I want to talk about art but first I’m going talk about music. Which is also a type of art. So I’m talking about art before I talk about art, because that’s just how my brain works and you are here because you’ve signed up for that ride.
In 1996 Chicago’s Victory Records released *Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent *by Refused. It was a interesting hardcore record by pretty good hardcore band from a little town in Sweden that was starting to get some attention for having some pretty good hardcore bands making interesting records. At the time, Victory was the gold standard hardcore label that any hardcore band worth their mosh pit wanted to be signed by. Songs did rela…
I want to talk about art but first I’m going talk about music. Which is also a type of art. So I’m talking about art before I talk about art, because that’s just how my brain works and you are here because you’ve signed up for that ride.
In 1996 Chicago’s Victory Records released *Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent *by Refused. It was a interesting hardcore record by pretty good hardcore band from a little town in Sweden that was starting to get some attention for having some pretty good hardcore bands making interesting records. At the time, Victory was the gold standard hardcore label that any hardcore band worth their mosh pit wanted to be signed by. Songs did relatively well for what it was, which was basically the debut international release (they’d had a previous album on a local Swedish label that saw limited distribution) by a new band from a small town on the other side of the world. As part of their deal, Victory hard first dibs to release their next record.
The following year they delivered The Shape of Punk to Come. The title was a direct reference to Ornette Coleman’s 1959’s The Shape of Jazz to Come but the nod didn’t stop there. The album was significant progression from Songs with heavy influence, sampling and references to jazz, beat poets, spoken word bits of literature, and the inclusion of electronic elements like synths and drum machines. It wasn’t just a big step forward for Refused, it was a big step forward for the genre in general. In the office at Victory Songs was popular so we were looking forward to the follow up, and when we got the CD-R for Shape we got together and listened to it together. To say the opinions were split would be an understatement. Some thought it was brilliant. Others thought it was garbage.
The obvious irony here is that historically some people have argued (and some still argue) that Jazz isn’t music because it doesn’t follow the accepted norms and rules, and/or that drum machines are fake and lack the emotion and humanity of a live drummer. And notably, despite those criticisms, both have widespread acceptance and fanbases, even if some grumpy purists refuse to even consider them. Hardcore (and punk more generally) was often seen as the unquestionable display and expression of human emotion, so a hardcore band bringing in these explicitly non-hardcore elements felt like a betrayal to some people, even as others thought it was needed growth. I won’t get into the nitty gritty of the arguments beyond that, but needless to say Victory passed on releasing Shape and it was instead released by the smaller Swedish label Burning Heart (with support by the much larger US label Epitaph).
When The Shape of Punk to Come came out, the initial public reaction was not too different than the small listening room at Victory, and with the exception of a few heated debates in various fanzines it went unnoticed (which arguably led to the breakup of the band shortly there after.) But* Shape* didn’t just die quietly. 5 years later Kerrang! magazine listed it at No. 13 on their “50 Most Influential Albums of All Time” list. Two years later in 2005, The Shape of Punk to Come was ranked number 428 in Rock Hard magazine’s book “The 500 Greatest Rock & Metal Albums of All Time.” In 2013, LA Weekly named it the twelfth best punk album in history. If you have any taste in music you already know how good this album is, and even many of the people who didn’t “get it” back in 1998 have admitted they had a blindspot. It should be no surprise to anyone that back in the office at Victory I was very much on the “brilliant” side of that debate.
I’ll end the music history lessons here, but the point to take away is this: People have always, and likely will always, want to classify and define what is and isn’t a particular type of art. They will try to dictate how much technology you can use or how far you can stray from the accepted norms before you are no longer doing the thing anymore. Some of these people might even be celebrated experts, but that doesn’t mean they are right, or that anyone needs to listen to them.
Last month, after years of side events in rented store fronts and hotel lobbies, and ongoing debate if NFTs can be considered art or not, Eli Scheinman announced the this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach would include a new main fair section called Zero 10 (a direct reference to the 1915’s “last Futurist” 0,10 Exhibition which deserves it’s own article to fully explain though Amanda Schmitt gives some details in this thread, but for now let’s just say it was really important), highlighting the work of a number of digital artists. Earlier in the year he’d announced that he’ was now an’d accepted a role as advisor to Art Basel and this seemed to be the first public result of that advice. The artists included were of course popular artists working with NFTs, but the conscious decision to talk about them here as digital artists, not NFT artists raised some eyebrows. The most vocal critic was Kate Vass, herself notable for hosting one of the first exhibitions of NFT artists in 2018, who argued in a seemingly gpt-co-authored thread that this incarnation of Zero 10 had lost the guts and rebellion of the original, and was bending the knee to art world overlords that web3 was meant to usurp in the first place.
