Dear MOCA: So What Do You Think about TezPole lol

In so many words...

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Dear M○C△,

So what do you think about Tezpole lol

Sincerely,

Top-Tier Tezos 

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Dear Top-Tier Tezos,

In a few words: I love it. But you didn’t come here for just a few words, you came here for the full monty, the perpendicular lines of thinking, the justifications and verbal assaults. Oh, I’m going to give them to you, don’t you worry. But please keep this very important point in mind as you read the rest of my column: I love the Tezpole, and I think it exemplifies everything right about crypto art, even while exemplifying everything wrong about it too.

But that’s just the great big bucket of ironies we all go fishing in everyday, ain’t it? 

The Tezpole itself —meaning the actual pillar-in-a-hotel-lobby covered in chicken wire and LED screens— is probably not worth celebrating. Because, man, what a farce. And from an organization that isn’t exactly flat-broke, either. While the following numbers are definitely outdated, if we look at the Tezos Foundation’s Biannual Report from March 2023, we’ll see that the Foundation possessed $471 Million USD (numbers reported from December 31st, 2022) in assets, with $20.5 million USD allotted for grants allocations over the course of 2023. This was their breakdown of held assets:

Now, do I think that a substantial amount from the Tezos Foundation coffers should have been put towards some kind of massive, immersive, awe-inspiring exhibition of the best art that the Tezos community has to offer? 

Not really.

Crypto art needs to escape this line of thinking wherein we throw copious funds at non-crypto locales and expect it to make any kind of material difference. The CoolCats balloon at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was a colossal waste of time and resources, in my opinion, a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, intended only to give CoolCats holders a momentary euphoria drip. Now, while I generally love and support IRL exhibitions of art, especially Tezos art (of which there is so much and which is so criminally underseen), doing so at a place like Miami Art Basel, which is such a scene and so honestly uninterested in crypto art, a game played on someone’s else’s court by someone else’s rules, strikes me as a lukewarm-at-best way to deploy funds. 

The Tezos Foundation was probably stuck between a rock and a hard place, having formerly been a title sponsor of Art Basel, now feeling a need to represent itself at such a globally recognized art-and-culture hub while not wanting to overextend unnecessary. I get that, and I sympathize with it. I don’t think a giant exhibition would have moved the cultural needle much, but compared to what took place, it would definitely have been preferable. 

The TezPole felt like a singularly terrible marriage of “We don’t want to do too much” with “We can’t just do nothing.” Not putting an an exhibition is one thing, putting on a ridiculously overpriced one is another, but to brand Tezos’ name to…well…this? 

Let’s just get to the point: The TezPole, in all its glory:

It was Nicholas Dimes who first seemed to draw our attention towards the toplit-pillar-wrapped-in-chicken-wire-and-also-with-a-dozen-misaligned-LED-screens that has since become affectionately known as TezPole, but once we all saw it, there was no unseeing it. This was how the Tezos Foundation decided to exhibit Tezos artwork: weakly, randomly, archaically, in what was a proud demonstration of neither display, nor artistry, nor blockchain. It was just there. This thing. Diminutive and cold. What is it? Who knows. What was its goal? Impossible to say. From the immediate reactions on Twitter, TezPole inspired only disdain, disappointment, and confusion. How could anyone think this was a good idea? Stuck between a rock and a hard place, the Tezos Foundation opted to shit itself, flail wildly, and wind up somehow even more stuck than before.

Which is what I meant when I said TezPole is the worst the crypto art world has to offer. Indecisive. Cloying. Reductive. The TezPole was an abominable disservice to the art and artists who make Tezos glow as it does. It was not a celebration but a denigration, a seeming confirmation to Tezos’ many detractors that “No, we don’t really care about what happens on our platform, we’re a third-rate blockchain with a difficult-to-monetize art community, who’ll we’ll now throw the tiniest of bones so they don’t feel totally abandoned.” It’s a ludicrous disappointment, and especially now, with so many artists across chains continuing to feel the sting of stagnated sales. I feel the same way towards so many terrible advertisements I see on TV, but, like, really who greenlit this? How many levels of corporate bureaucracy had to provide their stamp of approval?

The Tezos Foundation has already apologized for the fiasco. 

