DEAR MOCA: Who Is Even Collecting Crypto Art Right Now?
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,
As an artist, I've noticed that I'm meeting very different kinds of people in the bear market than when it was a, shall we say, busier place. Who *are* the people collecting digital art today - what's their deal? I want to know more about what drives them.
Sincerely,
Inexperienced Artist
Dear Inexperienced Artist,
I have to think that artists like yourself would have their finger on the collectorship pulse more than me. Why? Because the landscape of Who is collecting? and What are they collecting? so quickly and unpredictably changes. You kind of need to be in the trenches everyday, following sales, taking note of every artist on every blockchain, to get even a momentary handle on the thing.
Which is to say, while I can’t directly answer your question, I can provide some insight into the collector mindset, having spent the last six months-or-so writing a series of essays on collectorship (which you can read here, here, and here). I’m no authority, but my conclusions do come from many interviews, much research, and months of critical thought.
Here’s BE MY $UGARWHALE U R MY ΞTHERDADDY (2020) by Berk because it seems to resonate with this conversation:
The main thing to keep in mind when conceptualizing crypto art collectors is that they are not uniform beings. It’s a firmly-held belief of mine that crypto art’s ability to continuously reinvent itself in interesting and surprising new ways, week after week after week, comes from its composition: Crypto art is a collection of individuals with completely unlike backgrounds. That’s the nature of having an art movement perched upon the needle head of blockchain technology, which is still quite fringe. It’s not like they’re teaching crypto art widely in art schools at this time, indoctrinating students in the possibilities of NFT distribution mechanisms, nor is it really being presented to the art-making or art-interested public in an effective way, as we are all undoubtedly aware. You have to find your way here, and that journey takes countless shapes. Many crypto art extraordinaries come from software engineering backgrounds, while others got here by way of corporate graphic design, from the finance world —hell, I was a long-time restaurant employee with a fiction-writing compulsion when the pandemic started, moved from there to Contact Tracing (delivering information to, and gathering data on, Covid patients for the Massachusetts State Government) before I began the freelance writing career that resulted in my opportunity at MOCA. But therein lies crypto art’s wondrousness. It is a veritable Island of Misfit Toys, each of us taking long, strange trips in the dark to *poof* somehow arrive here together.
We don’t fully appreciate that crypto art collectors share this same multifarious history, and that they thus approach crypto art collecting from many different angles. I spoke to a collector who found a welcoming community of metaverse-enthusiasts in Cryptovoxels (an early Metaverse platform, for those that don’t know, deeply important in crypto art’s infancy) well before discovering the crypto artistry which also had a home there. I met another who lost a staggering amount of artwork in a storage locker fire and turned thereafter to blockchain-based digital art for the commensurate security it offered. Many collectors today and of yesteryear are artists themselves, of course, with their own singular combination of skills and influences, so they are naturally going to drift towards collecting works that reflect their own practices, whether stylistically or thematically. So it’s kind of a beautiful, deliberate mess.
Which is probably not the answer you want to hear, but I promise it’s for the best.
Inexperienced Artist, you invoked a time when crypto art was a “shall we say, busier place.” I can only assume you’re talking about the nuclear radiance of 2021, or maybe early 2022, which was the previous year’s first degrading half-life. And while it’s been said many times, it’s worth repeating: That era was a weird anomaly in crypto art’s history, bearing little resemblance to our community before or afterwards.
Many of the people I encountered during this period proved exceptions to the above Rule of Diversity. They boasted replicable and predictable paths to crypto art. First they saw a speculative opportunity in cryptocurrency, then they saw the same thing in PFP trading, until they fell into crypto art, hoping for the same financial gains which started them on this journey. They were traders in some cases, sneakerhead hypebeasts in others, but so many were possessed of a nose trained to sniff-out buy opportunities. And while they all had their own lives before coming into possession of those noses, such noses only take you down one path; a path with many branches, but make no mistake, it’s the same path.
That’s a path populated by mania when the market is good. Bunched together upon it, these individuals developed the kind of frenzied groupthink which characterized that era, and which probably influenced a lot of your interaction with these then-collectors. I remember well the manic high on my timeline. The WAGMI mafia. The rampant hyperbole. Monstrously positive attitudes, outlandish enthusiasm, all of it based on the shared ecstasy of “price-go-up” by people who cared only about that one thing. And price did go up! And the optimism turned feverish! The positive feedback loop became stronger and stronger. Crypto art briefly became a kind of cult.
