M○C△ Confessional: The Real World is Failing Crypto Art

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Please enjoy today’s M○C△ 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.

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Something a little different this week: Instead of answering a question, I wanted to talk about something that I can’t get off my mind. Welcome, everyone, to the very first:

So anyways, let me tell you what happened.

After having him on M○C△ LIVE on Wednesday, the very kind curator and artist Robert Alice generously invited me to the Christie’s auction house for a celebration of both the TASCHEN-published book, ON NFTs, and the release of Mr. Alice’s related generative project, Source [On NFTs]. Given I am a mostly solitary creature with very little in the way of an IRL art world network, I was tickled by the invitation, so I went. Wanting to strike a balance between formal, informal, and artsy, I wore a very old sport coat (blue), over a well-fit t-shirt (baby blue), some jeans (also blue), and a large overcoat I bought at a flea market in Paris for 20 euro, which fits more like an Akatsuki robe than a coat and is dazzlingly bedecked in a pattern of cartoonish owls, squirrels, and flowers. The coat looks like this:

But I digress.

The event itself was held in an auditorium on the second floor of what I can only describe as a “Modern art museum where everything is for sale.” The walls and grounds were adorned with works by Fernando Batero, Yves Klein, Jean Debuffet, Helen Frankenthaler, and you were just kind of allowed —after authorizing your presence on the guest list— to roam the space (could put your nose right up to some Warhol pencil sketches and give ‘em a sniff if you wanted). Then, after ascending a staircase and turning right, slightly past another well-lit gallery room, you came into the auditorium, where some of Mr. Alice’s Source [ON NFTs] generations hung on the walls, where a few copies of the gargantuan On NFTs Collector’s Edition sat open on pedestals for folks to leaf through. I took a seat towards the back right of the auditorium and watched other guests arrive.

I saw faces I felt I recognized —Dmitri Cherniak, Sam Spratt, Kevin McCoy, RedBeard, Yatreda— but these are people I’ve never met, and because I have a weird anxiety about misidentifying someone or calling them by the wrong name, I didn’t go over and introduce myself. Spotted a small group of people wearing hot-pink “Bitchcoin” hats (shout-out Sarah Meyohas), but what was I going to do? Insert myself into a group of people whom I don’t know and just fit in?

What would I even say?

“Hi, I’m Max Cohen, such a big fan of your work!”? No way, too fanboy.

“Hi, I’m Max Cohen, I write for M○C△, maybe you’ve seen my work.” Cloying and needy.

“Lovely weather we’re having, eh? Glad you asked, in fact, I am that very same Max Cohen, and it’s so gratifying to hear such kinds words about my writing.” Keep dreaming, kid.

The guests all eventually took their seats for a 45-minute panel discussion that was, to be kind, fairly surface-level. When was the last time you went to a moderated panel discussion and came away with valuable insight, anyways? No shade to the speakers, it’s just not a good format for information-sharing. It’s a good format for swapping of personal accolades and anecdotes, however, which is more or less what this was. 

And then it was cocktail hour. A great crawling mass of people standing in tight circles beside a white-tableclothed bar, servers in black vests, standard stuff. I said hi to Anne Spalter. I spent some time talking with Clay Devlin, as good a soul as I’ve met in crypto art. I didn’t know anyone else there, so I went and looked at some art. Soon I’d seen all the art. I stole a few parmesan breadsticks from a table’s centerpiece, I wandered around, and then I just… ventured into it… the scrum. The mass of chitchatting bodies gathered by the bar. It was —they were— all around me. To my credit, I more than once tapped someone on the shoulder and said “Excuse me,” meaning to introduce myself (I too am capable of courage), but between the noise and the general overstimulation, I was ignored.

Shortly thereafter,  I became beset by all the social anxiety I’d staved off to that point, and so, jittery and jilted, I turned tail, and I left. 

Coat-check cost me five bucks on the way out.

I left Christie’s feeling completely de-energized. Sapped of both my social vitality and, truthfully, my appreciation for crypto art. I wasn’t quite sure why at the time. I just knew that I felt resentful and put-off that…this…was all we could muster. 

Which is what inspired me to write this column.

I’ve been thinking about the ways we come together in-person, all of us who have chosen to spend their time and make their bones in a very very very online art community.

We who speak to each other over DMs and Discords.

We who internalize insane in-jokes as they happen, reference them to death, and watch them die surreptitiously to make room for the next thing.

