when you do work for the public, that’s not art, it’s commerce… I’m not particularly a fan of mr rubin, but something he says in this clip made me think of how we operate in the NFT space and the challenges, conceptually and artistically, they represent. This is me speaking out loud as an artist and art lover worried about what we all are building here. Transactions. Sales. Floors. Volume. For the past 5 years, our little section of the art world has experimented with the idea that monetary transactions create cultural value. Works of art have become validated because of their transaction history, more than from what they provide in terms of ideas, conceptual propositions and aesthetic experimentation. Some might argue that market entanglement is the proposition. Maybe there is historical relevance in threatening the idea of art by making art be just about the transaction. The network of transactions. The shared and very public display of shared ownership. It is an uncomfortable proposition when one thinks how art movements became relevant in the past by questioning the material of art more than its distribution layer. But maybe that’s what makes this a movement? I don’t know the answer, but listening today to Rick talking about how he does art for himself and how the audience should come last, it made me question what is it that happens to art when it’s produced for the audience. NFTs, we’ve seen and can corroborate, have become successful because they sell out, because there is volume, because the network constantly buys and sells them. So all work selling as NFTs tend to be made for the public, to be first a transaction in order to be successful. So in Rubin’s theory, what are we doing with NFTs? They exist because of their transaction history transaction. Rarely does an art project get championed by being art before it’s an NFT, hence, it can’t be relevant for what it is, the art, the idea, the concept, the aesthetics of it. We’ve championed NFT success because it’s native to the onchain environment we’ve built, and built on transactions for the public first. What does that mean for these works of art then when confronted with the outside world of art where there is a different set of values in terms of what is considered art? Could we maybe argue that this value misalignment is what has created the biggest pushback from the art world at large, and not the revolutionary aesthetic and conceptual propositions onchain art preaches on? Again, maybe this is the movement, and maybe we need to push more on this? At the end of writing this I am more confused than before writing it, because sincerely, I see much of what we’ve done in the NFT space as one of the most exciting places for emerging artists to experiment and distribute work in, but it’s also challenging to deal with the mechanics of the space, especially when thinking of how to progress what it means to do art in the 21st century 🫣