Postpointillism arose in the aftermath of the FTX collapse, as climate activists in the arts connected the burgeoning carbon footprint of Non-Fungible Token mining to boiler-room NFT marketers and computer block-chain gangs powered by coal.
Bitcoin mining already generates as much CO2 as all the SUV’s in suburbia, and NFTS are just as ravenous in their energy demand. What is worse, their contribution to the climate crisis will grow as population burgeons, and art distribution moves down market.
Yet this problem may hold its own solution. NFT's may encompass portfolios of images that take decade to create and sell for eight figures at auction, but the value of all the works in today's blockchain queues pales in comparison to the vastly more valuable inventory of pixels embedded in the great art of the past.
Contemporary art faces little danger of mass tokenization, for even digital masterpieces like Trump trading cards languish in FIAT files until actually sold. In contrast, demand for iconic paintings outstrips supply guaranteeing price inflation and providing a business model for art share investment schemes like Masterworks.
This unfortunately creates a temptation to tokenize since subdividing art can increase fungibility and amplify future profits.
Little climate impact risk arises from thousands investing in shares of a solitary Monet or Basquiat masterpiece sitting in a vault awaiting its next inflationary appearance at auction.
Turning a Suerat into NFT's is a very different matter. Forging a NFT blockchain to distribute millions of pointilles to millions of investors entails raising enough power station steam to run server farms the size of the Gare Du Nord!
While Banksy has pointed the way to ticker tape as a new medium for equitable division in post-modern art Popullist Art, some may object that impressionism is not amenable to subdivision.
This is not the case with the pointillists. Far from being an exercise in minimalism, extracting four million discrete two-millimeter dots from a pointillist work to enrich the lives of every aspirant entry level art collector creates a rich and strange new medium. Popping out the pointilles leaves behind a perforated canvass that maps the original as faithfully as a 3-D printing scan of a slice of Swiss cheese.
The former Suerat, minus its painty bits, can be mounted on high-tech elastomer film, and stretched into monumental Warholian silk screens that turn pointillism into a fit medium not just for casual graffiti, but enriching public art.
When the time comes for Christo's heirs to re-wrap the Arc De Triomphe, they can elevate the Seine to new heights by enrobing the arch in supersized rendering of La Grande Jatte tall enough for Parisians to admire from all points of the compass.
Far from being another sterile exercis in conceptual art, the marriage of post-pointillism and monumentality can produce hectares of material artworks, saturating the market and so sparing impressionist works from conversion into confetti as investors stage runs on the art banks to get wall-value for their money. Instead , concern for climate equity can be reified as art for the masses in the great tradition of socialist realism, as single recycled Seurat pointilles are set like Memling jewels aglow on square meter panels of recycled Christo burlap, that mounted on buses and Metro cars will set the stage for the 21st century graffiti renaissance.
