.
Once you’ve saved that, go back and hit that “Add New Item” button. This is where you choose the digital file you want to tokenize. Files can be a JPG, PNG, GIF, SVG, MP4, WEBM, MP3, WAV, OGG, GLB, or GLTF. Max size is: 100 MB. Add a name, a link to any external information about it (like your website) and a description. You can also add “lockable content” which is basically things that are hidden until it’s bought. I’ve seen people sell a collection of 10 blank white squares, with the actual image being locked content, so people didn’t know what they were buying until after they bought it. I’ve also see people sell a visual object and provide audio as the locked. Of course there’s no requirement to do this, it’s just an option if you want it.
Next is “Supply” and at the moment this is greyed out and limited to 1. However, if you paste “?enable_supply=true” into the URL and reload the page you’ll be able to edit that. BUT, you’ll lose anything you already added on the page, so don’t do that yet. Just go ahead with 1 copy and remember that for next time.
The next step is “create” which is where you’ll need to initiate your account with a transaction if you haven’t already, and then you can set the price/type of sale. Options are for a fixed price, auction, or declining price. Most people will want to just start off with a fixed price. If you have a following who is waiting on baited breath for your NFTs to drop then you could choose auction and see how much they are willing to pay. Declining price took me a minute to understand but this is a tactic to use FOMO as a marketing tool. You set a high price and a time period, and over that time the price gradually decreases until someone buys it or the deadline is hit – the idea being people will watch it and buy it before it gets too cheap and someone else gets it before them. I don’t know how this works in practice, but in theory maybe someone who only wanted to pay $100 might buy it at $120 because they are scared someone else will buy it at $105? Sort of a reverse auction or something.
Click sell, and you are rolling. You can tell people about your NFTs and people can buy them if you send them the link. They won’t be able to find them on their own though because there is one final step where someone at OpenSea has to manually “verify” that the collection is real and works and legal, once they do that then you are in search results on the site too. They say if you sell things you get noticed, but also just tweeting to them and asking for verification seems to work really well too.
If you have any questions let me know and I’ll see if I can help.
This is an excerpt my most recent newsletter which you should go subscribe to right now. It’s free.
Now let me just preface this next bit by clarifying that I don’t have any idea what I’m talking really. I’m not an investor and I don’t understand the stock market beyond generally that it’s there to make rich people richer and fuck over poor people. Now I must admit that my hands aren’t entirely clean in that – I do own 2 full shares of Disney stock that my mother bought for me when I turned 10 and I think they are worth exactly the same today as they were then and I have no idea how to sell them even if I wanted to cash out and buy a coffee, but that’s my disclosure. Maybe some of you are in the same boat. Besides that noteworthy asset my understanding of stocks comes entirely from watching Billions.
That said I have an ace in the hole that most people don’t have access to. My son Ripley, who turns 11 this year, is a math genius. No really, he won some kind of math contest at his school in Tokyo and everyone was really impressed. Ask anyone. So he and I were talking about what’s going on with GameStop (he’s been actively interested in the Bitcoin news) and when I tried to explain sort of what I thought was happening he corrected me and explained it better, so I thought I’d relay that here for all of your benefit.
A: Buying stock: This is basic 101 stuff that probably everyone already knows. If a stock costs $10 and you buy 10 shares for $100, then the stock goes up to $15 dollars and you sell all 10 shares for $150 bucks, you just made $50 bucks. Similarly if the stock goes down to $8 and you sell all 10 shares for $80 then you just lost $20. Easy math here.
B: Shorting stock: This one always confused the fuck out of me but I think I have a handle on it now. If you think a stock is going to go down relatively quickly buying it would be a bad idea due to the reasons we just discussed in (A). BUT! There’s a way to bet against the stock, which is called shorting it. The way that works is this: Let’s say Jack owns stock in a company called Hills Inc and Jill thinks that Hills Inc is about to fall down and break it’s crown, so to speak. So what Jill does is “borrow” shares from Jack when they cost $10, then she waits some agreed upon time for the stock price to drop, buys them back at a lower price and returns them to Jack keeping the profit. So – using the same math as above, if the stock cost $10 when Jill “borrowed” 10 shares from Jack and sold it at that price she then has $100 in hand, and over the next few days it drops to $5, so she buys 10 shares back for $50 and then returns those 10 shares to Jack, keeping the extra $50 profit for herself. Jill successfully shorted the stock.
Now the trick is, that’s assuming it goes the way Jill wants it to. If instead the price climbs, Jill is in trouble. So, if she borrows 10 shares at $10 and sells them for $100, but over the following days the stock price doesn’t drop but instead rises, Jill still has to return 10 shares to Jack. So if the stock price rose to $12, Jill has to spend $120 to buy those same 10 shares, which ends up causing her to lose $20 in the deal.
