M○C△ Confessional: The Toll of Crypto Art Twitter is Too Much

In so many words...

Welcome back everyone to another edition of:

And I will be starting this week’s with a kind of apology.

Because my column last week was too harsh, in hindsight. If you didn’t read it, the thesis was that crypto art would be singularly devastated by any worldwide economic downturn, something which seemed quite likely given financial events in the days before I set out to writing. In an inescapable economic slowdown, crypto art —downstream of crypto— would become an almost entirely illiquid ecosystem, though I wanted it on record my belief that crypto art would come out on the other end of this catastrophe smaller, tighter, healthier, and looking much more like the nostalgia-inducing crypto art of yesteryear, before all this corruptive money got involved.

That column prompted an artist I very much admire, the RarePepes OG, Rare Scrilla, to respond. Scrilla had this to say about the piece:

It is not the first time I’ve faced that criticism.

If I had to call out the blindspots in my own work, they would be many, but one main failure has always been a blockchain-based tunnel-vision regarding where I put my attention. I am woefully unprepared to discuss artistry on Tezos, Bitcoin, or anywhere that isn’t Ethereum. Thus I am unable to synthesize the trends, attitudes, and innovations on these chains into my comprehensive understanding of crypto art.

My writing about crypto art, then, is akin to dealing blackjack with a pinochle deck.

Another effect of my limited non-Ethereum experience is I overgeneralize when it comes to happenings elsewhere. When I unfairly trashed the Bitcoin Nashville conference as a “BTC-conference-hellhole-nightmare-threadguy-republican-circle-jerk” I di so because the things which slithered out from the Bitcoin ecosystem and into my frame-of-reference were all cash-grabby, clickbaity, politically-degradative things. I formed an opinion based off of limited exposure. I didn’t see the builders, the Pepe artists, the Ordinals innovators, and even if I had, they would have been presented to me without much context because information on Twitter appears randomly and asynchronously (a former president was speaking at the conference, for god’s sake; no amount of art could overcome the intimations of his presence.)

This is perhaps the structural failure of my crypto art experience: I am limited within my social-media echo chamber, and I don’t even know that it’s happening. That which confirms my pre-held beliefs I internalize, and that which subverts them, I brush away as noise.

As we’re all by now well aware, this is a fundamental component of social media in 2024: We are compoundingly fed whatever content we have previously proven attracted to, and with frightening specificity. We get caught in these deep informational vortexes. My vortex usually shows me art on Ethereum. When it shows me art on Tezos, they are usually one-off pieces by artists with an Ethereum presence. When it shows me art on Solana, it is usually an Ethereum-based artist minting something thereupon. When it shows me Bitcoin stuff, it’s generally influencer-peddled or financially-motivated Bitcoin stuff, with only brief glimpses at the round-table of Pepe artists who have been building that sub-movement for many years.

A sub-movement I do not really have access to, and thus, one I can not really understand.

I’ve always been interested in how Twitter warps our experience with crypto art and thus ultimately controls how it moves, ipso fact how it will be remembered. Lacking a veritable community commons other than this algorithmically-generated one, I become prone to cyclical thinking and sweeping generalizations. I don’t know how to break out of my echo chamber any more than those in extremist political spheres. I don’t know how to learn the intricacies of the RarePepe movement as it exists in 2024. I don’t know where to find the beating heart of Bitcoin artistry, and I don’t know where I must travel to gather what information I need to build a fuller context.

That’s a failure on my part, to an extent, but, I confess, it’s also something I’m not going to immediately rectify.

Because there’s another facet to this Twitter conversation I haven’t really discussed before, and that concerns my relationship to social media as a whole. I do not like social media, to put it bluntly. I despise Twitter. I do not like its shithead owner, I do not like its shithead algorithm, and I do not like its many shitheads either. I find social media mentally destructive. Like the rest of my generation, I am prone to doom-scrolling. I am prone to echo-chamber extremism. Social media makes me jealous, it makes me hateful, and it makes me cynical.

