Is the Drop really all that matters?
In the mid-nineties I created baby shaped speakers. A really cool project, but it didn’t sell and actually hardly sold for a very long time. Recently though they gradually became a kind of cult classic and slowly but surely people started buying them. By now I am getting emails from people offering lots of money for them, and they get disappointed to hear that all are sold out…..
Sometimes art causes a big stir and has a huge impact when it gets dropped into the outside world, but in retrospect we sometimes realize that it was actually just a flash in the pan. Which happens and is okay. Because a flash in the pan can be a Firestarter, often setting things in motion which will have a big impact for a long time and will inspire others.
But sometimes just nothing happens when art is released into the world. It might be ahead of its time. The world catches up with it only many years later, when people realize in hindsight that someone was the OG behind a new movement which began blossoming only when the time was right. Because as an artist you yourself might not even be ready for the art you create, in fact you’re then ahead of your own time.
It can also happen that as an artist you create a piece of art and nothing happens neither when it gets dropped nor even many years later. But that piece of art can still become an important part of your history as an artist – a part of the trajectory of your development which is often a necessary phase to reach the next level.
Nowadays though it often feels like it’s all about the drop. Sometimes the drop can be a necessary conceptual part of your art. But mostly it just seems to be a market mechanism urging potential customers to acquire art. And as such it can overshadow the real content and value of your work.
It takes time to develop a solid body of work and drops will mostly just disrupt the steady flow necessary to build that solid body.
So, for now I’ll drop those thoughts with you as part of the drop of “The Drop” NFT, hoping that it will stimulate you to contemplate the current drop culture, rather than inspiring your next drop…
