DEAR M○C△: How Do We Attract the Right Kinds of People to Crypto Art?
In so many words...
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Dear M○C△,
As I write this, Bitcoin teeters on the precipice of its all-time high. By the time you read this, it may already have toppled over the edge. This means one thing: lots of interest from lots of new people. They will come here, predominantly, to make quick cash, and some will. But just like what happened in 2021, some will become attracted to crypto art, for a whole host of reasons. We have an opportunity here to convince all these new people that there’s something here worthy of their attention, let alone investment. What are the best and worst things crypto art culture can do/be today to help convince the right kind of people to find, enter, and contribute to crypto art?
Sincerely,
The Redcoats are Coming
Dear The Redcoats are Coming,
You can smell it too, can’t you? The sweaty must of anticipation. The open-mouthed breath, unwashed hair, the dust. These are stampede scents, and they’re only getting stronger. I’d be shocked if we’re anywhere near the top or the end of whatever’s happening here, or if we’re somehow off-base in thinking that a veritable flood is preparing to flow down the “Crypto → NFTs → Crypto Art” pipeline.
Yet, I’m glad you asked this question, The Redcoats are Coming, because despite the sense that something important has begun in the wider crypto world, crypto art and NFTs seem stuck in the bear. Sure, an Alien Punk sold for 16 million, EtherRocks have been changing hands, XCOPYs and Fidenzas continue being gobbled up by collectors, but top-end market moves have never been a good indicator of crypto art’s overall health, at least as long as I’ve been here. Every coin (except the ones in our bags, am I right?) seems to be running up at an incredible pace, yet there’s a latency in public attention towards crypto-at-large. And if new participants are slow in entering crypto, they’ll be even slower finding NFTs and the crypto art downstream of it.
As proof of my assertion, I offer you…well, it’s just whole vibe here in crypto art, where the recent stream of notorious, euphoric windfalls is counterbalanced by the continued despairing cries of almost every artist I know.
Here’s a vibe check from this morning:
And then there are the numbers.
Though Bitcoin ever-so-briefly poked its head above an all-time high price, NFT trading is as stagnant as ever:
Yes, attention and money and fanfare are undoubtedly marching into the larger crypto ecosystem, but neither have yet arrived in NFTs. We can see the few big sales as leading indicators, but such loud and large investments have occurred all throughout the bear market; I don’t think they much indicate anything, to be honest.
In my opinion, the only thing that will ever attract the masses to crypto is “Price go up,” for a while. Price do be going up, tho.
“Price go up” is also a Trojan Horse. A lot of the folks attracted into crypto by Bitcoin’s price action will soon find themselves looking a bit further afield, first probably to Ethereum, then to altcoins, and on to memecoins, NFTs, Discords, crypto Twitter, SuperRare, Objkt, NFT Conferences, complete indoctrination in the Cult of Crypto before they even know what happened.
I am absolutely confident in this flow of attention; it happened to me and many others around me in 2021. It is also a natural reflection of how blockchain-based wealth has historically flowed. I point you to the “NFT Money Flow” assertion, which I first saw on batsoupyum’s feed, though I’m not sure its exact origin:
If this is the way money is going to flow, it is the way attention will flow as well. As Colborn reminds me constantly (borrowing the idea from Meltem Demirors), narrative follows price, not the other way around. If people are making massive money in crypto from skyrocketing-prices or airdrops or what-have-you, and they thus become more entrenched in crypto culture or crypto Twitter, they will feel the same desire as their forerunners to turn newfound wealth into valuable cultural affectation. It honestly doesn’t matter what that cultural affectation looks like at the outset, whether it’s collectibles/PFPs (as it was in the last cycle), or Metaverse assets, or something unforeseen, because that money —bringing attention with it— will flow downward to whatever is more sought-after, that which is even rarer and even harder to otherwise acquire .
Crypto art, glorious crypto art, which is downstream of everything. It all flows here, to the source, eventually.
In summation: Crypto art is inevitable. I don’t see us as being sufficiently powerful to change that paradigm, no matter what we do or how we act. Maybe that answers the first part of your question, The Redcoats are Coming: We don’t need to convince anyone of anything. As long as wealth craves ways to flaunt itself, which it always does, crypto art will continue to be the best store of cultural value that currently exists on the blockchain, Punks not withstanding.