Basically shorting a stock is a way to make money off a stock you don’t even own by betting against it. That said, in order to short a stock, you have to have some collateral being held incase things don’t go your way. Which is important for this next part.
It’s been about 10 years now since I started dabbling with photography, getting pretty serious about in a year or two in. In that time I’ve had exhibitions in galleries and published a photobook which continues to sell to this day. I’ve also sold prints to a number of people whose support has meant the world to me. Anyone who has been following me for a while knows I’ve also experimented with several different physical “subscriptions” where I pick things (be they stuff or coffee or music) and mail them out on some regular basis to people who have the blind faith to give me money without having a completely concrete idea of what they are getting in return. There’s a bit of mystery and excitement there which I like, creating that anticipation and surprise.
I spent some time towards the end of 2020 revamping my photography website and and while I was doing that I thought it might be fun to play around again. I quietly announced a Monthly Mystery Subscription at the beginning of December and a few people signed up right away. The idea being, for a relatively small fee I’ll send each subscriber a photo (or 3, depending on subscription level) in the mail. These will be miniprints on instant film and part of a very small limited edition, signed and numbered. I’m sending out the first batch of prints this week and wanted to share a little more about it because it was a lot of fun to put together.
This is a little bit of a give away because the point is that people don’t know what they are getting until they open the package, but I’d leaked images of the prints before anyway so I don’t think it’s too much of a surprise blown. Going forward, the secret will be kept much better. Right now I’m doing editions of 10 photos only, that doesn’t mean that only 10 people can subscribe, it means that if 20 people subscribe half of them get one photo and half get another. This keeps the edition low and the value high, I hope. Speaking of that, I’m leaving the introductory pricing live for a few more days as there are a few spots left to fill out that initial 10 people. For the moment 1 print a month costs $10 and 3 prints a month is $25. Free shipping in Canada, $10 extra for anywhere else in the world. This is basically a brake even price because I think this is a fun thing to do, but realistically I’ll need to up those prices pretty soon, probably double. If you want to get in before I do that the discounted price will maintain as long as you keep subscribing. If the surprise isn’t your thing but you like the idea of the prints, I am making a few available individually in my shop.
Over the years I’ve written about stuff, actual physical stuff that you can hold in your hand and appreciate. I’m guilty of fetishizing all manor of objects. So it should be no surprise that objects that fetishize other objects scratch a very special itch for me which is why my bookshelves are exploding with what I just refer to as art books though I accept that many people wouldn’t consider the subject of many of them to be art at all. An example of that would be guitar pedals. Most people wouldn’t consider them art, even though some people obsessively collect them like art. Musicians are artists, and music is art, so it’s really not much of a stretch to think of the tools artists use in an artistic fashion. I was recently gifted a beautiful book on the subject which made me realize that I now have several books on the subject and though maybe some others might be interested in hearing a little about them.
I bought Level & Attack – The Untold Story of The Tone Bender Fuzz in early 2018 admittedly without knowing much of what it was about. Some friends were very excited about it and I saw a few photos from it and was curious enough to jump through the needed hoops to get one shipped to me in Japan. I was not disappointed. Substantial barely begins to describe this massive book which is too big to fit vertically on my bookshelf. Authors Anthony and Steve Macari dive deep into the history of a single pedal (the Tone Bender) with almost pornographic close up photos of hand wired circuit boards and the most painstaking documentation of variations from one model to the next. This is supplemented by anecdotes by massive name musicians gushing about how much they love it. As an effect, “fuzz” wasn’t something I really paid much attention to before getting this book but there’s no way to take in the passion and love poured into this book and not get infected by curiosity at the very least. I can’t imagine how expensive this book was to make, and they only made 500 copies which sold out right away so getting one these days is no easy task, but if you have the chance to pick one up and flip though it I assure you it will be worth your time. I say that assuming that, like me, you enjoy seeing the most knowledgable people on a super niche subject just spill all of the goods in unrestrained detail.
You can almost smell the solder in Level & Attack
With that groundwork laid and the interest itch piqued, adding 2019’s Pedal Crush to the collection was an absolute no brainer. If you don’t know anything about guitar pedals and want to understand what they are, what they do, how they ended up doing that and who is doing what with them today then Kim Bjørn and Scott Harper (aka Knobs) have published the perfect book to answer all of your questions. While Level & Attack was hyper focused, Pedal Crush zooms out to cover the entire landscape. The history of various effects, what they sound like and how those eventually got squeezed into pedal format, the manufacturers who drove and continue to drive that innovation and generally how one thing led to another, and the who’s who of all corners of the boutique pedal industry.
