Buy Me

Buy me!

Antoine Schmitt 2021
generative and interactive NFT
Edition of 6

On sale on TEIA

Buy me! is a self-selling artwork, designed to exist in the environment of the NFT market. It uses of mind and emotion manipulation language to convince its viewer to buy it and collect it.

From direct order to emotional blackmail, from supplication to fake aggressivity, from implicit wish to clear demand, from guilt to false promises, from blackmail to lies, there are many ways through which someone can make somebody else do something through pure language, whether in interpersonal relationships, in advertising or in crowd consent manufacturing. Prolongating one of my previous artworks, Touche-Moi (touch me), Buy me! explores this dimension of performative langage, in the field of NFTs.

The NFT marketplace, by eliminating the intermediaries between the artists and the collectors, bluntly confronts the artists to their status on the art market. When we deal directly with the collectors, with no middle-person, we feel a bit like streetwalkers with no protectors. We may have a special relationship with some rich collector, whom we can charm and pamper, or a deal with some more or less glamour gallery keeper who can introduce us to potential interested parties, but on the NFT marketplace, we just have to sell our charms directly.

In Buy me!, I pushed this logic to its extreme development by delegating this selling task to the artwork itself, and therefore eliminating the artist from the loop. Buy me! is a rudimentary artificial creature that I programmed to advertise itself. It embodies and even reduces itself to its own advertising, it is an advertising-creature, a living ad, an artwork-ad. Buy me! radically extrapolates today’s marketing techniques into a future where objects will probably become proactive, and sell themselves directly to the customers, like in a dark Philip K. Dick novel. Moreover, since the blockchain is immutable, this artificial creature will live forever, or at least as long as the blockchain, i.e. internet, and it will continue to advertise itself.

Beware, even if you buy it, it will continue to try to convince somebody else to buy it, forever.