DEAR MOCA: What Are We All Still *Doing* Here
The perfect question for a New Year, 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.
First of all, Happy Bitcoin ETF Day everyone. We did it.
Now, before we begin, I wanted to extend a massive Thank You!!! to everyone who responded to last week’s newsletter. If we’re going to get together, all of us, each week in this place, I want us all to have a bit of input into the decor, so to speak. As such, I’d like to highlight a couple of your comments (which will also feed into today’s topic):
“...We are lacking much unbiased art exposition especially in art from the bourgeoisie as well as the new artists. Let's even have a seasoning of criticism. Light some fire with an honest opinion and maybe give us some drama...I am just saying that there are certain aspects of art communities that gets the kiss kiss treatment coz someone doesn't want to get on the bad side of the rich, powerful and famous. But the one pointing fingers at the dust under the carpet could be MOCA.”
“As for content, I think anything that is timely, controversial, and is talked about is great. I think ridiculous cryptodrama commentary is great. For instance, some people think that Steamboat Willy NFTs are the height of sticking it to the man, others think it is inane (I'm kind of in this camp). Shit like that. Or more serious stuff like: Will EFTs be allowed by our moronic government and what happens if they aren't? Why are people so willing to part with their money for utter crap but they don't buy good stuff? What does it take for people not to buy crap?”
“Showing artists: if they are emerging, yes, not same old, same old. However it's not a must for me.”
“I like…the relaxed vibe of…your Spaces: a friendly chill hangout that is about something. No shilling just chilling. 😄”
Okay, and now onto today’s question.
Dear M○C△,
New Year, time to adjust, time to reconsider. Question on my mind for a long time is “What are we all still doing here?” You have people saying crypto art is dead, you have people arguing over chains, artists saying do this do that. Not gonna hold you to your answer or anything, but what’s do you think is the point of all this, from where you sit, right this second?
Sincerely,
WhyBother?
Dear WhyBother?
A question I admittedly think about all the time! What are we all still doing here? And not in the sense of:
“I think it’s time to leave this place, let’s get out of here, come on guys what’s the hold-up, let’s go, we gotta move, it’s coming for us, I can hear it getting closer, what are you doing why are you just standing there why aren’t we leaving, oh nooooooooo…”
but more in the sense of:
“What are we attempting to accomplish in and with crypto art?”
Which at this moment, on January 10, 2024, feels like a very interesting question.
Surely, there are substantial subsets of the artistic and dev and influencer populations that merely want to make some cash and then bounce. If they accidentally end up contributing to the evolution of a nascent, internet-reflective art movement, it’s only incidental.
But the rest of us, who have maybe achieved a bit of whatever shallow intent first drew us here, or are otherwise simply sticking around to see what’ll happen; What is it we want to do with crypto art? What do we want crypto art to become?
WhyBother?, I want to try answering your question from two different perspectives: That of the We and that of the Me. A note, however: The “What are WE all still doing here?” aspect of the question is difficult to answer because it requires applying one voice onto a collective, and at that, a collective which is extremely, beautifully, maddeningly diverse in its thinking. You didn’t ask me specifically “What are you still doing here,” but the beautiful part of “we” is that it always implies the inclusion of all its individual members.
Let’s start with the comments ya’ll submitted to us last week, after I called for advice on how to better run this newsletter. A few important trends stood out to me:
I think it’s telling that you almost universally seek serious art criticism unmarried from the slapdash ramblings of Twitter.
I think it’s telling that multiple people want me to lean into so-called “drama,” which seems to mean engaging in discourse about current events that isn’t always kind or safe.
I think it’s telling that you want to see emerging artists highlighted (for how else does an art movement evolve than through the newly-integrated talents of its freshest members?).
And most of all I think it’s telling that you want this place to feel friendly and comfortable. I always imagined this newsletter as a cozy living room we’re all taking respite in for a short while.
At the intersection of these desires is perhaps the truth of the thing: What you want from me, in this limited, arena is a diminutive version different of what we seek from crypto art at-large.
I constantly say on the podcast, “I don’t have an answer for this but…” whereafter I go on to identify some abstract issue I take with crypto art culture. And that kind of encompasses what I personally am still doing here.
Allow me a minor digression.
I tend not to agree with Pablo R. Fraile’s terse and reactive sentiment (above) that crypto art is dead, and while I think the blockchain itself has a greater fate beyond the reaches of our fair art movement, I don’t think that only one of the two can survive: digital art or crypto art. But I also don’t think they’re interchangeable. If one makes digital art which is not crypto referential, does not emerge from the cesspool of opinionation and madhattery which is Twitter, does not engage with blockchain mechanics in any meaningful way, I don’t think it qualifies necessarily as crypto art. I wrote about this a long time ago for RightClickSave, but the medium an artist uses is not necessarily indicative of their participation in any given art movement. It gets dicey with crypto art because this movement doesn’t reside in any one place, existing somewhere in the cross-section of aesthetics, intent, and technological foundation. But take, for example, the Norman Rockwell Foundation’s announcement that they’ll be minting unreleased Rockwell photographs as NFTs. This is not crypto art. It’s obviously not crypto art. It doesn’t want to be, and we don’t want it to be either. But it doesn’t have to be. Others are allowed to use NFT technology and not crossover into our weird, wonky, internet-addled and anarchic atmosphere.
