At Long Last, M○C△ Presents: Art DeCC0s
An Entirely Redefined Vision for PFPs (Trust Us)
On March 8th of this year, a most innocuous beginning:
Both the message and groupchat itself came from our Programming Director and CryptoArg founder Julian Brangold. This was just after he, myself (Max), Museum Founders Colborn Bell and Rene Schmidt, and artists Anubis3100, DaïmAlYad, and Untitled,xyz all spent the previous hours falling down the rabbit-hole of one particularly hare-brained, high-octane, and half-baked idea…
And that’s where this whole journey, which would last six months, include hundreds-of-thousands of individual artworks, span thousands of laborious man-hours, take up over a terabyte of raw data, and take the Museum in an altogether new direction, began…
In the past year, our team has changed, crypto has changed, and crypto art itself has changed, but M○C△’s ethos has not.
Our mission has always been to support crypto art however we can: with criticism, with tools, with Metaverse spaces, with curation, with exhibitions, with events. And so as we brainstormed what the future of M○C△ would look like, we thought perhaps we could contribute to crypto art as well as support it.
Which brought about our group-chat, which brought about all that work, which brought about…
against all odds…
surprising nobody more than ourselves…
a 10,000-piece PFP.
Friends, supporters, dear readers, and esteemed patrons of the arts, it is our absolute pleasure, to introduce you to…
Art DeCC0s, a 10,000-piece PFP collection with unmatched aesthetics, astounding technical creativity, and a layered conceptual backbone, which we believe altogether earns it a place in crypto art’s long-form pantheon.
In just about one month, on October 10th, we’ll launch Art DeCC0s into an unpredictable crypto art landscape.
In the meantime, it is our pleasure (believe me) to spend the coming weeks talking all about how Art DeCC0s came to be, how we made them, and what they mean. It’s a singular honor to, at long last, show you what we’ve been working on.
Today, some backstory:
The Idea of Art DeCC0s
Colborn first coined the name on March 28th, telling our groupchat:
That we would be here more than six months later with the same Art DeCC0s moniker is testament to how sticky the name’s implications are.
Decentralization, fair use, remixing, abundance, irony, creativity, etc.
Art DeCC0s has proven itself an altogether sticky project, the product of thousands of combined man-hours, countless experimentations and iterations and tests, multiple workflows, a hundred directions, but something which has retained its essential shape since the very beginning.
Now, we are not blind to the irony of the situation: An avowed crypto art institution staking our reputation on a a 10,000-piece PFP? Who thought that was a good idea?
But let me just say: We’re extremely confident in what we’ve made here.
Confident because, frankly, PFPs have on-the-whole let us down.
At the height of 2021/2022’s NFT Bull Run, a dozen plodding PFPs were being minted every day, their alliterative names turned stultifying, their aesthetics so categorically disappointing that the term “NFT” itself became noxious to the general public.
Each project had some version of the same goal: to be the next Bored Ape Yacht Club, which I suppose meant running up to a speculatively lavish floor price, making a mountain of false promises over the course of many months, systematically alienating their holders, failing to capitalize in any real way on any shred of market momentum they’d gained, refusing to put their mint funds to any creative use, and ultimately crashing back down to worthlessness, appearing in hindsight much more a cautionary tale than a movement sparked.
And yet, we are on record —or at least I am— as believing in the possible artistic merit inherent in PFPs.
The very first feature essay I published for the Museum, back in January of 2022, was “The End of Art (as we know it) (again), or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bored Apes.” Despite its deliberately bombastic title, the essay was meant to examine whether, underneath all the marketeering, there was something artistically interesting about PFPs as it related to identity-formation via digital images. I find myself struck even now by something Hackatao told me for that essay:
“It is an era where we live with multiple lives…You have your own physical self and your digital presence and all of what you curate that to be. So to identify with a piece of art this closely…where these [PFP] avatars are used, it’s a very interesting phenomenon.”
Yes! Despite what a frenzied market did to PFPs, our identifying so closely with art objects, the potential to have our identity represented in a digital ecosystem via only a single image, that remains revolutionary even today! Just as many CryptoPunk holders today are inseparable socially from their avatars (think Claire Silver’s pink-haired Punk, 6529’s hooded Punk, Cozomo de' Medici’s Zombie Punk), the essential promise of the PFP is to let us to select digital emissaries for ourselves, and via some combination of that digital emissary’s aesthetics and the values of its community, we can individually communicate ourselves and what we believe. Over time, the digital identity and the avatar become more and more intertwined.
That promise, however, has been systematically destroyed by so, so, so many sub-par PFPs. Most “communities,” should they even continue to exist, have allegiance only to floor prices, and they shatter entirely once value evaporates. Most projects proved themselves satisfied with thoughtless aesthetics, uninteresting copycat traits, obvious rarity systems, and a complete lack of conceptual thought.
Thus, if M○C△ were seriously going to release a 10,000-piece PFP, we knew it needed to address all of these things.
The aesthetics needed to be unmatched, both in creativity and variety. We believe they are.
The traits needed to be thoughtful, additive, and all of them worthy of inclusion. We believe we have accomplished that.
A pre-designed rarity system being banal, we wanted value to emerge organically based on crypto culture’s unpredictable interactions with our project, similar to Rutherford Chang’s and Sovrn’s Cents. We have done our best to assure that, while maintaining some surprises therein.
Finally, we wanted to buttress every single choice we made with a conceptual underpinning. Nothing in Art DeCC0s is accidental. Everything serves to poke and prod at greater, unanswerable questions in the realms of value, AI, identity, and profiteering.
As we internally began to answer the first question —”Why a PFP?”— a most important response came back to us from the abyss:
“Well, how are you going to do it?”
Next week, right here (and on Twitter in the interim) we’ll talk about the entire six-month process by which Art DeCC0s took first form and eventually came to life.
Until then…
Your friendly neighborhood art writer,
-Max
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