Dear MOCA: Are Collaborations Bad for Crypto Artists?
In so many words.
Please enjoy today’s DEAR MOCA column. Have questions you’d like answered? Have a thought you want us to respond to? Email us at hello@museumofcryptoart.com or submit your questions to our dedicated Google Form.
Dear MOCA,
How do you feel about all these artists collaborating on artworks? Part of me thinks it’s really important for artists to establish connections with each other, but another part of me thinks it devalues an artist’s market to put out work where they’re one of a number of artists who worked on it. Like the XCOPY/Moxarra/Neurocolor collab that came out for NonNFTFest that is well below the market value of any other XCOPY piece. I get that artists need to survive any way they can and this brings publicity maybe, but it still feels weird that it’s become such a common tactic. Thoughts?
Sincerely,
OneArtistOneArtwork?
Dear OneArtistOneArtwork?,
I actually love this topic so much. Thank you for bringing it up! This is definitely something I’ve noticed recently, that many artists —probably because the market is so depressed and so difficult to endure— are turning to collaborations, leveraging the strength-in-numbers approach to try and generate not only sales but interest. MLow’s recent 12-person collaboration featuring folks like Andrés Zighelboim, CECHK, and the Perfesser —among others— is just one example. Async.Art’s Forever Supper experiment is yet another. But there are tons of examples we can point to, and this isn’t a new phenomenon either, it’s been a staple since crypto art’s very beginnings.
But the question remains: Do collaborations inherently devalue the contributing artists? It is strange that the NonNFT drop mentioned above has a floor price below XCOPY’s Max Pain Open Edition despite having 1/10th of the supply (Not that floor price is ever a good indicator of quality, but in this respect, it’s somewhat educational).
Nevertheless, my personal opinion is that it’s silly to ever deny oneself a short-term survival opportunity because of some long-term fear of damaging one’s market. And it’s equally silly to deny oneself a powerful artistic experience because our egoistic idea of “value” may somehow suffer.
I think the part of this conversation which often gets lost is that crypto art is a long-term art movement with an uncertain lifespan. So let’s escape from the present moment and jump into the semi-distant future. Let’s think about how crypto art will be conceptualized…hmmm…let’s say 10 years from now.
This is a topic I discussed at length with HiddenForces when he came on the MOCA LIVE podcast a few weeks ago, and it was his opinion that crypto art is already such a wide-ranging cultural movement that it has both
A) transcended simply visual art, and
B) already attained historical significance.
Which, depending on your crypto art POV, makes a lot of sense. If crypto art is indeed the things we believe it to be —an artistic revolution, an aesthetic extension of the internet itself, the home of digital art’s bleeding edge— then how could HiddenForces’ points not both hold true?
Crypto art does have a definitive and unique dialectic, a set of core principles, internal epochs and sub-movements. I’ve written like 400,000 total words on crypto art and have not even scratched the surface of understanding it; there is simply so much muchness. The music and poetry and literature and performance that are minted as blockchain assets, or that engage with crypto art tenets, exemplify and capture crypto art’s spirit as much as the purely visual artistry that emerged in the movement’s earliest days. Cryptocurrency is itself a broader economic movement that will need to be included in any 21st-century financial discussion, and crypto art is the expressive, cultural manifestation of cryptocurrency’s ethos. So it definitely feels wide-ranging enough to be considered a cultural movement with a larger scope than just visual art itself.
I may, however, be burying the lede. The Museum of Modern Art just last week acquired a tokenized artwork: Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised (2022), which has been on prominent display in their lobby since November of 2022. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art accepted a large donation from Cozomo de Medici earlier this year including pieces by Claire Silver, Pindar van Arman, Yam Karkai, and many others. The Centre Pompidou in Paris has acquired NFTs, the big auction houses —Christie’s and Sotheby’s specifically— have long dabbled in auctioning NFT lots, and most of this coming amidst a bear market in which NFTs have attained a kind of sardonic “Remember those?” connotation.