Alas, centralization has failed the crypto art community again. But the thing about crypto art is that, when centralized powers fail, we conjure this incredible capacity not to wither, not to rage, not to complain, but to reorient ourselves, restructure reality itself, organically reconfigure ourselves into a meaning-making machine. The way the Tezos community has reacted to TezPole is amongst the most interesting, most significant, and most heartening micro-moments I’ve seen in my crypto art life. 

Many people, such as EDust, have put into beautiful worlds what it has been like watching the Tezos community rally around the #TezPole symbol, using it as inspiration for a deluge of multi-styled, many-mooded artwork with the TezPole at its center. I’ve included a couple of my favorites here:

Still from ArtEzos Column (2023), by Lara Art. 

Still from Tezpole and the Brown Acid (2023), by Ke Visuals

Still from tezpole /8381 (2023) by Sam8

Still from Enjoy the #TEZPOLE Party (2023) by Firoxelia

Much gratitude to the performance artist Violet Bond for putting together this most wonderful compilation of statistics about the #tezpole usage on Tezos artworks, which communicates the staggering scope of this symbol’s spread. At the time of this writing, 693 artworks by 517 artists were created under this hashtag, resulting in an absolutely mind-blowing 76,106 minted editions. That is simply an unprecedented example of community engagement, and all around this one simple, terrible, ridiculous symbol. 

This is what crypto art is all about, baby. What makes it so profound and also so frustrating. It wasn’t just that these artists rallied around a symbol which could so easily have been crushing or deflating, it was that this entire thing arose organically, as a result of information spreading as haphazardly as it always does on social media, as a result of emotion being poured into expressiveness, so unpredictably, so suddenly. Colborn, on our podcast this week, saw this phenomenon rooted in the same high-expectation disappointment that turned the beloved Kevin, of Pixelmon infamy, into a timeless crypto art meme. In the face of meaningless, the crypto art community creates its own meaning through a combination of sheer effort and cooperation. 

Here, for a moment, Kiszkiloszki’s wise words bear mentioning:

Structurally, crypto art is an art movement affixed to all the geography-agnostic, culturally-colliding, hair-trigger, highly-emotive aspects of social media. How social media, namely Twitter, goes, we go. After seeing this TezPole explosion, it seems you cannot actually put on a true exhibition of crypto art —something curated or selective in any way— that reflects its reality. Because its reality is reactionary, momentary muchness. 

Only something which:

A) arises organically,

B) grows organically,

C) displays countless emotional angles,

D) is gatekept by awareness alone, 

can truly evoke the crypto art vision. You can’t plan for such a thing. People can try, and they have, but plenty of symbols pass through crypto art and go on their merry way into oblivion. There isn’t a rational explanation for what makes one cultural event worthy of becoming a phenomenon when so many others fade immediately into obscurity. Some combination of comedy, community tenacity, and awareness, but as far as I know, the calculus remains mostly undefined.

God knows this isn’t the first pathetic crypto art exhibition…

It is in moments like this that I remember how interwoven crypto art is with internet ideologies. All of them. We too often see the like-and-follower model of social media influence manifest in a star system of artists: heavy on the top, exhibiting gravitational pull. But we don’t often see this, the other side, the community side: Reddit phenomenons, meme-making, sudden onslaughts of action. I come to you today with no clear idea of how to harness such a thing, only this newfound reminder that it happens, it can happen, and if it has happened once then it can happen again. There is in crypto art the possibility for massive and sudden action, for magnetic support, for collectivity. We are perhaps not just drops in a pond, as we may sometimes feel, but a full-on pond in our own right. Others are a drop in us!

I don’t want to lose sight of this energy, or how quickly it can come together, or how it can radically reorient reality. What does a focused version of this look like? Is such a thing even possible? Can this madcap, decentralized cooperation be wielded at will? Could crypto art come together for anything but half-depressing comedy? How can this be used to make crypto art more egalitarian, better, more expressive? I don’t know any of these answers, but I’m wondering.

I wasn’t wondering before. I wouldn’t have even allowed myself to wonder.

So that’s what I think about TezPole…lol.

- Your Friendly Neighborhood Digital Art Museum,

M○C△