We who often go by pseudonyms or are otherwise completely anonymous.

The online spaces we exist in are free-flowing, participatory only when desired, perfect for lurking, they mask emotion, they let us edit ourselves, and thus they are the very diametric opposite to the kind of event I found myself at last Friday night. 

And that feels like a problem.

Now, I recognize this was an event at an auction house, which is a business, and a very old business at that, and it was neither in their interests nor probably their ability to challenge the art-event paradigm. I don’t begrudge them this. They do what they do so as to sell as much art as possible, and so everything from the guest-list to the spacial orientation to the hors d'oeuvres were designed for that singular purpose. 

And it’s not really even a problem with events, per se. This night at Christie’s is not the only time I’ve gone to some kind of event, only to find little more than a short dialogue between successful people followed by an awkward and anxiety-provoking cocktail hour. 

But there must be another way.

The problem, as I see it, is that the more expansive and accepted crypto art becomes, the more we within it will be asked to step out of the internet environment wherein this movement was wombed and into spaces that do not really either honor our values or even encapsulate our desires. 

For example, Christie’s still represents, to many in crypto art, a kind of otherwise unobtainable success. To have the institutional backing of a museum or auction house is to feel validated in a way it’s really hard to feel validated by any of the players within crypto art. And what that validation looks like institutionally is smart-casual dress, champagne, polite networking, and the same fine-art-hanging-on-barren-walls-in-an-intentionally-underdecorated-space that makes so many art museum experiences exhausting. This is not a matter of whether a space is playing techno music or classical, whether they have screens hung instead of canvases, whether the lights are dim or the drinks are electric blue and smoking. This is a matter of how IRL spaces, and the demands of the IRL world, do a uniformly terrible job of engaging in any way with the customs, cultural norms, and communication styles within crypto art. 

Who among us is truly about that life?

I think it’s fair for us to want ways of interacting IRL that reflect the best bits about our online discourse. Comedic and only sometimes serious, for example. Characterized by strong personality and less by shows of knowledge. Ways of engaging each other in conversation that allow for dipping in and out of discourse at will, that are participatory for more than just a small fraction of the people in attendance, that reflect what’s happening that day, in that moment, freeform and sudden.

Can I get a freakin’ nametag and some icebreakers, at least?

And furthermore, I think we need our own ostentatious vision of success, one that fits our singular internet-age ideals. I’m tired of champagne. I’m tired of this “Choose Rich” Nick guy so tritely relying on tired trappings of wealth like chauffeurs and helicopters and large, minimalist homes. We either built, or were attracted by, crypto art in part because of its supposed opposition to these traditional values. As Matt Kane has said in the past, “Crypto art is either a revolution or it isn’t,” and that doesn’t just mean the aesthetics or the market mechanisms. I want, when someone achieves monumental success, to feel legitimately impressed by what they’re able to do in the aftermath. Beeple’s Charleston Studio is a good example: plentiful weirdness, wonky events, art-making, that’s quite a good go of it. It’s experimental! It’s unique! I want the IRL bounties of crypto art to be even halfway as gonzo as the culture at its core. Or, at the very least, I want some kind of creativity and controversy in how crypto art collides with the real world. 

And what tires me so, I think, is that we are too often asked to check crypto art at the door. It dies when our screens shut-off, and that doesn’t feel appropriate. I don’t want to be online all the time, but I want our platforms when they throw parties, and our influencers when they financially thirst-trap, and institutions when they dip their toes into crypto art, and exclusive parties when they’re thrown to:

A) really consider what the sublime sparks are within crypto art, and

B) put legitimate effort into porting those into physical spaces.

There should be people who, seeing crypto art’s explosiveness made manifest, can’t hang with this thing that is, by nature, loud and obnoxious and not for all tastes. We should be shooting the shit at very loud, very sticky punk rock shows, not trading quips about market dynamics in chandelier-ed corridors. We should be trying to make each other laugh. We should be creating things flippantly and in-real-time, and we should be empowered, encouraged, enthused to share what we’ve made. We should be buffeted by sight and sound and sensation as we are everyday when we take part in this movement.

I demand the right to feel underwhelmed by anything to the contrary. And there’s a whole lot of contrary out there.

Whoever cracks this code is going to get an all-access key to our kingdom. Let that be both challenge and warning.

-Your Friendly Neighborhood Art Writer,

Max

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