From Duchamp To Du-blockchain
This is the first ever interview with the persona and force-de-fqery that is, Fuck You Buy Me. To protect the voices of the guilty we opted to take written form over a podcast.
(FYBM) named as a possible spin on the Goodfellas movie line “Fuck you pay me”.
To get a surface understanding of FYBM, it's easy to imagine them using the same silver tongued movie charm when shilling their art.
Business bad? Fuck you, buy me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, buy me. Place got hit by lightning huh? Fuck you, buy me."
As we scratch past the cruddy veneer of the persona in this interview, it becomes apparent that FYBM is more than just the alter ego of an artist poking fun at his peers, people, and behaviours in the space. There's an intelligence in the work that holds a dirty mirror up to us all.
Side note. The use of the F word, although frequent in this interview has still been massively decreased, however if you have a sensitivity to naughty words this article isn't for you. READER BEWARE!
The Interview
WB - A lot of your art seems to be a satirical commentary on the motivations and struggles behind digital art, NFTs and everything in between, what inspired you to step forward and become the voice of the digitally jaded?
FYBM - I was born a year ago, on the 6/6, after the death of the cryptoart boom and the rise of the fqing arrogant collectors telling artists how to do their own fqing shit. It was too much, and some punk fucker telling them to fuck off was overdue, letting the grand delusions of what is good art and what is an art collector fqing rot and fqing burn.
One of my early fqing products says "NOT A COLLECTOR, A fqing CUSTOMER". Nuff fqing said. To answer your fqing question, I'm both Batman and the fqing Joker, and a fqing necessity.
WB - Your wallet tells a story of being interested in code art. Is this something personal to you or do you just like cool shit?
FYBM Very early on in FYBM's story, I developed a specific taste for something I would later coin as "fqing dirty".
WB - What is fqing dirty?
FYBM - Something that tastes like dried blood, smells like rust, sounds like fqing distortion turnt to 11. Some code products elevate this dirty taste to the digital fqing dirty, where glitched out pixels, extreme datamosh and generative mayhem give birth the digital native flavour of what "fqing dirty" is. It's more about that fqing esthetic, attitude and energy than an interest in fqing code.
WB - What are your views on Tezos since HEN and what it could evolve into?
FYBM - Tezos wins by being fqing dark mode by design, and often leaving the stats out of the way to throw the fqing digital dirt right in your face. Mix that with cheap flippers and low standards of entry and you have the crypto equivalent of a fqing Berlin STD-fest club. I don't read the fqing future. As long as some dark corners of Tezos continue to smell like fqing piss and cheap whisky, I'm in. Someone's gotta find a way to curb the fqing spam NFTs tho.
Last year open sea apparently took a grant from Tezos to integrate the tezos blockchain onto Opensea. Reading between the lines it looks like OpenSea didn't go through with the integration. Do you see any chance of this happening in the future and if so what impact do you think it will have on tezos based art? -
FYBM - Seeing how quickly they put that Solana hiccupchain on OpenShit, I'd be fqing mad if I was Lord Tezos. The future is fqing crosschain anyway, and there's nothing inherently bad in BrokenSea laying its shit on Tezos. If I had any fqs left to give, I'd say I hope the "energy of Tezos" (whatever the fuck that is) doesn't change, but if it does it wasn't worth fqing shit anyway, so whatever.
WB - Any artists we should be looking out for that have really stood out to you?
FYBM - In my search for the fqing dirty, I almost became a stan account for that die with the most likes, but the fucker is already making ripples and living his dirty best life, so let's dig up others. I can, dig Mike Three's shitposting and memeing skills, and randomly namedrop Autocannibal, Empress Trash, XPHYEE, ukheyhoo, ZafGod, or the recent Quitters and Gaspard de la Guerre, and make the rest of them lynch mob me for stopping there.
WB - Its rumorored that you have a public persona, and that Fuck You Buy Me, is only one part of you, you as a whole. Care to offer any clues on who your better half is and which marketplaces you feature on? -
FYBM &? - From my two halves, fuck you and fuck that question.
