When two Canadian coders started an online project called CryptoPunks, they had no idea they’d spark a hyped-up, blockchain-fueled cultural juggernaut. (From 2021)
Right away, Bracegirdle saw a parallel in Hall and Watkinson’s work: “It immediately became clear to me they were like Andy Warhol,” she says. Hall and Watkinson were “critiquing and exploring the way we consume now,” she says, just as Warhol did with his. Bracegirdle invited the two to a blockchain-themed event she was planning to hold at Christie’s in London. Just like that, they were catapulted into the rarefied world of fine art.
After the panel, a curator named Georg Bak cornered Hall and Watkinson to ask if he could exhibit their work in a gallery in Zurich. “Guys, what you did is art history,” he remembers saying. “I have to show it.” Bak was organizing a blockchain-themed art show that included Abosch and Ai Weiwei; he thought Larva Labs belonged there too. For Hall and Watkinson, the whole trip had been surreal, so why not throw in a gallery show in Switzerland? They said yes.
Just as they got going on the project, though, invitations to cool art world events petered out, and interest in the CryptoPunks slowed to a crawl. Crypto winter had set in. But Bak was organizing another show and urging them to produce new work, so they pushed through., a reimagining of LeWitt’s wall drawings for the Ethereum age. It was a generative art project, but this time the generator itself was in the smart contract.
She starting thinking about artificial intelligence and whether it might help people like her, people with disabilities, in the future. If AI could augment a person’s abilities, would it alleviate their suffering? On the other hand, would the loss of pain diminish their depth of spirit? Her curiosity sent her in search of ways to experiment with AI in her art.
Silver realized that Twitter and Discord were her conduits to a better life. One day a photographer named Justin Aversano, who cofounded a nonprofit that uses empty billboards and other advertising space to promote art, sent her a message asking her if he could use Punk No. 1629. She agreed. In May, on 55th Street in Manhattan, just three blocks from MoMA, the pink-haired Punk appeared on a screen atop a public Wi-Fi kiosk. It wasas if Mr703’s prediction had come true.
As the summer wore on, Silver’s popularity online kept growing, but sales of her NFTs were spotty. Sometimes she went weeks with no income. During one dry stretch, her mother was due for a surgery, and Silver wanted to rent an Airbnb so she could be nearby. She decided it was time to sell a Punk—a woman with a shock of red hair and pink eyeshadow that Silver had nicknamed Strawberry Marla. A first-time Punk collector picked it up for about $63,000. Silver booked the Airbnb.
For the first eight months of the company’s existence, Calderon priced the mints at no more than $1,000 each, so that more people might find them affordable. But every time a new project launched, eager buyers swarmed to his company’s Discord, flooded the blockchain, and grabbed all the available works within minutes. The Discord server was bustling even between drops, with collectors gathering after a sale to suss out the pieces they scored and to see what others had gotten.
So he changed the pricing structure. In August, Art Blocks started selling pieces using a Dutch auction format, where the prices start sky-high and then fall in increments until all the works are claimed. “Now you’re not guaranteed a profit,” he says. “If the Dutch auction is working, there’s less speculation, people settle down a bit, and it leaves room for others.” The change didn’t fully solve the bot problem, but it did make it more difficult for them to game a sale.
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