Thus, I have spent great effort extricating myself from the social media samsara: I rarely use Facebook, have almost no Instagram presence, never made a Tiktok, and LinkedIn is a joke. But Twitter is sticky. Twitter is where all of you live. It is where I must wander whilst being in the crypto art business. I can’t write about crypto art if I’m not existing where crypto art exists, and that’s on Twitter. We don’t have a neighborhood full of galleries, we don’t have bars in the West Village, we don’t have the homes of important figures where we pass each other as we’re passing through. We have only Twitter, and its endless, ignominious gullet.

Gertrude Stein’s (right) Parisian salon at 27 rue de Fleurus is a quite-famous example of such a common-space. Lost generation artists (Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Matisse, Joyce, Pound, etc.) of the 1920’s and 30’s flocked here.

I’m like a recovering alcoholic, but my entire social circle still hangs out at the local bar. If I want to remove myself from social media because I want to be social IRL, or because it's summer here in New York, or because I want to strip myself of Twitter’s deleterious mental effects, if I for any reason want to live life outside of my cell phone, my understanding of crypto art proportionally suffers.

When that happens, I tend to make assertions based on increasingly limited information. I miss the details that would change my larger understanding. I get over-influenced by headlines and under-influenced by nuance, since that nuance is made more remote by my online absence.

To a writer, context is everything. But when the context itself is harmful, and if, without, the writing suffers, the calculus of participation in crypto art becomes quite difficult.

When I used to work in restaurants, I knew basically everything about the Boston restaurant scene. I couldn’t avoid fraternization with bartenders and servers from all the new spots, I was constantly overhearing gossip about chef firings, I was a conduit for the rumor mill. It wasn’t just restaurant happenings either, it was all this lore about wine and spirits, about food preparation, about ingredients. Once I left the restaurant world, however, that knowledge vanished. I could no more tell you today about Boston’s restaurant scene than I can discuss Italian wines at any length, or the taste differences between oyster varietals, or how you can pre-treat an endive leaf to suppress or elevate its natural bitterness. Poof, all of that is long-gone.

Crypto art knowledge follows the same principle. In the dead of winter, when it’s dark at 5pm and bitingly cold, when I am on my phone far more often, I can ramble on-and-on about all these small-time artists and their artwork, experiments, exhibitions. I see more art, I follow more artists, I I intake more information. The sharp edges of my warm-weather generalizations are blunted by exposure. That makes me better at this work.

The other edge of that sword, however, is I am further swallowed by the moment’s emotional rhetoric. I become a better writer, but I nurse a more-damaged soul. Such overexposure to crypto art has destabilized quit a few individuals I’ve come across here, none of whom will I name but many of whom, I’m sure, pop right into your head. That’s no accident. The further down this rabbit hole you go, the darker and smellier it gets, the harder it is to breathe.

There is no panacea for this effect, at least not one I can see. No amount of Telegram chats can amount to the sheer educational largesse that ample Twitter time provides, not when it comes to crypto art. You can only comprehend the randomness, the glut, all the gossamer connections, the drama and the career arcs, the aches and pains, the triumphs and thwarts if you are engaged with the thing constantly. And that’s categorically not good for you; the surgeon general warns against it.

We are obviously all interested in better collecting practices, more discoverability, more curation, more exposure for lesser-known folks, more overall contextualization in crypto art, but I’m not sure we’ve reckoned too well with the personal consequences of those things on those brave enough to attempt them. The better you want to be at crypto art, the more you sacrifice. It’s a 1-to-1 relationship. That’s not crypto art’s fault, of course, it’s Twitter’s fault. But crypto art and Twitter cannot, as far as I’m concerned, be disentangled from one another. They are, after 6+ years of symbiosis, the same organism.

As time moves forward, these specificities of our internet-based art movement only become more apparent. Some, like this one, seem obvious in hindsight. I would love to hear from the early-2010s Tumblr folks, or from the DeviantArt crowd, about whether their experiences there were similar. My initial inclination is to doubt it, for crypto art takes itself extremely and uniquely seriously, in its continuing attempt to revive and solidify the values upon which it very noisily built itself.

Point being: I know what it takes to become more educated on the Bitcoin community’s artistic proclivities. I know that information can be found by wandering around for a while in search of it. There are spoils of a sort for those who snuff them out.

But that’s a disinteresting prospect to begin with, becoming less interesting all the time, and only more so when the sun is out.

There’s a world out there. And there’s a world in here. And we can only live in one at a time.

-Your friendly neighborhood crypto art writer,

Max