Welcome to the world of the 21st century, the home of virtual domination. You enter the world always with a Level 1 Character, but if you’re a Level 99 Player, it doesn’t matter what your powers are or what your advantages might be — you play like a 99, and that really is the difference between a Level 1 Player and a Level 99 Player, if both are in Level 1 Chars.
The idea is to come into the world as a Level 1 Character, but then raise the char to 99 through hard work efforts and deep levels of meditation, acts of kindness and charity, and application of wisdom knowledge.
That’s not an easy order, and many are not anywhere near up to the task, which is why we keep on trying.
Consciousness and the Waking State are not popular among ape-descendants, and if you bring it up, you’re likely to end up in the fun house, the poor house or the funny farm.
It’s nothing you did, just the nature of human so-called civilization. Actually, it’s a broiling mass of organic struggle, and nothing about it is outwardly pleasant.
Even the flowers can be downright evil, in pollen season, as it is now in California, and probably where you live, too.
It’s pollen season again. Everything happens to me.
Now, there’s a point of view that makes you the center of the universe, with everything swirling and revolving around you.
If you’re that important, you qualify for the “get over yourself, the waiter doesn’t need to know your name” syndrome treatment, which is to start deep meditation right away, in order to minimize the spiritual damage you may do to yourself and others by remaining in a permanent state of stupification — in short, sleep.
Level 1 can be expressed in a variety of ways. For instance, you may have taken up the guitar practice. There’s no end to the perfection open to you with the guitar.
Perhaps running QMVs is one of your daily practices, and it should be, if you’re not running at least one Orb per day.
I know, you have plenty of other things to do, things that HAVE to get done to make a living and to care for your family and home, but how much time do you think you’ll really have to achieve Level 99?
Oh, sure, you can be happy at Level 1 — there’s nothing stopping you from giving yourself permission to be a total self-absorbed creature seeking pleasure and avoiding pain and ignoring the pain and disaster you’ve caused in your rear-view mirror.
There’s always more time, right? Haw, haw, that’s rich.
So how to sell your virtual art? First of all, let’s make the quick calculation that if you paint a painting and put it up for sale, you’ve paid for the canvas, the stretcher bars, the gesso, the paints, brushes, drop cloth, smock, and of course, the easel — which can cost at least a couple hundred bucks.
My Italian solid oak easel cost me $500, but I’ve used it for 45 years, and it’s totally clean and functional.
There was a time when artists had to compound their own paints, make their own brushes and stretch and gesso their canvases, and quite often had to frame them, as well.
These days, you just get online and order the stuff from the lowest reliable bidder. But the thing is, you still have a cost in it.
Now if you crate your paintings, it will cost you hundreds. If you have them professionally crated, it will run you about $4,000.00 shipping to get your stuff to a gallery that isn’t right there in town, and about half that to get back the remaining pieces after the show.
What’s more, you can only pull off a gallery show maybe four times a year without frying yourself out. It’s expensive to have a show, and you don’t always get lucky with a lot of sales.
When you DO get lucky, it’s time to invest in your future.
Okay, so here’s my pitch for NFTs and virtual art in general — it has no hard costs. Sure, there are always costs to everything, and you have to pay the mortgage or the rent and you need to keep food on the table and in the fridge.
That’s understood, there are always those costs, whether you produce anything or not.
Producing NFTs is not about speed or production or any of the ordinary things that would afflict you and affect you as a small startup company, which is what an artist really is, at the last analysis.
So you produce some virtual art. Maybe it originated as a painting on canvas, or a drawing on paper, or a sculpture in a spatial environment, or perhaps you created it inside the computer.
In any case, it ends up as a NFT, a piece of virtual art which turns out to be formless and void in every sense of the word — it’s just a block of numbers planted somewhere and only as secure as the software itself.
So look, first thing I’d do would be to decide what would be a GREAT NFT and get the image ready as a .jpg or .png and be ready to upload it into your NFT minter, but first — grab your PORTFOLIO and stuff it into the body of the NFT.
If you don’t know how to do this, the easiest way is to go into ZOOM, get into your .PDF scrapbook file and read it and turn the pages, creating a sound video .mp4, which is easily stuffed into the NFT.
You can also POST your video and have a direct link to your video or your webpage from your LOCKABLE section in the NFT.
The idea is to have all your background stuff, your provenance and history and all that sort of thing, stuffed INSIDE your NFT, then CAP it with the image that IS the NFT.
If you don’t quite get that, I don’t blame you. NFTs are very new and very unfamiliar things, but like dot-coms and smartphones, they will soon be all-too-familiar.
Now, in the case of my JazzArt, I also happen to have photos of many famous jazz musicians playing or accepting awards or giving a lecture in front of my paintings.
My painted backdrops were featured for over a decade — that’s ten years, for the gen z kids — at IAJE, the International Association for Jazz Education, and was featured in the first three years of the opening of the San Francisco Jazz Center as well as many jazz venues over a 50-year period of work with jazz artists.
I also compose and perform — why not? If you tote up all the things I’ve done, you’ve got a good argument for reincarnation.
