The mass adoption of #Bitcoin will make a more creative world. It will unleash reservoirs of untapped creativity AND, perhaps most importantly, it will restore the audience’s capacity to receive art as a gift.
In other words, it will transform art’s role in culture and society. It will take back some of the ground ceded (and surrendered) to the forces of commodification and financialization.
Here’s how:
In his book, The Gift, Lewis Hyde described art as existing (with friction) in two economies: the gift economy and the market economy.
“A work of art can survive without the market,” he wrote, “but where there is no gift, there is no art.”
He’s referring both to the way art is created and the way it’s received by the audience. Art is the “emanation of its maker’s gift,” which is to say both the maker’s talent and his/her intuition, neither of which can be bought.
With respect to the audience, “art that moves us is received by us as a gift is received,” which is to say “when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price.”
#Bitcoin improves the environment on both sides of this gift equation.
A lot of people allow their creativity muscles to atrophy in the daily relentless pursuit of sustenance and getting by, a pursuit that is increasingly difficult when you are running uphill against inflation.
More people getting on a bitcoin standard will gradually allow would-be creators to buy back more time, giving them room to breathe artistically. It’s almost like being able to give yourself a grant that vests in the future.
I also think we will see a boom in artistic patronage, as newly wealthy bitcoiners look to facilitate the creation of great works, support artists they love, commission and finance projects that take long periods of time to complete, etc.
On the audience side, the fiat system has gradually degraded the audience’s capacity to receive art as a gift. We are working longer hours for less purchasing power, while things like houses, higher education, and healthcare grow comically unaffordable for most.
Our money loses value so, rather than save, we are incentivized to spend, invest, or speculate. We are also the most advertised-to humans to ever walk the earth. Not exactly the ideal environment for tackling a long novel, listening to a record front-to-back, memorizing a poem, staring at a painting, or watching a serious film.
Bitcoin, I believe, can help facilitate a return of the gift exchange ethos, in the Lewis Hyde sense, to creators and, more importantly, to the audience.
Bitcoin, by instilling a low time preference culture, restores the audience’s capacity to receive art as a gift, a capacity which fiat currency’s high time preference culture has broken.
As a lover of the arts, this gets me really excited.