M○C△ Confessional: Why are we All so Obsessed with XCOPY?

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Welcome one and all to another:

So, last week I was finishing up my editing process for the MOCA LIVE podcast, a sequence of events which involves: recording a cold open, splicing that and the credits and the music together with the podcast itself, writing down everyone mentioned during the conversation, writing an episode description and title, minting the newest episode to Zora, getting the thing up on Spotify and Apple and other audio platforms, and, finally, making sure everyone whom we mentioned gets properly tagged so that they knew we we’re talking about them. Standard podcast-production duties. I have it basically down to a science. But last week, as I was tagging down the week’s mentions, I learned that the first Twitter page that pops up when I click the search bar is none other than @XCOPYart. “Hmm,” I thought. “Interesting.” Turns out, after doing a bit of research, that we mention XCOPY —the majestic and prolific darling artist of crypto art— nearly every single episode. 

It’s almost without fail. XCOPY is invoked by me or by Colborn or by our guest, and it doesn’t even matter the topic. XCOPY comes up in discussions of old vs. new crypto art, about finances and market metrics, about chains warring against one another for attention, about memecoins or the metaverse, etc. etc.

There is no subculture of crypto art within which XCOPY is not apparently relevant. 

MAX PAIN AND FRENS (2022), by XCOPY. Edition (currently) of 5940.

Since I came to this realization, I’ve been wondering “Why?” Why does XCOPY lord over all our crypto art experiences, our stories, our conceptualizations? Why, of all these artists, is XCOPY uniquely deified? XCOPY’s work is universally lauded, be that their 1/1’s, their Open Editions like MAX PAIN AND FRENS (2022), even as memefied mega-releases like the recent Mutatio (2024) collaboration with NeonGlitch86, and on every platform, from KnownOrigin to SuperRare to Base to Manifold to defunct marketplaces like Rare.Art, all of which makes them essentially unique amongst the rest of crypto art. The massive prices are there, so is the history, and yes, plenty of institutional respect, but also the community support. Those three things almost never coexist together, yet XCOPY maintains an almost universal approval rating with artists, collectors, curators, and writers like me. 

Hell, XCOPY is trending as I write this. 

But why? How? 

There have been many incredible breakdowns of XCOPY’s prowess. Da Vinci’s thread about “The Complete Works of XCOPY” is chock-full of straight-up iconography. The Metaveralist’s article, “Everything You Need to Know About XCOPY” is probably the greatest single encapsulation of their work and career, but whether it’s interviews with RightClickSave or the many threads written in the past few days about XCOPY’s massive success, it’s clear that the artist is only achieving more: more sales, more acclaim, more cheerleading from artists and influencers alike. 

There are things clearly working in XCOPY’s favor, things outside their actual art. The most important is probably that XCOPY has been an early-adopter of basically everything. XCOPY has been creating art on Tumblr since August of 2010, with their singular style —flashy, monstrous, twitchy and neon-inflected figures— coming into being sometime between 2014 and 2015, depending on how you want to identify their style. I can tell you for a fact that XCOPY’s famed The Doomed, minted as an edition of 100 on KnownOrigin in December of 2019, appeared as a Tumblr image in November of 2015. More than that, XCOPY has been releasing art on the blockchain since at least 2018, on all the platforms I mentioned above. Point being, any argument about historical significance favors XCOPY. Having 12 of the first 16 mints on SuperRare, contributing to Async.Art’s First Supper (2020), these are the innovative choices of an artist who staked their future on crypto art. 

The Doomed (2019), by XCOPY. Edition of 100.

And yet, XCOPY’s influence frankly dwarfs their peers, folks like Matt Kane, Hackatao, Videodrome, Travis Leroy Southworth, who all command serious acclaim and impressive sales. The artist is larger than life, and all of this despite near complete anonymity. XCOPY is omnipresent in crypto art, but outside of their Twitter page, they’re a ghost. 

I have heard a number of unverifiable rumors about XCOPY, though it feels somewhat sacrilegious to even mention them. Like that they’re a man. Like that they live somewhere in London, according to 33NFT. Like they have a family and are in their 40’s or 50’s. I’m not sure if this is a Cozomo de’Medici situation, where the person is mostly anonymous but some folks actually do know their identity, or if this is full-on complete phantasmic deindividuation, but for the intents and purposes of the crypto art space, XCOPY is unreal, only an icon, an artistic output, and a series of sometimes acerbic, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes celebratory tweets. 

So XCOPY is an OG, and XCOPY is anonymous, and XCOPY has an art style that is oft-imitated but still unmistakeable. XCOPY’s brand of glitchy, flashing, epileptic, ultra-colorful artistry heavily influences the oeuvre’s of artists like ZafGod, RustNFT, and PrettyBad, and then we have the countless others who create homages to XCOPY’s famous CC0work, whether that’s remints and remixes of RightClickSaveAsGuy (2018), or the countless works in the last few weeks which were plays on the aforementioned Mutatio. 