But those people are almost all gone, scuttling back down the same path that brought them here in the first place. A lot of leeches (and a lot of good people too) have been excised from this space because of the bear market, and so those who remain are inherently different. They’re generally more discerning, generally more level-headed, almost certainly possessing less funds. And their aims are certainly less unified.
The people who are here today were here during that bull market fervor, of course, only they were sequestered into the minority. With the outside noise so greatly weakened, it’s just that we can hear them a lot more clearly. My own circle has mostly been filled with the same builders, the same artists, the same collectors throughout my time in crypto art —which began in Fall of 2021…on a night just like tonight— people with integrity and belief in crypto art’s future, who ain’t giving up on this thing so quickly, who may have ridden the bucking bear markets of yesteryear and so know a thing or two about survivability.
These people will likely be here through many of the coming bull/bear cycles, so you best get used to their faces. And unless/until the greater crypto or NFT market explodes, there will likely not be a new influx of interest into crypto art, so it may be some time before the kinds of euphoric faces from your past make their return. Those that are in crypto art today seem to maintain stronger ties to the past, stronger ties to the networks they’ve already established, and probably possess a well-worn ethos that inevitably limits what they find affecting or worthy of collection.
So that’s kind of the irony of the situation.
Q: Who is collecting crypto art today?
A: Those that have been collecting it the longest, in most cases. Which is a limited pool of collectors, certainly, but many are known quantities, either by their personage or by the contents of their collection itself.
Let’s now marry all these points.
If most everyone here in crypto art today got into this world for their own weird, individual reasons, and if the people who you first came across got here for one shared speculative reason at the very same time, and if the people in crypto art today are generally those that have been here the longest, then we have to conclude that the people who are here today —collectors importantly among them— are as unpredictable and varied as their histories. They are impossible to understand en masse because each is entirely unique. And this applies to the artists who remain, the developers still building-out platforms and projects, the collectors who continue scrounging enough ETH to invest in art.
I can’t tell you what drives them because each is driven by a completely different value system. And that alone sets them apart from the “collectors” who overwhelmed this space in its busiest epoch. Some certainly possess a money-minded and investment-centric collectorship style, but they too are going to drift towards different investments than the lemmings —among whom, it’s important you understand, I once held membership— who lusted after all the same projects, all the same artists, all the same collections, hoping for a quick flip and a quick buck.
If you want to know more about the collectors today, I promise you the best thing to do is to ask them directly.
Now, many collectors have bemoaned to me the number of artists jumping into their DMs to peddle artwork.
Don’t do that.
But we are a small family in crypto art today. Pindar van Arman once posited to me his belief that there are less than 1000 active users in all of crypto art. You are pretty likely to receive a response from many of the individuals here; maybe not the high-demand, high-notoriety figures who’ve had to close their overwhelmed DMs. But sniff around. There are collectors of all sizes, who traffic on all blockchains, who are drawn some of them to photography, others to AI work, others to classical style digitized paintings; every taste has its champion. Find some art you like, or that is like yours, and see who is collecting it. Reach out and kindly, politely introduce yourself, ask them yourself what they saw in this or that work, if they have any advice, form those relationships.
Don’t try to sell anybody anything, and you should be okay.
Despite my lengthy answer, I don’t understand these collectors nearly as much as the collectors themselves do. Don’t be shy, they —generally— won’t bite. And if they do, be careful not to wince or scream or nothing. They’ll like that. Collectors today respect those who can tolerate a little pain.
- Your Friendly Neighborhood Digital Art Museum,
MOCA
Thx for the very insightful and generous post. As a minor Collectoor, I agree with everything here, but would like to add: the best way an artist can attract collectors, imo, is to constantly share your work. I am much more receptive to DM’s from artists whose work I’m familiar with, than not (I’d call the latter ‘cold DMing’). I am amazed at the prolificness of many of my favorite artists! I also notice that ‘birds of a feather flock together’ - artists I like tend to have friends whose work I will like as well. So, for ex., If you see a collector liking many works of a friend of yours, and your style + quality is similar to theirs, I suggest ‘@‘ that person on a few of your creations!