Now I want to address your second question, concerning our ability to attract the “right kind of people” to crypto art…
…or lack thereof.
Unlike in 2021, crypto art in 2024 is fully interwoven with the traditional art world’s tendrils: auction-houses, collectors, and museums all have an established presence here.
It’s unclear what a returned hyperfinancialization of crypto art will do to these traditional art world institutions and to their networks, but that outcome, I suspect, will orient the composition of our future crypto art cohort more than we are ready to admit.
It will be these familiar names —Sotheby’s, Christie’s, MoMA, Tate, Pompadou, etc.— that the multitudes will likely flock to for insight and direction. We probably can’t fight that either. In the court of public trust, brand names win nearly every time.
But these institutions will act as an unwitting and highly-effective filter. They are flypaper, and those who approach crypto art as a pure money-making mechanism will be stuck there, their still-twitching bodies waiting to be feasted upon by the influencers who lurk nearby.
Perfect.
Through the filter will fall all manner of strange and curious creatives. They will come from varied origins, demonstrate different intentions, boast dissimilar skillsets, and become attracted to crypto art for entirely unique reasons.
Which is exactly what happened to me. I’m not sure I —at the time, an out-of-work waiter with a fiction-writing habit and a PFP addiction— would have qualified as anyone’s idea of “the right kind of person.”
But people often surprise you, when given the opportunity to be surprising.
So if added attention on crypto art is inevitable, and if we can’t really affect the arrival of various good souls into crypto art, then call me quixotic, but I think the best thing —the only thing— we can do in this scenario is to, each of us, take responsibility for making crypto art as creative, weird, and welcoming as possible.
Because if we provide tools, discourse, and creative spirit as a baseline, then when people like me do unwittingly find themselves in the crypto art world, they stand a much better chance of becoming the right kind of people.
There plenty of things already working in crypto art’s favor. It’s bizarre, for one. It’s dramatic and thus addictive. But most important of all is the fact that crypto art incorporates cutting-edge technology quicker than nearly any other community (which is why we are all like 99th percentile AI-literate, simply by being here). Once you find the cutting-edge, it’s really hard to go elsewhere and find yourself similarly energized.
It’s easy to fall in love with crypto art. We have collectively built a place that’s easy to fall in love with.
Unfortunately, however, it’s also easy to become so frustrated by crypto art culture that you simply cannot stay here while retaining your mental health.
And propagating this is something we should (god, I don’t even want to say it)...maybe…try to…when we can…if it’s not too much trouble…avoid…?
I can feel the hot breath of criticism already on my neck, so let me just say:
We should still speak truth to power, always
We should still be ourselves, always
We should still be honest and raw, always
No, I’m not telling artists how to live their lives, never
Dude, you’re putting words in my mouth, just let me explain.
We all know the kinds of people who found their way into NFTs in 2021. These are money-seeking missiles, and if they sniff an arbitrage opportunity, they will contort themselves to capitalize on it. We cannot stop the incursion of these new influencers, new flippors, new grifters. They are as numberless as grains of sand on the beach. And those people will look upon crypto art solely as something to suck dry and leave behind, so it doesn’t really matter in their case how we act or what we discuss or what opportunities are available, because they don’t care about that anyways.
But we can inadvertently discourage the good folks.
We can be nasty to newcomers because we fear them. We can be exclusionary in the name of preservation. We can gatekeep our platforms to those who we know, we can laugh when they get grifted, we can complain and rage at every new development in crypto art that we don’t necessarily agree with.
But such activity will only ultimately harm us. Others will adopt welcoming voices, I assure you, especially if they see some financial opportunity in doing so. These people will gain a following, gain influence, gain market share, and end-up bringing into their orbit a number of people who otherwise might do real good down here with the rest of us.
That will probably happen anyways, but it is our responsibility to offer a counterbalance. We can be as creative as possible. We can be kinder and more hospitable. We can provide as many interesting opportunities to as many people as possible in the hopes that the bright, shining souls who found this place will decide to make their home in it as we have.
We can’t keep waves from breaking on the shore. We can only control how we greet them as they do.
- Your Friendly Neighborhood Digital Art Museum,
M○C△