This I know, but explaining why I know this, well, that’s more difficult. Herein, I feel the upper limits of my knowledge. And also where I start to question myself, my qualifications, my certainty. Maybe I’m nowhere near the best judge of crypto art’s specificities, being that I’ve only been here since 2021 (I missed most of the fun, it seems). But since most of the folks I know who’ve been here much longer feel more or less the same, I wander onwards undeterred.
This is what binds you and I and most of us in crypto art, even if we don’t realize it. It is, I believe, the crux of what we’re still doing here everyday: We are wandering onwards undeterred.
Each and every day, I see new questions arising, sparked by newly-proffered information. New sales, new technologies, new beefs between famous figures. And then we all go manic online with memes and poetics and threads and callbacks in an attempt to make sense of the day’s frenzy. Today I got to have a wonderful conversation Danny O’Brien, a Senior Fellow at Filecoin, and one of the things I most admire about Danny’s history as both a decentralization-maximalist and internet activist, is how he very keenly learned long ago that an integral part of fighting for internet rights is identifying to the public, first, what those rights even are, and second, how they’re being impinged.
This interests me not just on a legal level, but a cultural one. We don’t know enough. Can we ever? Too much is happening, and painfully few of us —perhaps none of us, period— have enough context to make sense of it all comprehensively. That’s not our fault; gleaning greater context from one’s present circumstance is a blistering task, fit only for bodhisattvas.
Nevertheless, the humble homosapien is a logical beast. She seeks to understand, and thus master her surroundings. Call it an evolutionary advancement: If we know where the edible mushrooms often grow, during what season, and what they smell like, we’re more likely to avoid accidentally ingesting some sinister toadstool. And so we instinctively want to make sense of the world, but crypto art’s is a very fast, very frustrating, very illogical world. A proudly illogical world even! What else does all this memecoin fever, influencer nonsense, and endless PFP derivation together communicate? Crypto go up, crypto go down. Nonsense. Project worth much, project worth nothing. Inane. Good art, bad art (that’s a big one). Contradictory. There is no rationality to be gleaned in any of this! Crypto art functions based on happenstance, subjectivity, and the randomness of an attention economy.
This, I assert, is the core of all the comments I captured at the beginning of this newsletter:
“...We are lacking much unbiased art exposition especially in art from the bourgeoisie as well as the new artists. Let's even have a seasoning of criticism. Light some fire with an honest opinion and maybe give us some drama…”
What is this but a desire to see some kind of sensible perspective applied to otherwise senseless situations? Art criticism emerges from a desire to justify an artwork’s quality despite all the subtleties and themes that may not be immediately present. “Is this artwork good? Why is this good? Help me understand!” Who among us does not feel this way?
“As for content, I think anything that is timely, controversial, and is talked about is great. I think ridiculous cryptodrama commentary is great. For instance, some people think that Steamboat Willy NFTs are the height of sticking it to the man, others think it is inane (I'm kind of in this camp). Shit like that. Or more serious stuff like: Will EFTs be allowed by our moronic government and what happens if they aren't? Why are people so willing to part with their money for utter crap but they don't buy good stuff? What does it take for people not to buy crap?”
Again we have questions on topics which defy logic, and we either want someone to help us understand or we want confirmation that it is the irrational problem, not our inability to comprehend it, which causes our confusion.
It is this same impulse which may explain our constant calls for more curation! More exhibition! Something, anything which helps us focus our attention, because from identification we can come to understanding.
Back to you, WhyBother?, and your question: Everything you mentioned —this presupposed death of crypto art, the arguments over chains and advice on careers— are they not all scaffoldings someone or other is attempting to affix to crypto art’s otherwise invisible foundations?
Maybe we should let that sink in for a moment.
Because I think it explains a lot.
What I do here and on our podcasts.
What all these influencers and know-it-alls do when they tweet out some thread about art or culture or whatever.
What we seek from critics and seers, what we hope each new platform and artist will reveal to us: Some thing we can latch onto through which we can maybe understand this hyperspace, hyperspeed wormhole of a world.
Each day we remain creating, building, developing, interacting is another day spent wandering through a dark, thick forest. We make predictions on our location based on the position of stars, where the sun rises and falls, moss growing on this or that side of a rock. We know the forest will gain shape only when we escape it, but since we’re all meandering around here together, orientation seems like a pretty compelling way to pass the time.
- Your Friendly Neighborhood Digital Art Museum,
M○C△
Great article, Max! 🔥