(meme credit Phantom Scribbler)
I don’t want to spend a lot of time on that debate, beyond recognizing that it took place however I do need to note a few things. First of all I hate that it played out on X, making it almost impossible to follow even live when it was happening. That’s the real show of concession to centralized power, and if there was any actual desire for independence I’d have instead been linking to blog posts and comment threads on individually hosted sites. I remain heart broken that for a brief moment in the mid 2000’s that future was within reach and we collectively lost it by handing over our time and attention to social media instead, but I digress. Secondly, as many people in various replies and reposts noted, there is no single hivemind of web3. Everyone playing around with blockchain tech, be it for art or any other reason found themselves here for different reasons, and has different (and possibly contradictory) aspirations. And that’s a good thing. That’s where robustness and future proofing come from. Lots of different people with different motivations and use cases and hopes and dreams all using the same tech is good. It reduces failure points. If everyone was in 100% agreement then it would only take one thing to shut it all down. So while it’s nice to assume everyone agrees with you and is here for the same reason you are, if an argument presupposes that to be true, it’s lost before it starts. Beyond the specific nature of web3, everyone has their own definition of success and while you could argue about that indefinitely I hope we can all agree that artists who have been trying hard, having the opportunity to do things they want to do, on a global stage, and be applauded for that, is a good thing. Even if not everyone would have wanted the same thing for themselves. Let’s let the artists have a win here.
You could read that and think the event simply happening was the win, and on a different timeline that might have been the case. But on this one, just happening was the baseline. By all other metrics Zero 10 was a massive success as well. In previous years I’ve had to hunt for any mention of the NFT-adjacent events in mainstream art world coverage of Basel, but this year I almost couldn’t avoid it. I think the rebrand to “digital art” made most of those reporting about the event more comfortable talking about it, it’s inclusion in the main fair as opposed to being a side event made some coverage expected, but the crowds made it unignorable. There were certainly curious people who just wanted to see what it was all about, but if it was a novelty that would have been the end of it. There were sales too, and enough of them for everyone to take notice. I could spend all week talking about each artist involved or debating the merit of the financial aspect of the art market, but instead I’m going to highlight two different projects by two different artists who did something new and exciting and relevant that people immediately took note of.
I don’t think many would argue with me if I stated that the most talked about thing at Zero 10 was Beeple’s Regular Animals installation. At face value this gets immediate attention, famous people’s heads on robot dogs walking around pooping out art. You can immediately see why people rushed over to take videos. But Mike (aka Beeple) explains that there’s a bit more conceptually going on than that. The piece is a commentary on how traditionally an artists job was to reimagine the world, but today the algorithms designed by a handful of billionaires have more impact on how we see the world than what artists are doing. In this piece, the robot dogs are walking around taking photos, and then using built in AI to decide which photos are most interesting, those photos in turn are converted to a “style” that represents each character and then printed, or pooped out which is a whole other commentary about art in general. These prints were collected and signed, and then given away free to attendees at different set times. Some of those free prints, 256 to be exact, also had a claim option for an NFT of the art, or rather, a piece of digital art that someone could collect. As I write this 186 of those have been claimed, and if you want to buy one on the secondary market the cheapest one listed is about $30k. Yes, art that was given away free is being sold for tens of thousands of dollars, only days later. Currently there’s been over half a million in secondary sales, a number I only expect to keep rising. This is the NFT aspect of the work on full display, without that underlying tech there wouldn’t be a global secondary market participating seconds after the work was first transferred from artist to collector. I don’t know of any other situation at an art fair where someone was given a piece of work for free and could sell it permissionlessly for $30k minutes later.
For a lot of people Beeple was the first “NFT artist” they’d ever heard of, and it was his $69 million sale in 2021 that got their attention. Of course he was making digital art long before that sale, and he’s not stopped working since then. But this gets ignored by people who want to bash NFTs and single him out as an example of that. While Mike has continued to make and sell work to collectors and place major pieces with museums, you can easily find posts on art blogs from as recent as earlier this year suggesting “his big sale” was hype that has long since popped. I don’t think these skeptics are intentionally lying to people, but I don’t think they are doing their homework either. They are making assumptions based on the sentiment in their own little bubbles, and assuming the rest of the world is following along. They have no idea that in reality the rest of the world is moving on and not bothering to get their approval. Regardless of how you interpret the last 5 years, Regular Animals sold out at Art Basel (the prints were free but deep pocketed collectors threw down real money to take the individual dogs home) and people who assumed Beeple was a flash in the pan fluke are eventually going to have to come to terms with the fact that they may have been letting their ignorance of/distaste for a technology cloud their view of the art. the reason people are still paying top dollar for Beeple’s work is because there’s actually a there there.
