The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway. (There may be unexpected stops along the way.)

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Piss Pots

Last week, at Paris’s Pompidou Centre, I saw Duchamp’s notorious urinal, Fountain – the “readymade” object that, in 1917, he signed “R Mutt” and submitted to the Society of Independent Artists’ salon in New York, who roundly rejected it because it wasn’t a “real piece of art.” Voila, conceptual art was born.

I thought I’d seen it, anyway. The original, apparently, was lost. And in 1964, Duchamp signed eight facsimile piss pots, which have been floating about the world ever since, getting adored, questioned and defaced.

In 2006, the one at the Pompidou was attacked with a hammer by the French performance artist Pierre Pinoncelli.

Pinoncelli’s renown as an artist has come primarily from damaging two of Duchamp’s urinals. Think of that – to be so important that an artist can be known primarily for damaging it, and a urinal no less, which is differentiated from the other, utilitarian urinals in the museum only by its protective casing and placement amongst the “art.”

And there’s a cadre of others who’ve made a point to relieve themselves in the urinal – amongst them Brian Eno:

I first learned about Eno’s role in the piss mischief – let’s call it pischief – when I attended the UK Premiere of Eno’s “generative” documentary at London’s Barbican Centre. 

But Eno wasn’t alone in his pischief, and there’s convincing evidence that Duchamp wasn’t even Richard Mutt. And, of course, there’s plenty who don’t consider Fountain to be art at all.

This Beat is a quasi part deux to last week’s, where we sought to differentiate “that which is real from that which isn’t.” This time, we’re asking the question, what is art? and who is authorized to pen its history – a tome in which legends are made at the exception of the overlooked? Where truths can be slippery replicas of piss pots whose “creators” we’re not even sure we got right.

What is Art?

As the legend goes, when Fountain was rejected, Duchamp, who was a member of the Society of Independent Artists’ board, resigned in protest. Fast forward nearly a century and, in 2004, Fountain was declared – “by 500 of the most powerful people in the British art world” – the 20th century’s most important piece of art. 

Of course that didn’t happen because this particular latrine was chic or revolutionary – it’s because it wasn’t. Duchamp didn’t even make it. Fountain was part of a series of “readymades” – found objects he elevated to the echelon of art simply by presenting them as such. 

The questions that followed speak to the piece’s influence: what is art, and, perhaps more importantly, who gets to answer that question?

That sentiment was published anonymously next to a photograph of the original urinal – only one such snapshot exists, captured by photographer Alfred Stieglitz – in The Blind Man, a short-lived journal published by the New York Dadaists. 

Many believe the words belong to artist and Duchamp defender Beatrice Wood, and they’re important: the object isn’t relevant, she says, what matters is that Duchamp has transformed our perspective.

As an Eno acolyte, I especially appreciated his role in this saga. ‘What a visionary! What a rascal!’ I thought when I watched the generative doc.

But then I learned that he wasn’t the only one to relieve himself in it – far from it. In 1993 alone, Pinoncelli did it, as did South African artist Kendell Geers at the Venice Biennale.

And then I learned that Duchamp himself may not have even been Fountain’s artist.

Writing in The Guardian, author Siri Hustvedt makes a solid case that Fountain didn’t come from Duchamp, but from the German-born poet and artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhove:

Hustvedt goes into the whole tale, presenting much more evidence, and her narrative is grounded in this world that disproportionately grants men “intellectual and creative authority:”

So, was Duchamp’s Fountain – the most important piece of art in the 20th century – not even Duchamp’s, but a product of the patriarchy? Was it more ‘art world fencing’ or the ultimate rebuke to the legacy elite? Does the identity of its creator change its message?

Also, was Eno the first to piss in it? Did one of the pissers inspire the others, or was it parallel invention? And did said pissers’ acts ruin the piece, or did they advance the piece’s intended commentary, as some of them say?

(Pinoncelli was so invested that, preceding the urinal’s 2006 exhibition at the Pompidou, he sent a long, angry letter to a Pompidou curator that his past “contributions” – i.e. peeing in it in 1993 and hitting it with a hammer – warranted his designation as Fountain’s co-author.)

Ask a million people these questions and you’ll get about a million different answers. All of this is fodder that support Eno’s “scenius,” a companion term to “genius” – where genius is the creative intelligence of an individual, scenius is the creative intelligence of a community.

But the point is that most of us believe Duchamp is the creator — and that matters.

So what do we believe is art? We believe what’s presented to us. We see Duchamp’s toilet on display: art. We take a break from visiting said toilet to use other toilet: not art.

When we listen to the radio, we just listen to the radio. What we hear we think of as art. We’re not thinking about payola and other backdoor schemes that might have gotten some track on-air at the expense of another.

And on Spotify, how many of us think about the ulterior motives – e.g. the conflicts of interests that come from major labels owning large stakes in the streaming platform – that might go into the algorithmic playlists we listen to every day? Or the payola-like mechanics behind their “Discovery Mode” that give artists who pay better placement? We just listen to the art, happy that we’re getting such a good deal to do so.