Still, it feels like there’s something else at play here. XCOPY wasn’t the only artist whose works maintained attention during the last bear market. Tyler Hobbes’ Fidenzas, Refik Anadol’s Winds of Yawanawa, Snowfro’s Chromie Squiggles, Dmitri Cherniak’s Ringers (including The Goose), Matt Kane’s Gazers, all managed to ignore the market downturn, but XCOPY’s success feels much more holistic. After all, it’s not just one collection or their 1/1’s which are frenzied over. Nor is XCOPY an artist with any interest in limiting their output for market purposes. The 666-piece PFP collection, Grifters, the MAX PAIN AND FRENS open edition, the literal hundreds of 1/1s.  

Grifter #147 (2022), by XCOPY. In collection of Papa_Secure

Nobody ever shouts at XCOPY that they’re diluting their market. Nobody criticizes new stylistic choices. When XCOPY pieces sell for huge sums, there is little pushback from the crypto art masses. Most such sales are met with genuine excitement! XCOPY has been elevated to the level of patron saint, and a win for XCOPY is almost always reacted to as if it’s a win for the space as a whole. No disgust for an influencer cabal, no degradation of crypto art’s values by way of auction house market manipulation.

Through everything, XCOPY remains pure. 

I’ve listed a lot of facts about XCOPY, but still have posited no conclusion as to why XCOPY has achieved this pedestal-ed place at the apex of our art movement. But I think you kind of have to know all the facts. You have to consider the anonymity, the bottomless capacity to mint, the early support for platforms and other artists, the aesthetic style itself. Because when you put all those things together, the insane truth reveals itself. 

My Conjecture: XCOPY is XCOPY because, somehow, XCOPY is crypto art itself personified. In XCOPY’s work and career and choices are all the things we claim to hold dear, all the values, all the experimentation, all the batshittery. 

But this begs a really pertinent question, a question that actually makes me reconsider just how important XCOPY is to crypto art.

My Question: Did XCOPY evolve into perfect synergy with crypto art today, or did crypto art itself evolve to match XCOPY? 

Go with me for a second here. XCOPY’s art is often said to ecnapsulate the “extremely online” aesthetic. The flashing lights, the monstrous characters cloaked in bright colors, the maddening speed with which these gifs vibrate, the sublimation of memes and crypto culture, it’s all a frighteningly-accurate distillation of crypto art culture. On top of that, the human XCOPY is nonexistent. Instead, XCOPY becomes a symbol, stripped of pesky human opinions and genders and skin colors and nation origin, and instead floating in a liminal, online space. XCOPY’s Twitter page engages exclusively with crypto art culture, the mixture therein of posts about their own artistry, retweets of other honorific art, snarky comments about the market, remixed memes, and even banal reminders like this:

There’s no face, no real name, no series of investments, no attempt at influencerization, no sticky or suspicious collaborations with wealthy bodies. There’s just the internet of it all, a kind of decentralized, automated being.

I don’t think anyone who looks at an XCOPY piece feels any deep longing or soaring wonder in their souls. The work is flashy, it’s recognizable, it’s often fairly funny, but it isn’t like the apex of technically brilliant or existence-enriching artistry. What it is, however, is perfect for a Tweet. It is the soul of a Tweet! And like Warhol, it’s a lot more Iconography than it is Art. Disagree with me on that point if you want, but it is art made for momentary consumption. You do not want a piece like this flashing maniacally on your walls:

data_lords (2020), by XCOPY. In collection of Artifaction.

You do not want to look at it for very long, at risk of migraine induction. It is there, it completely engrosses your attention for a single second, elicits a momentary reaction, and then demands you leave it alone.

But it’s all these things we talked about, right? The art is just right. The online persona is finely-tuned. Every step in every direction feels obvious; XCOPY can do basically anything, and it fits. Preceding 2023’s open-edition craze by a full year; joining forces with Base for a million-edition mint; ceasing to make any 1/1s for months, then releasing a slurry of ‘em in rapid succession. Each of these decisions, despite being so varied in execution and tact and purpose, make sense within the march of the person’s career.

But that’s the thing about XCOPY: They’re more than a person, and also they’re less, they’re as much of a person as they need to be at any given moment.

To achieve this delicate dance, one of three things must be true:

1. XCOPY is a genius, not just at art-making but at marketing, at cultural ingratiation, at reflection, at self-mythologizing, at everything. We might just be looking at a 99.99th-percentile intellect, carving through crypto art like the queen carves through a chess board.

2. XCOPY has simply won the crypto art lottery. Dumb luck! 

3. XCOPY’s influence has been so grandiose from so early on that crypto art’s many minute maneuverings have all taken the artist, their art, their career, their choices into subconscious consideration. 

Is it legitimately possible that XCOPY’s career choices, their aesthetics, their boldness have been so influential to so many people that we have unwittingly built crypto art in XCOPY’s image? Does XCOPY exemplify crypto art’s values, or does crypto art exemplify XCOPY’s values? Does XCOPY expertly move through crypto art, or does crypto art wriggle into the ideal shape for XCOPY to move through? We know that we’re all in XCOPY’s shadow, but could we literally be XCOPY’s shadow? 

If you have a better explanation for something otherwise unexplainable, then please, let me know. Because —and I mean this 100% literally— I’m at my wit’s end. 

Just loved this short interaction between Danil Pan and BLAKKMASSART

-Your friendly neighborhood Art Writer,

Max