So a big thought this morning, on why art matters.
So the first big idea is, at the end of the day… Once you got the Lambos, the Ferrari, whatever, then, what next? Art.
Who’s on top?
So a big thought on my mind is, if you distill it… Who matters the most? The artist, the art dealers, the galleries, the investors, the platform, who? The bloggers?
ChatGPT and bloggers?
So I think it’s pretty obvious that I dominated the photography scene through my blog. What’s kind of interesting for me is… I did this all with essentially like zero infrastructure. All I had to do is pay for my blog Web hosting which is maybe like $200 a month, rather than paying for some sort of insanely expensive lease on a physical space, and I suppose the upside of having a blog is, you essentially have infinite reach and freedom, instantaneously. Even in today’s world, the admiration that I get for my blog is pretty great.
Why?
So I think my honest thought is, the reason why you have art pieces selling for like $1.2 million for a painting is, it’s like 99.99% speculation, investing, financial returns, and also… About 100% Social sociological.
So to any fool who does not understand the art world, it’s because you do not understand human nature or the sociology behind the art worlds.
Simply put, there is a complex ecosystem of artists, collectors, galleries etc.… And it’s kind of like an interesting game.
so does it matter?
Of course it matters. Why? It all comes out to art. Our clothes, shoes, homes, societies architecture media etc. Anything that humans make is art.
So where does that leave me?
Well first of all obviously you’re an artist. You might not have pieces selling for millions of dollars but that doesn’t really matter.
So my first big proposition is, if you just want to make a lot of money, the obvious strategy is bitcoin, MSTR. And then art, should be more of our autotelic passion? That is, we have the will to art, artistic impulse to create art, collect art, become art?
honorable art
So my first thought is, the most honorable type of art that we can have is, the human body. Until you have met really really beautiful people, like the 6 foot tall eastern European models, in the flesh, standing right next to you, you have not experienced true beauty.
Also, I think this is where bodybuilders or weightlifters are impressive, assuming they’re not taking steroids. My simple heuristic: 
Only trust weightlifters who do not have Instagram.
Any sort of weightlifter or bodybuilder who has social media Instagram TikTok or whatever… Or even YouTube, is probably secretly taking the juice because, they want to magnify their following.
Better yet, only trust weightlifters who don’t take protein powder.  Why? Protein powder is also a scam, essentially just like hydrogenized pulverized milk powder, creatine is also the same thing but with like bones and flesh. It’s like 1000 times more effective to just eat the meat and the bones itself. All this way protein powder stuff and creatine stuff is just pseudoscience to feed a $10 billion fitness industry.
art
So it looks like Leica camera is selling out to the Chinese. It’s kind of a tragic and to all these art world photographers who want to be fancy.
Hasselblad has already been sold to the Chinese.
So who has not sold out? Ricoh Pentax, Fujifilm, the Japanese.
So why does this matter? I think there’s a weird equipment fetish for us for photographers, that in order to feel important we must own some sort of expensive camera. And the truth is it works, if you’re at a fancy art show exhibition and you have a film Leica MP, around your neck, people will instantly find you more fascinating than somebody with just like a Canon power shot. Hilariously enough if you see somebody at an art show with a Canon power shot, the deep interesting insight is, they’re probably factually actually very interesting.  Also, if you’re meeting a bunch of people, high net worth individual individuals, and somebody just has like a seven-year-old iPhone SE,.. probably also a very interesting signal.
Another one, never trust anybody who drives a Tesla, only poor people drive Teslas.  the same thing goes with any luxury car, people only purchase lease and drive luxury cars because they cannot afford a good single-family house.  The true rich and wealthy, the people with $150 million home in HOLMBY Hills, just drive a silver Prius plug-in prime. Even to the people you see driving the Ferraris, they’re often these like 82-year-old dudes who are about to die. 
So now what
So I’ll give you the secret, I think the secret is going to be art world blogging. Because people are still going to be using ChatGPT and Google in order to analyze artists. For example, I’m kind of fascinated right now by the artist Richard Prince, who seems to be right now the crown jewel of the art world. Using ChatGPT deep research, on any artist, posting it to your blog, will help you dominate search results, both on ChatGPT search and Google. 
Forward
Spring is here! Bitcoin spring, MSTR spring, art world spring, and also… Richard Prince paving the way for us photographers!
ERIC
Become the artist you desire
- Conquer NYC, APRIL 19
- DOWNTOWN LA ART WORKSHOP MAY 9
- June 26-28th: Phnom Penh Cambodia, the workshop of a lifetime
- HONG KONG STREET WORKSHOP July 25-26
- CONQUER TOKYO, AUG 8-9th
Art assignments
so assuming that ERIC KIM has an open source free art school, some ideas:
- Use Procreate on your iPad or iPhone to make art images.
- Use Sora 2 or Grok to make AI generated art videos, or you could use Grok, to animate your old photos and to essentially remix and, “upcycle” them for something new.
- Take some old master artworks, whether it would be famous photographers or painters or artists, or even Renaissance paintings, and animate them with ChatGPT, grok whatever ,,, see what happens
- Treat your whole life like an art project
- Buy some 3M car wrap, and start wrapping your car like an artist turn your car into an art project.
- Start writing poetry, some of my poems here
- Think digital artwork, AI generated artwork whatever… Even the dirty little secret is a lot of these painters the famous art world painters like Andy Warhol just have factories and teams of other people to paint and repaint their own artwork.
Art and nothing but art!
ERIC