Yes, conclusions were jumped to, prematurely.
High profile big ticket sales always come with accusations of back room shenanigans, but the next project I want to highlight is all about complete and total transparency.
Self Checkout by Jack Butcher challenges the often hidden world of the art market by putting every thing on public display. As the white paper for the project explains, $74,211 was the total cost incurred by the artist to produce this work. Hardware, fabrication, labor, shipping, travel, booth fee, all in was $74,211. Unrounded. This total was posted on the wall showing the deficit. At the time the doors opened, the artist was in the hole almost $75k. At this point the audience had the opportunity to get involved. In person attendees could buy a receipt with a seed phrase on it allowing them to claim an NFT of the receipt later on. Collectors not in attendance could buy a receipt online, and optionally choose to have a paper receipt mailed to them. The receipt is the art, it represents the contribution to the artist. As each receipt was bought, the negative number on the wall decreased. It was perfectly transparent to everyone what the financial status of the project was at every moment. In person you could buy a receipt for $1 and watch the counter register that sale. The project documentation identified the three possible outcomes from the beginning.
This is interesting on so many levels. You could argue that in person attendees might have felt some social pressure to contribute, but the same can not be said for online buyers. With no predetermined collection cap, there was no risk of selling out so impulse buying driven by FOMO is also gone. As many receipts as were sold will be minted. Receipts however were printed on thermal paper, which is impermanent. In a few years those will be blank pieces of paper, this was chosen intentionally. The NFTs conversely are indelible, they will be there forever, no matter what, but if someone who bought one forgets to move it out of the auto generated wallet or loses the provided seed phrase, they will loose access to it. So there’s a lot of tension in various directions with that. Additionally the physical work itself was sold through a public and transparent auction, all bidding on-chain of course. In the end China’s X Museum acquired the 1/1 physical installation, and the receipt balance ended at almost $115k on the plus side. I think it’s safe to say this proved the experiment was a success.
Part of the fun was that on each receipt the buyer was allowed to add their signature, in turn contributing visually to the art they were buying. While this started off with people just writing their names, it didn’t take too long for people to start exploring the medium on it’s own. I saw artists drawing pictures and people piecing together concepts. I had to take the opportunity to use this meta commentary on art to reference another meta commentary on art, apologies to Mr. Baldessari.
Screenshot
In both cases, Beeple and Butcher, the audience is playing an important role in the art. If no one was there for the robot dogs to photograph, no one to take the free prints home, if no one bought receipts – both of these works would have been failures. The opposite happened and people couldn’t get enough. Looking around on social media for reactions outside of my circles, I saw a number of Basel attendees talking about how surprised they were that in the Zero 10 section the artists were right there talking to people and explaining their work, and how this was such a refreshing change from the usual blocker put up by galleries whose business models depend on keeping artist and collector at arms length. Back in 2021 I wrote about how in this new web3 space artists had all the power and warned that middlemen were already lining up to try and get their piece, but this connection between artist and collector is special and important and it would benefit the artists not to hand control over to anyone trying to build a wall between them.
In the years since sixspace closed (and since writing the above call to arms) I’ve occasionally felt the urge to open a gallery again, to be a part of it all again. I always stop short because I’m not sure what I have to offer here besides opinions and perspectives and experience. I have no desire at all to become a middle man or to throw sand into a situationship that works so much better with the blockchain lubing it up. And I’m much happier being a collaborator and contributor and facilitator, in whatever contexts that makes the most sense. In the end I think I would much rather people remember what I added, not what I took away.
As I think about where we’re at right now in the big art and social cycles I can’t help but remember that day back in Chicago listening to The Shape of Punk To Come with my coworkers. I’m reminded how what seemed so obvious to some of us seemed unfathomable, even insulting to others. I think about that and think about how people have talked about artists minting their work onto the blockchain, I think about how people are currently talking about artists using AI in their process. The excitement of what the future might bring seems so obvious to me, and I wonder how long it will take for others to recognize their blindspots, or if they never will and will just get passed by without ever realizing it?
As 2025 wraps and I think about what I know is coming in 2026, I can’t help but smile.