WB - that's offered a lot of insight. Any comment on the rumor that you are X-Copy?
FYBM - If I were you, I'd ask X-COPY about the fqing rumours that he's Fuck You Buy Me.
WB - That’s offered some clarity! Your upcoming drop has a lot of similarities to NIfty gateways varying mechanics. Any chance of seeing you there in the future? -
WB - You might get the call after this drop. Do you have any reply to the people offended by your use of colourful language?
FYBM - Dear gentlefucks, outstanding citizens, guardians of the Shakespearean legacy, utterly civilised elite of the Internet, connoisseurs of the finest thesauri and Grand Commanders of the Order of the Holy Language - Even Twitter allows me to a exist, so I'm good fun for the whole family. Zuckerberg rated. Fuck you very much.
WB - The art of Marcel Duchamp is about the idea behind the art being more important than the medium. Example R.Mutt. I get those vibes from your body of work and persona. Do you have any thoughts on that?
FYBM - Yeah, just just the fact that I choose to call artworks "products" and collectors "customers" to fuck up the delusions of grandeurs about art is literally a duchampian move.
That was the motive behind his ready-mades. Also making artworks of urinals is very fuckyoubuyme-esque, if I dare say so myself.
WB - agreed! leveraging his role as magazine publisher and position, as exhibition holder to break down the elitist narrative of art, and what defines it.
I feel like The Urinal could be any other object and the art would still be same
FYBM - Clearly! Allegedly, these objects were chosen to be not beautiful nor ugly, just mundane, indifferent things, moving away from strong emotions of attraction or repulsion. A lame-ass door or a fqing chair would have served the same purpose.
I also think that besides storytelling and personaplaying, part of my shit is in the collectors/customers themselves. They are encouraged to be fqing flippers through high royalties, instantly adopting cussing, and enjoying the rekt and loser culture, with a dash of fqing fin dom. What NFTs bring to this kind of performance act is a connected and active collector-audience, something that was impossible at Duchamp's time, but today i’m sure he would have actively fucked with degen anons as well.
The irony is that me, being undercover closer to old ideas of conceptual and performative art, is in a way at odds with the cryptoart market, that values innovation, but also eye fqing candies over most things. Proper generative art with new relevant esthetics but deprived of any semblance of concept, conscience of a larger art history or much to tell.
As the epitaph on the gravestone by
@Littorina_torea
says, "I saw beauty in pure shit", and there's a beauty in the fact people can value whatever shit they want for whatever reason. And there's fqing beauty in me being able to write their art collecting shit is ridiculously boring and insignificant, from my own arrogant standards.
WB - It's interesting that you say crypto art. I think the more focus goes into the idea rather than the end result then possibly the prefix will be dropped for the most part in the future!
FYBM - Yeah, for someone who claims to not be a fqing artist and just a NFT dealer/maker, that's pretty ironic.
But as much as I can enjoy a good brainfuck, when you go all the way to extreme levels of ideation over substance, it becomes lazy cash grabs parading as clever shit. I care about the fqing dirty product as much as the fqing banter that goes around it.
WB - On that note would you like to take this opportunity to shill your latest cash grab before we part ways?
FYBM - Fuck yes. 3 NFTs: an open edition, 10 editions as a ranked auction, and a CC0 1/1, all in the spirit of getting rekt properly. Classic products that will age so fqing well they will all go to zero as planned. It's happening on the fuckersary, the 6/6, celebrating 1 year since I minted my 1st fqing FYBM piece. I think it's my best drop yet because all are instant genius classic worthy of my fqing hubris, tailor-made for the fqing bear market, with maximum memetic fuckery. Be a good customer, buy my fqing products, fuck you very much.
Links
DropHook
https://drophook.io/FuckYouBuyMe
FuckYouBuyMe (@FuckYouBuyMe) / Twitter