Hi,

Welcome to your fortnightly update of Polish-English artistic musings that mostly just focuses on a long-dead guy called Marek Zulawski. He has a new retrospective exhibition later this year in Toruń, so he could use some promo.

Marek gets his first shop

So the other day, in a flurry of misguided enthusiasm, I started an online store for Marek Zulawski artwork.

I could have started putting artwork on eBay, but that seemed a bit shoddy. That's where we put the Russell Hobbs Slice & Go.

So I signed up to a platform called Big Cartel and started a small shop. It has just 5 pieces for sale.

I have done nothing with this shop so far. It's not linked to any other site yet, has no post on social media, and I've emailed nobody until this newsletter.

Nothing.

The main reason is that, almost unconsciously, every single artwork I added to the shop is highly sexual. Some might say pornographic, in all honesty.

It was almost going to be five illustrations featuring naked women touching themselves until I noticed this pattern whilst adding the fifth artwork.

So I swapped the fifth one for a colourful gouache orgy.

I swear that was just the content of the first drawer I opened.

I should have started with the drawer that has that nice guitarist and a goalkeeper in it...

Plans for the shop

The artworks in the shop will change every 2 weeks so that it doesn't just remain something all search engines will want to censor.

That should also create a sense of "Limited Time Only! Act NOW!" which is always fun.

How do you price art... that isn't art?

I put some prices in the Marek store that might seem dear to some people.

But if you think that's expensive, you should check out this digital artwork I discovered the other day...

Some of you are looking at that cryptocurrency price tag and saying "What is 18 ETH...? Is that any good?"

It's actually eye-popping. 18 ETH is nearly £23,000 today. That value will certainly fluctuate, since that's the main thing cryptocurrencies do, but it will remain many thousands of pounds at the very least.

The artwork is in the form of an NFT. If you don't know what an NFT is, it's essentially a digital item that has a certificate of uniqueness in its code so it can't be duplicated. They can offer all sorts of extra features too, but many do nothing.

Like many art NFTs, it looks like this one does nothing.

Ok, so the waves move a bit (click to squint for yourself). But that really doesn't count.

Where did this "art" come from?

The original painting used to hang in our family's studio.

When I was a teenager, my mother sold it to an insurance agent called Mr Caplan. Apparently he came in for a meeting with her and was captivated by it, insisting that he had to buy it off her.

It looks like 30 years later, Mr Caplan's son Jonny is now the proud owner of the painting, and is trying to capitalise on it using current tech trends. (It looks like his entire career is based around tech trends).

Jonny has made (or rather "minted") quite a lot of NFTs, with varying luck in quality and sales, using a mix of images he owns (like the Marek painting), clips from TV shows he's worked on, and images churned out by AI image generators.

I'm in two minds about this thing

Should people make NFTs out of every piece of real-life art they own?

Is that where the world is going?

I'm offering certificates of authenticity with all the artworks sold in the Marek online shop. But perhaps true reliable provenance will soon be expected to be a digital unchangeable NFT certificate, a proof that can't be tampered with.

That does actually sound like the future to me.

But twenty-three grand for that 13-second video? I think Jonny is having a bit of a laugh... Maybe he should list it for tree fiddy.

I am glad to see he's enjoying the painting though (I had wondered what had happened to it), and that it's getting a curious second life.

That's it for this week. Thanks for reading. Remember to eat all your vegetables.

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / Procrastilearning.com / More stuff

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