started reading an interesting book
My friend (whom I met at church) introduced me to a book by Lewis Hyde, titled “The gift: how the creative spirit transforms the world”.
(Formerly known as “The gift: The erotic life of property).
It uses insights from anthropology to analyse a creative performance as both a gift – which is exchanged, consumed, and circulated within the society that surrounds the artist – and a commodity, which is bought and sold in the marketplace.
What is the conflict between the commodity and the gift? How should I look at my art? These are some questions I think about, just from reading the first few pages.
What an interesting book!
P. S.: First published in 1983, it seems to describe the chaos surrounding NFTs today: too much like a commodity, and too little like a gift.
P. P. S.: the author hypothesises that “the commodity market will collapse when gift exchange collapses, but gift exchange can still continue on, even when the commodity market collapses”. Or something like that.