M○C△ Confessional: Trash Art is the Only Thing That Can Save Us
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Let’s get into this one quick, as there’s quite a lot to talk about. So yes, yes, on with everyone’s favorite banner —
—woo! Fantastic! Grand! And now that we’ve got that out of the way, we can slip quickly into this week’s conversation.
Which, in a few words, is about why we need, at all costs, for the benefit of the entire crypto art landscape, to study, emulate, and ultimately recreate the Trash Art movement.
And to understand why, we need first return to Trash Art’s inception.
One of the fathers of the movement is also its chief chronicler, and so I will be quoting Eric Rhodes (aka SecondRealm) liberally throughout this essay. As Rhodes notes in his essay “The Origins of Trash Art” there is a literal “Trash Art” movement that very literally finds meaning in repurposing and elevating garbage to the status of Art, which we can trace theologically all the way back to Marcel Duchamp’s infamous Fountain (1917) artwork, considered by many the forefather of conceptual art. The form was fine-tuned using traits and techniques from the 20th-Century’s Found Art and Junk Art movements, which are pretty much exactly what they sound like, while Rhodes points to Damien Hirst —and specifically, Hirst’s piece A Thousand Years (1990)— and Glitch Artists (of which there are too many to name, but who repurposed digital trash just as their fore-bearers repurposed physical refuse) as crucial modern innovators of the Trash Art movement.
So conceptually speaking, Trash Art responded to high-brow, overly-academic, snooty and exclusive artistic ideals by shoving things like urinals, decapitated cow heads, and game-breaking computer code onto the same pedestal from which “serious,” capital-A Art looks down at the rest of the world.
Now, the story of how Trash Art entered into the NFT world is often-told, and so I won’t re-hash it in much detail here. You can read Eric Rhodes’ “A Short History of NFT Trash Art” if you want more detail, but for now, as the story so-famously goes, in January of 2020, artist and provocateur ROBNESS minted a piece called 64 Gallon Toter on SuperRare. The Toter is literally a stock image of a 64-gallon trash can, taken from the HomeDepot website and affixed with a Photomosh filter.
Irate collectors felt ROBNESS was devaluing real artwork with his hijinks, while a threatened SuperRare worried about both copyright infringement and their core claim that “everything in the marketplace is original & created by the artist,” which 64 Gallon Toter clearly was not. The piece was promptly removed from SuperRare, and after a few more instances of rabble-rousing behavior, ROBNESS himself is removed too.
Furious about what they see gatekeepy behavior by egotistical platforms, artists flood platforms with hastily-composed and hastily-minted artworks. Many incorporate, remix, or repurpose the image or idea of a trash can as an homage to ROBNESS’s Toter, and soon others —like the aforementioned Eric Rhodes with SuperRare and Max Osiris with SuperRare, KnownOrigin, and Foundation— are kicked off of platforms for their own perceived infractions.
Which only inspired the Trash Artists to further flood crypto art with their deliberately low-effort creations.
“ROBNESS would joke ‘if you don’t make it in under 5 minutes, it’s not a Trash GIF,’” writes Eric Rhodes.
And so the NFT Trash Art movement took the conceptual roots of its predecessors but affixed them to a megaphone: This was a loud and clear “fuck you” to the crypto art establishment. As Brady Evan Walker wrote in their MakersPlace article, “What is Trash Art”:
“Trash Art arose like a middle finger from the mists of the burgeoning crypto art movement to say, ‘Hey asshole! Don’t think that’s art? Check this shit out!’ Trash Art is the gleefully defiant counterpoint to digital art that aspires to fine art, like a tomboy who prefers skinned knees to rouged cheeks.”
But Eric Rhodes captures it more poignantly than anyone else when he writes:
“[Trash Art] plants a flag in the middle of the argument between ‘what is’ or ‘what isn’t?’ art and states clearly, ‘You do not define Art anymore.”
This, I suppose, is an war that needs to be waged every decade-or-so for the rest of recorded history. NFT Trash Art is only our latest, loudest skirmish.
We talk a lot about Trash Art in general, but we under-appreciate the dynamics of crypto art in the period where NFT Trash Art emerged, matured, and found its teeth.
What was crypto art like in this era? Well, as it relates to platforms, things did not seem awesome. SuperRare had reduced its artist royalties from 10% to 3%, sparking the famous “Minimum 10% NFT Royalties – Letter to Platforms.” On top of that, SuperRare was an very-exclusive, invite-only platform, as was KnownOrigin. According to this very long graph by Rchen8, SuperRare had only ~281 artists at the time ROBNESS minted the 64-Gallon Toter. It now has over 3600.
Because crypto art was still such a small community, the voices of better-known artists and collectors had unfair influence. In Alexandra Artamonovskaja’s NFTs.wtf article “What Exactly is Trash Art,” Trash Art pioneer CryptoYuna is quoted as saying “...big named artists were throwing their weight around in this space trying to set rules for everyone. Collectors with money had way too much influence on what the platforms decided to do to artists,” a sentiment echoed in CoinTelegraph’s March 2020 article “Immutable Trash: Crypto Art Revisits Arguments on Censorship and Meaning,” wherein writer Darren Kleine goes back-and-forth with ROBNESS in the following passage:
“The heart of the problem, Robness says, lies with the collectors and their undue influence on curation. ‘I’ve noticed that collectors are having a lot of say and are pushing their weight… They’re ego-tripping a little bit.’
“Robness describes an incident with a particular collector who, he alleges, flexed his influence to get [Max Osiris] removed from another digital arts platform, KnownOrigin. The collector threatened the platform, he explains, saying he would stop buying from it altogether if Osiris was not given the boot.
“‘I didn’t like that. I didn’t like how certain collectors muscled their way in.’”
There certainly seemed to be a lot of muscling. ROBNESS, Eric Rhodes, Max Osiris were removed from platforms, while many others artists had their work blacklisted (which “happened to CryptoTonya’s BTC Bitch Remix #1; Nino Arteiro’s An Original Art; and Max Osiris’ I1O I1O I1O [EDIT] LOVE,” as Eric Rhodes informs us) after being accused of stealing the original work of other artists. “I was permanently banned from SuperRare in September 2020, simply for threatening to remix a Hackatao,” says Eric Rhodes in “WTF is Trash Art?”.
Which sparked these artists and an absolute legion of their compatriots to tilt full fury towards turning Trash Art into a titanic crypto artistic trend.
As Eric Rhodes noted, “On February 5, 2020, artist Barbara Tosti sent out a tweet with the hashtag ‘#trashart’², but it wasn’t until j1mmy.eth responded to JayDelay.eth on March 20, 2020, that the term really stuck:
Soon, ridiculous, deliberately low-effort, remix-heavy, garbage-centralizing art was everywhere. It was its own sort of instantly-recognizable visual club, where the only qualification for entry was participation. It was anathema, by design, to gatekeeping. It was bold and exuberant and communal, the very essence of decentralization. There are many reasons Trash Art looms as large as it does in the memory of many, why even I —who was not there to see the first lifespan of this movement— find myself so conceptually enamored with it and its progenitors.
But let’s return to my initial conjecture. We are in desperate need of a collective return towards Trash Art. I mean this: Crypto art’s soul is very clearly slipping away, and I believe Trash Art, or some honorific cousin, actually has the capability of repairing that damage.
Think about where we are right now. If you’re a crypto art OG, stop being a crypto art OG for a moment. If you’ve ever sold artwork for five or six-figures, pretend for just a moment that you haven’t. Pretend you’re a member of the majority, and you are watching as the powers-that-be continue squeezing the crypto art narrative through an ever-slimmer list of of actors and institutions. You are not on the radar of a 6529. You were not chosen by Vincent van Dough as one of the Artists of the Millenium. You might mint predominantly on Tezos, or Solana, a place where you can reliably afford gas fees. Maybe you have a bit of a following on social, but you aren’t getting any real acclaim, aren’t receiving your due attention, and you’re forced to watch as influential crypto art voices cycle through their list of Kings-for-a-Day —XCOPY, Sam Spratt, Dmitri Cherniak, Tyler Hobbes, Refik Anadol, whomever— for the umpteenth time, congratulating each other for their ingenuity while the rest of the ecosystem withers. Hell, maybe you are a true OG, and maybe you had your time in the limelight during an earlier crypto art era, but either way, you also be seeing crypto art success further and further gatekept by fewer and fewer figureheads.
As Beatriz Ramos —co-founder of DADA.art— wrote recently, “Sadly, money and speculation are powering the toxic acrimony that is muddying the otherwise open and collaborative ethos of this community. Interestingly, in the decentralized world of crypto art as soon as conflicts arise, people look for central authorities to intervene and sanction others.”
Nope, fooled you, that quote was actually from an article called “Speaking Truth to Power” which Ramos published on September 9th, 2020. And this is my point: History is rhyming, and we’re again in one of these centralizing periods where power consolidates. KnownOrigin just announced that they are “pausing new creator applications,” every XCOPY 1/1 sale is treated like the second coming of Christ, and to quote the OG collector Collin:
Value may be 👑⚡️, but it’s dangerous to have financial endorsement coming from only a few sources. We can see this consolidation of collectorial, and thus curatorial, interest as being predominantly market-based, or we can see it as some insidious cabal tactic, but the cause matters less than the effect. There is a distinct lack of energy and excitement on both the curator and collector sides of crypto art, as both categories are seem to be fairly-understandably afraid of deviating too much from what has previously proven valuable.
Which is exactly the kind of world into which Trash Art emerged. In Rhodes’ “WTF is Trash Art,” he writes that:
“The [Trash Art] movement started with a focus on gatekeeping, censorship, copyleft, and welcoming new artists to open platforms. Instead of forming a centralized group, artists instigated important discussions about decentralization for collectors and creators by making art that challenged a variety of traditional art norms.”
The “traditional art norm” of most virulent danger today is, to me, this plague of self-seriousness so many are already infected with. We’re all here making ART! And ART is so important! It’s borderline HOLY! And because ART is posited as so vital, so spiritually-necessary, we are obsessed with justifying and rationalizing in hyper-aggrandizing terms so much of the scattered success that occurs here. Everyone successful is a genius. If you aren’t successful, you haven’t worked hard enough. Nothing feeds the soul as fully as art-making.
Hyperbole is currently king here in crypto art. Maybe that started as a way to explain massive financial expenditures, but it is now so ingrained in our lexicon that crypto art often feels less like an art movement and more like a mass of plebians begging for handouts from the Gods on Olympus.
Even the meme-based artists —take Darkfarms1 or Jack Butcher— of note today are revered for, in Butcher’s case, their purported conceptualist brilliance, or the years and years of thankless blood, sweat, and grinding, which Darkfarms1 poured into the RarePepe world and finally, deservedly received his due.
XCOPY is basically the poster-child for this cultural tendency; every work has to be generational, every decision genius, every secondary sale momentous. We are turning artists of every flavor into Gods, and as their mythos is being written, their success is supercharged with highly-subjective and hyperbolic reasoning. As it always seems to be, this romanticized and honestly-ridiculous idea of “genius” is then placed way up high, far out of our reach.
The market seems desperate to place a skyscraping pedestal underneath every artist it holds up as its next prophet. 99% of us are not going to be able to reach that pedestal in our wildest dreams. That’s not our fault; these pedestals are erected sans handholds, ledges, or anything else we can cling to and use to hoist ourselves up. The platform is built under you, sometimes without your even knowing, and before you know it, you’re looking out upon the rest of crypto art from 10,000 feet. Barely anyone, if anyone at all, can intentionally reach these heights.
Since you can’t reach the pedestal, you will eventually stop trying. You will come to hate the pedestal. You might end-up badmouthing the pedestal, but somehow those who’ve built it are always able to hear you, and they are shouting things at you like “You’re just jealous!” and “Lalala we can’t hear you, we’re having too much fun with our very real friends on a boat or at another very fun-seeming locale!”
In her article, Beatriz Ramos continues, “I’m not endorsing trolling. But we must recognize where art trolling comes from. Trash artists are irreverent, satirical, and unapologetic. They carry the legacy of the beginnings of crypto art which started with the Rare Pepe memes. They are punching up as an act of protest.” And while we should not blame the artists who sit on these pedestals above us, we have to begin the process of knocking down these pedestals by force. Any resultant head injuries are occupational hazards. The Trash Artists did this in two ways: They flooded the world with so much trash, so much deliberate and self-celebrating trash, that this trash tide lifted the entire community up a way. But the trash-cans were also wielded as weapons. Every time Barbara Tosti or Shilly Preston or Wondermundo minted a trash can, they were also throwing it full force at the nearest pedestal. This may not have been enough to bring the things down, but it made them wobble. And once the foundations of genius begin to wobble, we can see more clearly that genius is only ever built from rotting wood, cardboard, and fishbones, its facade of indestructible marble only a facade after all.
Let us once again knock down some ivory towers! Inspire everyone, in Beatriz Ramos’ words, “to mint their most meaningful work, half baked ideas, or fun experiments, even those made with one click!” Conspire against so-called “genius” by suffocating it outright! Drown it in a veritable sea of what-the-fuck-ever. Trash Cans, bird carcasses, decapitated cow skulls, whatever is at your disposal, toss it onto the trash heap! Marcel Duchamp proved beyond a shadow-of-a-doubt in 1917 that every single thing can be art —brilliant, powerful art— as long as long as its creator says it is such, and that truly staggering level of power is rarely being leveraged for good. Stuff the blockchain with shit. Give crypto art indigestion! Angry that its only XCOPY sales getting any attention? Then we must collectively come together to overload each other with nonsense, sticks and stones and whatever else is lying around that through our sheer willpower alone we can elevate to the level of Art.
I can say the time is ripe for Trash Art to return, but it feels more existential than that. Crypto art needs Trash Art to return. We need a return to fun, for fuck’s sake. We need our attention redirected back towards liberated creativity. Success is a steel trap, and it limits the ways we can move. Genius is a body suit made out of gold, shiny as all hell but heavy, uncomfortable, and, whoops, someone forgot to drill air holes.
Burn it. Burn it all up in the fire of fun. It’s been done once, and it’s imperative we do it again. Who will be the ROBNESS, the Max Osiris, the Eric Rhodes, the Jay Delay, the Barbara Tosti, the Cryptoyuna, the EmpressTrash, the StellaBelle, the Max Capacity of this new movement?
Reveal yourselves! Please. We need you now more than ever.
-Your friendly neighborhood Art Writer,
Max
... & it"s here ZeroOne comes in as a Saviour ‽ ...
https://zeroone.art/profile/lennarrrt