The Postmodern Economy of Mistrust: Blockchain and the Postmodern Design

This two-part essay approaches Beeple’s EVERYDAYS in relation to artistic practices that engage matters of trick and risk at the time of mutating economic systems.

The first part of the essay outlines the structural relationship between the Blockchain infrastructure that underpins EVERYDAYS echoing in its aesthetic, and the formal specificities of the postmodern architecture exemplified by the 1970’s Bonaventure hotel, as described by the American theoretician and literary critic Fredric Jameson.The second part focuses on The First 5000 Days in the context of the emergence of cryptocurrency as a doubt-riddled alternative to fiat currencies. I place this work in conversation with the centuries-old art practice of paper trompe l’oeil, which at times spoke to an equivalent skepticism towards paper as a new monetary medium in 18th-century Europe as the world of finance grew increasingly immaterial and mobile.

These seemingly unlikely pairings accentuate ruptures and unveil continuities between the contemporary moment and two different but, I hope to show, not wholly unrelated historical periods: the cementing of postmodern consumer capitalism and the emergence of the modern paper economy.

Westin Bonaventure Hotel, 1976. Los Angeles, USA. Architect: John C. Portman Jr.

Beeple (b. 1981), EVERYDAYS: The First 5000 Days, 21,069 x 21,069 pixels (319,168,313 bytes). Minted on 16 February 2021.