DEAR MOCA: The TASCHEN Crypto Art Book Is Making Me Miserable
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 M○C△,
I, and many others, were left out —it feels like pretty ignorantly— from the TASCHEN crypto art book that released during NFTParis last week. As someone who has been making art in this space for a very long time, it really hurt that my contributions weren’t seen as “important” enough to even get a mention in a literally giant book that included so many others. Obviously, I’m really happy for everyone who was recognized, but I’m so angry. I’m so angry that others are writing the crypto art story and so many people I know who are brilliant artists are left to the wayside. Is history really going to forget about all of us? Are we all really going to just become footnotes because some big collectors didn’t mention us when they put their giant definitive crypto art books out?
Sincerely,
Bummed-Out
Dear Bummed-Out,
Boy, do I feel your pain. Sure, I don’t have the historical provenance which it sounds like you do, nor did I contribute in any way to the aesthetic or conceptual development of this movement from its inception. But as someone who has written perhaps the most actual verbiage on crypto art of anyone alive (at this point, something like 400,000 actual words and growing), I too feel the sting of being excluded from what is being posited as a major new historiography of crypto art. I mean, I couldn’t even get a blurb in there? Not a footnote, not a quote, not a description?
Which is only to say that you’re not alone in your grief, as I’m sure you’re well aware.
The day TASCHEN and Robert Alice’s On NFTs released was an odd one: seeing all this exultation from the many artists, collectors, and curators who were included juxtaposed with the disappointment and outrage of those who weren’t.
For the record, I have zero problem with anyone’s exultation. It’s immensely validating to be included in an absolute tome like this, especially one so sumptuously designed and highly praised. We’re all artists of a kind, and we not only feast on external validation, it’s vital for our practices themselves. Sure, we can momentarily indulge the admirable, optimistic little assertions about “Real artists make art regardless of sales and attention,” but back here on Planet Earth, sales and attention are really quite important if we’re to outduel the everyday hardships which being an artist bring with it.
We should be celebrating our wins. We should be celebrating them every single time, no exceptions.
And we must celebrate the TASCHEN book, in addition to all other crypto art books, and I want that on the record. Writing about art is obviously near and dear to me, and considering the sheer largesse which is the task of publishing a book, the countless steps involved, the moving parts, the manifold choices made by real people in small rooms over endless hours, there is simply no way that our torturous exclusion justifies a denigration the thing itself.
I’d like us to remain conscious of a couple realities applicable in the putting together of a book like On NFTs:
There are only so many pages, and only so much space, and every book will need to cut-off inclusions somewhere. Since there are only 101 artists represented in the book, then artists numbered 102, 103, and 104 will suffer the same fate as those who have done nothing for the space. A shame, but a truth.
Nobody publishing a book like On NFTs is doing so because it’s some fantastically profitable endeavor. Books, let alone comically-large books about artistry, are not generally money-makers. So we have to assume that this was a labor of love (isn’t it obvious by looking at it/), and if it were indeed a labor of love, then the process of exclusion could not have been done with malintent or carelessness.
“Forgive them, father, for they know not what they have done.”
I also think it’s important that we unmarry the social rhetoric around the book from the rhetoric of the book itself. To its credit, On NFTs doesn’t ever claim to be a comprehensive history of crypto art. Nor do the other various crypto art books of which I’m aware. Sure, The NFT Yearbook claims to be the “first-ever record of this space as an NFT and IRL physical copy,” which, I don’t know, sure; and On NFTs says it is “the first major art history survey of this field,” which like, do I find it slightly insulting that TASCHEN implies that every other survey of crypto art is somehow less than major? A little, sure, but that’s marketing for you.
The only folks seeming to claim that On NFTs is either comprehensive or fully encapsulative of crypto art are those who had their bags pumped by it.
As usual, social media is mostly (if not entirely) to blame for us feeling how we feel.
Understanding these realities does not, unfortunately, change the reality of how we feel. We feel what we feel. We were excluded, as were many of our friends. We (well not me, per se) were here building this crypto art thing from the outset. We were the ones planting seeds again and again in infertile ground until there emerged an environment ripe for enormous-art-book-making in the first place! How can anyone claim to be telling the story of crypto art without mentioning us?
Situations like this force us to embrace cognitive dissonance. Even if we logically understand the limitations of the form and the incitement of our own emotion, we are nevertheless currently miserable, owing to our exclusion from a large-scale survey of a thing we contributed much of our lives to. At the same time, we know that we can/should/must be exhilarated by the fact that someone has put together some comprehensive survey of something we cared enough about to contribute much of our lives to.
We simply have to hold two competing viewpoints in our head at once. Fortunately, crypto art is basically one big exercise in cognitive dissonance to begin with.
I might argue that a kind of dual-consciousness about the nature, mechanisms, and purpose of crypto art is vital to navigating this movement intelligently while also keeping it from eating us. We have to simultaneously understand that
This is a place full of profiteering and market manipulation and social media enervation, otherwise we won’t be able to accurately contextualize what we see around us while also believing that
The art matters most, and our creation of art has a larger philosophical and/or social purpose. Because without that, the crypto art market monster will destroy us.
Most of us have already internalized this cognitive dissonance. We wear it nonchalantly, like an earring we never take out. We are constantly feeling pain at the same time as we feel pride or joy. We’re happy for the sales and success of others even as we wonder “Why not me?” We know —or at some point we knew— how unlikely it is that the larger public will ever care about our work, yet we force ourselves to grow, evolve, make, and mint anyways.
This On NFTs situation is no different. We fear our own diminishment even as we must bask in the fact that crypto art is getting some much-due recognition. Both things are true, both are felt, and rather than repress that dissonance, we need to embrace it.
But again, that doesn’t lessen the sting, nor does it diminish the rage. Hell, I’ve just written this piece, and I have still have rage. Of course I have rage! So many artists I admire, who I have written about at length myself, were left out of that book. Artists like Angie Taylor, Miss AL Simpson, OficinasTK, AnonymousNobody, MightyMoose, Abysms and many other truly fundamental figures A) in crypto art but also in B) my own understanding of crypto art. I learned about this movement through the MOCA Genesis Collection, and the works and styles and talent of these artists were crucial in my own conception of this movement. To leave so many of these instrumental individuals out of any survey of crypto art is inherently farcical.
Apropos your anxieties, Bummed-Out, a bit of cognitive dissonance might do you some good. On one hand, history can’t forget about you, because I and all the people you’ve touched won’t forget about you. On the other hand, history will definitively forget about you, because it forgets about all of us, and if it does somehow remember us, it may well turn us into merchandised iconography like it did to Basquiat, Pollack, Warhol, Kahlo, the list goes on.
Our job is to be eminently aware of this reality and also ignore it completely. Which is good: It keeps us from getting too high or too low.
It keeps us marching straight on the right path, which isn’t a path as much as it is a tightrope…
Over shark-infested waters…
inside a volcano…
which is itself carved into an arena full of spectators shooting at us with blow-darts…
and there’s very loud music playing…
and you are not dressed for the occasion.
All of which is to say: Focus on keeping balance. There’s nothing else to be done.
- Your Friendly Neighborhood Digital Art Museum,
M○C△