There’s no way anyone could master all those skills in a single lifetime, and I didn’t. It took a while, and I’m still working on it, same as you, except I got an earlier start, so I’m here to help you make up the difference.
One way is to convince you to somehow make an NFT, even if you’re not an artist. Musical NFTs work, too.
The thing is, it’s all in the MINTING — and in the case of NFTs, you have to be clever, because most of the kids doing them are totally clever, beyond anything you’ve ever seen before.
It’s a whole world of wonder, fractals and all. There really is no limit, and you can do things as simple as take one of your childhood photos and post it as a NFT.
Sure, it takes a LARGE crowd of rabidly loyal fans to sell a photo of yourself as a kid, but if you’ve got absolutely no talent, what are you going to do?
Of course, there’s always drawing and painting. You don’t have to be good at it, just have fun with it, to make art that people will enjoy and perhaps buy.
When it’s a NFT they’re buying, you have no framing, no crating and no shipping and billing and waiting to get paid before you ship and all that sort of rot.
Forget all that stuff. You’re in a new world now, and the world of art has never been easier to penetrate. There’s far more art market now than there was a hundred years ago, believe me — I endured it.
What, you think this is the only lifetime I’ve spent as an artist?
Most of the time, it was rotten. You lay on your back and painted the ceiling. In some ways, it’s worse than road-repair, which I’ve also done.
It wasn’t my idea. Once in a while, you get taken as a slave, and that happened a lot in the ancient world — there were always barbarians arriving at the seacoast, looking for more land and more opportunity.
The thing is, you don’t have any of that anymore. Just sit down at your computer and invoke your free PAINT program.
Yeah, it’s free, if you don’t mind a few inconveniences. And it works okay, not as good as Adobe, but it’s free, and Adobe emphatically is NOT — boy, is it expensive and hard to use in its latest form.
So go in there and make some squiggles. If you have doubts about how to do this, get my book, “Draw Good Now”, which gives you the steps.
By the time you finish the exercises in that book, you’ll draw good, and you won’t have to post brutally stupid garbage anymore.
There is no definition of art, just as there is no definition of jazz, that is accurate in every case and condition, there just isn’t, and that’s all to the good, and besides, it opens the door for you and anyone else who wants to try their hand at art.
So what’s the penalty for failure?
Well, if you never try, you guarantee that you will fail. Trying doesn’t cost a thing, if you go about it rightly, or it will cost you very little, if you do it right, and for instructions on how to do that, with Ethereum going through the roof at the moment, you need to get yourself over to our morning meetings on ZOOM at 6:30 am every day but Gnorphmas and Ankhlatide, when we start an hour earlier.
So what to stuff inside your NFT???
I have several options, developed at different times over the past 50 years, and they all take the form of .pdf files expressed as “scrapbooks”, each one of which has a specific theme.
- DOWNTOWN COMMUNITY SCHOOL — A scrapbook of my experience with the Pete Seeger community and the Normal Studer education system. Very revealing time-capsule of New York of the 1950s and the lifestyle of a science fiction and progressive education community during the McCarthy Era.
- EJ GOLD @ MoMA — My work and exhibits with the Children’s Craft Village at the New York Museum of Modern Art from 1944-1949. My mother was assistant director, and there was no such thing as childcare, so I went after school every day, five days a week, waiting for her to get off work. I had four shows there as a youngster. The Official MoMA photographer, Soichi Sunami, was a family friend, from whom I got the original photos from which the scrapbook was made.
- CEDAR BAR SHOW — I was the only member of the infamous “Cedar Bar New York School” in the 1950s to actually have an art show at the Cedar Bar, which was attended by members of the Ruling Families, the deKooning, Kline, Pollock and Frankenthaler were represented, along with many lesser-known art celebrities of the period, who were also members of the New York School.
- MY OTIS EXPERIENCE — A photo scrapbook of time spent at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, which also covers many of my earlier art shows.
- MY WHITE HOUSE ADVENTURE — A photo scrapbook which includes scans of letters from the Clintons about my artwork, of which they currently have 56 ceramics and sculptures.
- THE JAZZART SCRAPBOOK — Showing many jazz celebrities playing with my giant theatrical hand-painted backdrops. The shipping alone cost on average about $10,000.00 for every show because the pieces were typically 11 feet tall or more.
- 50 YEARS OF THE INSTITUTE — a photo scrapbook covering some of the highlights and features of the past half-century at IDHHB, Inc.
Those are all intended to get tucked into the wallet cards — not all of them in all the cards, of course.
They’d be included if the subject were significant in their realm. I’m planning something like a scrapbook for gaming, but it might be in the form of a collection of videos, not sure yet how that will manifest.
I also have a very nice-looking “AfterLife Adventures” scrapbook, covering some of our Reno Runs. This will go into NFTs related to those events.
Gosh, there’s no end to the number or subjects that would make great visual treasures and historic records of important events, and it’s well within your reach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWJ25xIXBXk
Just try.
If you’re one of the late-starters who didn’t get out of the gate, just relax and wait for the opportunity to initialize your opensea account. Be patient, it will happen. In the meantime, you can enjoy the creation of NFTs until you’re able to monetize and therefore weaponize them by giving them an asking price, which you can always lower, but not raise, for free.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby