M○C△ Confessional: Where Is the Killer App We Were Promised?

In so many words...

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We’re going to keep today’s newsletter pretty short and sweet. Not coming for anyone’s neck, not indicting crypto art culture, not trying to establish any kind of high-minded philosophical architecture. Not today. Today’s is a bit of a different kind of:

Really, I’m really just here to ask a simple question. Maybe we should call it:

And this simple question is so vital that the entirety of the crypto art world relies on its answer. I don’t just mean visual crypto art either. Music NFTs, literary and poetic NFTs, video NFTs; basically any art form that exists on the blockchain is awaiting an answer to this question, which I’m about to reveal, because without a very straightforward answer, our crypto art creations will never reach the audiences we hope they might.

Question: Where is a good place to actually, you know, look at the art we create, covet, and collect?

Answer: THERE LITERALLY IS NOT ONE.

I’ll admit, I might end up appearing a bit obtuse for the rest of this newsletter, but, like let’s just keep this simple:

What do we want to do with visual art? We want to look at it. With music? Listen to it. With books and poetry, read them; with films and videos, watch them. This is the fundamental purpose of these things, to be consumed in the manner they are best consumed. And yet, we comprehensively, fundamentally, frustratingly, still do not have a good way to:

• Look at the art we collect.

• Listen to the music we collect.

• Read the literature we collect.

• Watch the videos we collect.

We often point to a whole host of hifalutin reasons why the greater NFT ecosystem has failed to experience even a slight upswing in attention and appreciation by the wider world. We blame middlemen, Twitter algorithms, celebrities, scams, crypto regulations; Hell, I do this too! But the Occam’s Razor of the thing might be that:

Nobody can begin to care about crypto art because nobody can fucking experience the art we’re making here because nobody has created a way to do so!

Every conversation about crypto art, its cultural worth, its historical significance, and its financial value might be moot, simply because we have failed to innovate in the realm of experience. We are still somehow looking at the art in our wallets via our Opensea profiles; that’s just about the most damning possible denigration of crypto art I could imagine.

Now, I’m no technologist. I have no coding ability. I barely understand how blockchain works. Thus, this might come across as an “Old man Yells at Cloud” kind of situation, but I can’t quit feeling that so much of our collective heartache over the societal disinterest in crypto art might be explained away by the fact that we lack a kind of “Killer App” in which we can view art, hear music, read books, or watch movies that we have collected as NFTs.

This doesn’t strike me as so difficult a concept. I’m imagining an app. I’m imagining an interface which knows the NFTs in our wallets (or in anyone’s wallets, but let’s start small) and sorts them based on file-type. Different file-types are treated in different ways. Image files invoke displays that are form-fitted to their aspect ratios. Music files pull-up a very simple music player: play, pause, next, back. Literary files are the trickiest by far, but, like, how hard is it to create a PDF-reader that saves your place? By now you’re probably sick of hearing me describe very obvious, very standard ways of experiencing various art forms, so I’ll stop doing that.

Having one Killer App to do all of these things is end-game. I get why an all-in-one entertainment app connected to blockchain is a tall task. But lack any way to easily, aesthetically, and quickly experience even a single kind of these artistries.

It just doesn’t seem like this has to be that hard. Blockchain boasts some of the most technically-advanced, innovative minds in the world. Devs have figured out cross-chain smart contract interaction, chain abstraction, validator customization, and yet, we can’t invent a way to look at the NFTs in our wallets the way we look at photos in any number of apps.

How can it be that I am still unable to cast an NFT to one of the many screens around my house?

Why is it damn near impossible, when someone asks me to show them the crypto art I most like, to pull up Matt Kane’s Gazers without going to four different webpages via my MetaMask app, without loading the world’s slowest Opensea page, without the ability to go full-screen, without 80% of the time crashing the page?

There’s a reason, I suppose, why so many artists are jazzed up every year to have their work displayed on giant billboards in Times Square: At least they can see their work somewhere.

This isn’t a conversation about digital frames with un-adjustable aspect ratios. This isn’t about 4K pieces being displayed on 1K screens. This is not about the best possible solution. This is about literally any solution. Give me incomplete! Give me a stopgap! Give me something!

Crypto art is attempting to convince people who don’t own a record player how good these records would sound if, you know, you could listen to them. No matter how much we collectively agree upon the ingenuity of an artwork, no matter how much internal cultural relevance we imbue it with, if we lack places to look at it or show it to others, it will all appear juvenile.

In absentia of this technology, many artists have turned to half-measures. More crypto artists than ever are releasing physical works or physical companion pieces. On one hand, I’m like: “This is dumb, pandering, and unrelated to crypto art altogether.” But on the other hand, I’m like: “Well people can actually go out and see this work, they can share it, they can like look at it when they’re just doing stuff around the house, office, wherever.” And it’s difficult to argue against mechanisms which allow that.

And then we have the Refik Anadol types with their giant screens and their corporate partnerships and their projector-filled rooms. Say what you want about the guy, he clearly understands that, “Hey, this crypto art shit is pretty cool, maybe we should actually find a way for people to look at it!”

At the risk of complaining forever, I will leave you with three closing questions:

1. Who is responsible for building something like this?

   Find me the dev team. Point me towards those responsible. Put us in contact. I will make them rich, and they will make us all so happy.

2. How is this not the greatest arbitrage opportunity in crypto?

   Solve this problem, and the entire NFT ecosystem in in your thrall. You will have a monopoly on bringing NFTs to the world. If not a monopoly, you will certainly have first-mover advantage. And best of all, you might well put Opensea out of business.

3. What does a future look like where we figure this out, and what does it look like where we don’t?

   That first part is pretty easy to answer: It looks a lot like the world we live in now. The second part is mostly conjecture, of course, but I would have to think that being able to show the people in our lives the art we create and love, being able to live with this art in our physical spaces with relative ease, being able to simply see the art that inspires us without jumping through a hundred hoops, that this would make our lives —plainly— better.

Somebody build this god-damn thing. I am desperate to be able to look at crypto art as effortlessly (it seems) as I am able to criticize it.

-Your friendly neighborhood Art Writer,

Max

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