In 2014, the reach of cryptocurrency and the blockchain had already extended to art. This brought along all the attendant critiques of financialisation and proprietization that blockchain art is still subject to. In response, I used the pre-NFT token system DogeParty to issue different kinds of tokens as art in order to engage with these critiques. And when dealing with questions of value and ownership, what could be more priceless than one’s soul?

This reminded me that in the 1980s the expat Soviet artists Komar & Melamid set up a corporation in the US to buy and sell people’s souls. They bought hundreds, including Andy Warhol’s, thereby depicting the pressure of capitalist society on artists to (more metaphorically) sell their souls to the market, to “sell out” for success.

Inspired by their example, I divided my soul up into 100 tokens so that I would not have to sell it all at once. This is more economically rational than having a single token to represent my soul and having to sell it all at once to a single owner. The effects of competition within the market for fractionalised souls should both reduce costs and allocate these resources more efficiently than a monopoly could.

Sadly this hypothesis has remained untested because I am unable to accept any offers to purchase MYSOUL tokens. This is because my wife has pointed out that if my soul belongs to anyone then it belongs to her. And I agree.