If you don’t know much about academia —at least American academia— in the year 2023, know that it is a cutthroat world full of extremely-brilliant and financially-crippled PhD’s all trying to stand out from the crowd. Simply put, crypto art is too vast and too interesting and too influential in its usage of generative technologies, AI technologies, display technologies, etc. for art historians to gloss it over. In fact, the opposite is almost certain:
Art historians and thinkers and academics are going to descend on this space en masse hoping to be among the first to tell its story and analyze its place in the artistic continuum. On MOCA LIVE the other week, MLow and I discussed a number of individuals who are writing about the space from within it: MontyReport, Zeneca, Leapxyz for example, and of course RightClickSave is a wonderful home for high-end crypto art discussion. But I’m talking academic journals, I’m talking college classes, I’m talking retrospectives and exhibitions all over the world, all the time. I’m talking mainstream, high-school-art-class-type shit. Even if crypto art ceased to exist suddenly and immediately, right after you finish reading this column for instance, its staggering importance would remain. As a direct evolution of digital art, as a workshop for cutting-edge tech, as a breeding ground for artworks that attain sexy, high-dollar-figure valuations, it will be fodder for capital-A Academia going forward, and it will only increase in importance as folks use it to make a name for themselves.
We can go into the further implications —good and bad— of that another time. But let’s get back to collaborations.
To me, many of these specific artwork collaborations —owing to the number of their collaborators, the geographic agnosticism of their artists, the blended and sometimes conflicting aesthetic senses at play here— are a picture-perfect representation of all that makes crypto art special, and thus what makes crypto art historically important. Crypto art is not really a monoculture as much as it is a superculture. A superculture as Reddit is a superculture. It does not eliminate cultural and geographic and identity-based characteristics, but blends them together into a bowl of chunky soup. I cannot imagine a world in which representations of that fact are not seen as supremely important. Let’s go back to the NonNFT example. XCOPY is an anonymous-but-probably-European glitch artist known for making monsters and abstractions. Moxarra is a Mexican pop artist known for deep integration with crypto and pop culture. Neurocolor is also a Mexican artist, but works with gothic themes and Japanese-style imagery. We get to have these artists all represented in a single artwork where their styles are both clearly represented and also convergent. That, my friends, is new and bold, especially when considering the startling number of similarly successful collaborations that exist in this space. For further exploration, simply look through Zack Yanger’s (Roses) SuperRare page.
I rest my case, because I can.
Frankly, I’m surprised at the periodic distaste I see for collaborations, but I think it has a lot to do with this aforementioned idea that someone might inadvertently devalue their own market. I’ve heard very smart people who make very wonderful art argue very compellingly that the protection of one’s market is a prime necessity. I hear them, I respect them, and yet I can sum up my reaction pretty succinctly:
Fuck that.
The caveat to my above rant about future art history is that we do not know what the artistic continuum will glom onto as crypto art’s defining features. There’s no way of knowing, and it does not necessarily depend on what’s being seen as important today. The Impressionists were formed as a kind of collective in the 1860’s but were routinely criticized or laughed off as amateurish or talentless. It took until the mid-to-late 1870’s before they saw any kind of wider acceptance. Hell, Alfred Sisley died in poverty. Monet didn’t attain financial security until well into the 1880’s.
We may know what the future holds, but we know bupkis about what it will hold dear.
All this talk about future markets is so damn silly. Crypto art itself is an exception to every conceivable historical rule of what constitutes an art movement: It defies culture, geography, style, mood, technique; even its patron saint, the blockchain, is used only sparingly as more than a distribution tool. We are all in uncharted waters here. Why is that not more prominently understood? Who knows how this thing evolves or who gets future acclaim or whose names affix themselves to the inside of history textbooks and why? Hell, I couldn’t stand to guess, and I’ve written more about crypto art than literally all but maybe like two people on the planet. The market will expand and constrict unpredictably, and every career will follow a similarly unpredictable arc.
So, I don’t know, OneArtistOneArtwork?. I think it’s pretty wonderful that I can own a Moxarra/XCOPY/Neurocolor collaboration for a somewhat affordable price. Maybe the actual coup of collaboration is in disincentivizing today’s marketeers from collecting, so the rest of us —who actually enjoy this shit— can have the pleasure of collecting something ourselves. Maybe collaborations like Async’s First Supper (2020) will come to have outsized importance in our future understanding of crypto art, the very proof —along with all its collaborative brethren— that it was crypto art’s de facto most important cultural development in the first place.
Do what makes you happy today, what fulfills you today, what allows you to eat today, and let the future unfold how it may. As with many things, general life advice often applies to crypto art too. Because, shocker, crypto art is just a new node in a much longer legacy. We might be new, but we’re also a part of the past, just as we’ll be a past part of some new future soon enough.
It’s really not that hard.
- Your Friendly Neighborhood Digital Art Museum,
MOCA