Now even faster speculation on art as an asset was possible. One could buy and flip NFTs several times a minute without worrying about annoying things like shipping and import tax. The NFT market could be much more responsive to—and expressive of—speculative demand. Seeking new crypto money, Christie’s and Sotheby’s cut all other legitimizing actors out of the loop with NFTs, elevating what might previously have been categorized as illustration, graphic art, or a social media meme to the status of fine art. The auction house endorsed the new asset form, and the asset’s price, in turn, made the institution appear responsive to an emergent cultural power. The tight loop between capital, asset issuing, and auction-as-legitimizing-engine echoed Polymarket’s recursive news-and-market-making cycle. […]

All crypto is literally new money—financial value that didn’t exist before Bitcoin. Legitimation of NFTs by blue-chip auction houses is a counter-elite victory over the cultural values embedded in the art assets previously sold off by auction houses, institutions that have not seriously courted new markets since their 1970s push to attract investors beyond a more traditional “connoisseur” class.

The most important part of Beale’s speech is the part that is almost never quoted: it’s the part where he explicitly eschews any kind of direct political action. Instead, the culmination of this scene is everyone performing a meme. Yelling “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” out their windows. Success for Diane Christensen was measured by whether people were yelling in far-flung affiliate cities like Sandusky and Baton Rouge. It was, in many ways, TikTok before the person who dreamed the idea had even been born.

Today we are surrounded by a million “mad prophet” Howard Beales now served up customized and personalized to your exact demographic ideological aesthetic micropreference on screens of every size telling us that they don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.