Tremawhat? Pedal Crush explains it all
Between these two you might think the story has been told, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But any good story has multiple layers and Eilon Paz’s Stompbox really puts the personal stories front and center. That’s not to say the previous books don’t talk about people (they do) or that Stompbox doesn’t cover history (it does) but much more than the others, rather than being about pedals this book is about the people. The subtitle 100 Pedals of the World’s Greatest Guitarists buries the lede because the “greatest guitarists” part is really what makes this book so special. The absolute bulk of this already bulky book is personal stories from musicians you love talking about something that in many cases defines their sound. This is artists talking about the favorite paint on their palette, the brush that they couldn’t have painted a masterpiece without.
J and his Big Muff in StompboxAlbini on his legendary Percolator
100 musicians, 100 pedals, lifetimes of stories. This isn’t a book you read cover to cover and then put on your shelf to forget, it’s one you can (and will) open to any page at any time and find something wonderful and inspirational. This book is brand new and I haven’t fully read it yet, but that is only due to its size and my need to eat and sleep. However there hasn’t been a page I’ve read in it yet which hasn’t left me wanting to read the next one as well, and I may savor that feeling by limiting myself to reading just one a day. That, as well as a way of self regulating and to prevent myself from blowing a bitcoin on Reverb. Which brings me to a stern word of warning–do not even open these books if you are subject to GAS. They will wreck you and full you with lust. Glorious, beautiful lust.
Death By Audio pedals being spray painted by hand
(Did you enjoy this post? Let me know and stay tuned as I’m considering doing a series or even an ongoing video thing where I explore some of my art books and what I love about them.)
Apparently I haven’t blogged since May, which might be the longest stretch of non-blogging since I started blogging before blogging was called blogging. In my defense, we’re in the middle of a pandemic and I moved around the world from Tokyo to Vancouver. That’s not to say I haven’t been active, I just haven’t been active here. Which I regret. So I thought I’d quickly drop an update for the few of you that still read blogs.
Just after moving to Canada from Japan we at Safecast had to face the cold reality that our funding efforts this year have failed miserably in no small part due to COVID and that was unlikely to change anytime soon. We made the hard decision to shift the entire paid staff to volunteer so that we have reserves to keep the servers online hopefully long enough to get through this. That includes me, and means that for the first time in 20 years or so I find myself without gainful employment. Did I mention that I just moved around the world and we’re in the middle of a pandemic? Right, so that’s fun. The interesting thing about being self employed for most of your adult life is that it makes you essentially unemployable.
To that end I’ve been staying up late working on various side hustles any number of which might, with just the right combination of time and place, grow to at least fill some of these new gaps.
I redid my photography portfolio site seanbonner.photos top to bottom to try and give a better view of what I do, what I’m trying to do, and where I think that might lead and why it’s useful. At shop.seanbonner.photos you can buy prints and books and merch. I’m especially excited about my new subscription offer where I send subscribers a limited edition mystery miniprint each month – a few spots are still remaining if you are interested.
Speaking of photos and merch, streetsheets.tokyo has been updated with some new pacific northwest influenced designs on housewares and clothing.
Tara and I have finished writing The Interest Driven Life book and are in the final production steps before it goes off to the publisher. If you’d like to get more info about that as the release date gets closer, please do sign up for our mailing list on the site.
Speaking of mailing lists, I’m still actively writing my newsletter The Crowd, though like this blog the updates are not as frequent as they once were. This is in part due to the fact that I’m taking a break from Twitter because it’s a garbage fire of depressive bullshit, and that’s where I used to get a lot of the news I’d write about. Perhaps ironically I’m spending more time on Instagram. I would like to explore how best to merge the blog and the mailing list, so that I could write something and it would go to both places.
Perhaps most exciting, I’ve revived my old record label Toybox Records and have begun announcing plans and releasing things. The roadmap at the moment includes a mix of older yet previously unreleased material, reissues of favorites, and new stuff by new bands. As before, genre-wise, expect it to be all over the place. For now music can be found here and brand spanking new merch is over here.
Writing that all out does make it feel like a lot, but I’d be lying if I told you that from the place I’m sitting at the moment it felt like a lot. I think because so much of that is in the “about to happen” or tentative stages it feels like none of them are actually real. But they are, and at this point I’m just trying to get them in front of people who may appreciate them. If you know someone who might be interested in something I’ve mentioned here, I’d be in your debt if you felt like passing the link on to them to check out.