Tech platforms have become important extensions of art, because without them, we may never find said art – the platforms have become our critics, our curators, our history tellers. We like them because they’re trained on our own behaviors so we believe them to be neutral – and because they’re glossy and clean and easy. They present us with what we think we want to see or hear.

That’s why Instagram is so successful – it’s the veneer of curated life, where we accept vanity metrics and a good filter as the commensurate value of a human being. That’s easy, and people like easy. It’s so simple that even bots can make us believe that someone is pretty, or popular, or talented. One more follower on the scoreboard. It’s a behavior that’s become so normalized that we forget it’s a facile representation of our collective humanity.

Many of us believe in web3 for its potential to move beyond these pay-for-attention schemes, but it’s quickly becoming sullied by the same game.

Something Sinister This Way Comes

“Something sinister is happening on Sound,” wrote Supersigil – aka Alex Roth, the musician and founder of the metalabel, Zyla – in a recent Twitter thread.

After noticing an unusual comment on a recent track he posted, Roth did some sleuthing and discovered his commenter was a bot. He then went deeper down the rabbit hole, unearthing a whole bot army. At scale, bots are collecting and hyping tracks across the Sound platform.

And nearly all of those tracks, he realized, were curated by Cooper Turley’s Coop Records.

Not long ago, I mentioned Coop Records in the Beat. They market themselves as “a community-owned record label that generates 100% of its business from on-chain sales.” Recently, they launched Coop Records Platform, whose interface is a standard ledger of transactions, which shows three “key” metrics: “mints, rewards and new mints.” The platform integrates directly with Sound.

Essentially, Roth’s “something sinister” is Coop Records using “boosts” or “quests” – i.e. on-chain ads — to elevate the label’s tracks on Sound’s viral charts. The result?

There are some conflicts of interest to consider as well, Roth notes. Turley is a personal investor in Sound, for instance. “Is he flooding the platform with bots [in] an attempt to make it look like it's flourishing?” Roth wondered.

The thread got a lot of traction. Some commenters said this was old news, and that this is simply how Sound has always worked, and others acknowledged that these mechanics led them to abandon Sound altogether.

And there were others who were more apologetic, claiming that this is how things work. Gotta pay-to-play. In short, if you’ve got money, you’re more likely to win. If you don’t, better find a label that does.

These are the same principles that make the web2 world spin round. And Roth, frustrated by the steady dissolution of web3 values built around a vision of something else, invited Turley to comment:

Turley did, but his defense was, essentially, that he’s transparent about his use of boosting and rewards-based platform incentives.

And he has been that — which one commenter shrewdly observed as “some wild ‘if the system incentivizes this behavior, either as a feature or a bug, there is nothing wrong with exploiting it,’ going on here in justifying the behavior.”

Roth responded to Turley’s rationale with another thread about “why @Cooopahtroopa's defense of this practice is disingenuous & how it's harming web3 music.”

In it, Roth invokes some old friends of the Beat – namely Cory Doctorow and his theory of enshittification, which describes (and damns) platforms that wedge themselves between users and artists and siphon value from both sides in insidious ways.

A few days later, Turley posted a clear outline of his platform’s mechanics, where he also pointed out that “it is extremely common for artists and labels to run paid ads on platforms like TikTok and Instagram to promote their music.”

That’s true, but these aren’t exactly paid ads, and that’s the world we’re trying to leave behind anyways: enshittified tech platforms and “art world fencing.”

To get us there, it’s important that we push back, and have these conversations – and many engaged with Roth’s thread, from Sound’s CEO David Greenstein to artist builders like Songcamp founder Matthew Chaim.

What’s great about on-chain music is that a lot of the builders are artists. And the reason is because they understand how this tech – like art – can transform perspectives.

It’s “new thought” for our objects, with a growing realization that the medium is the message. The tech we use to tell our stories is becoming inseparable from the art itself. So who builds the platforms and creates the art and writes the histories does change the message, and in web3, we can be the who that molds new mediums.

“The great part about composability though is you’re not limited to using just one platform or interface,” commented Nick Cam Smith. “If the game seems rigged on [Sound], experiment with others…find a community that actually cares about the music and not just how many mints a song gets.”

So, build tech that you can believe in because it feels like art.

Coda

A few decades after Duchamp, John Cage famously asked a similar question: what is music? His assertion was that “everything we do is music.” Cage offered those words as a postscript to his seminal piece, 4’33,” an entire composition dedicated to the observation of silence.

Throughout his career, many artists – like Eno – adopted various Cagisms, merging them with more popular streams, using outré techniques to make art music more accessible to mainstream listeners – or, depending on your perspective, to make conventional pop music more interesting.

Today, we know Eno as the godfather of ambient music. But without the Cagian groundwork, it’s questionable whether his ambient music would have gained much traction – and perhaps he would have never pursued it all.

That’s the power of the permission givers – those who grant creative license, and expand our conception of what something can and can’t be, so that others may build upon it.

But remember, when history credits a single person – especially when it’s a white man – question it, because if art is everything that we do, we should honor it with nuance, context, and the truth that we live in a scenius world.

Now go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.