Is Art Blockchain’s Killer App?

I wrote my first article on blockchain and art almost a year ago. Bitcoin has plummeted by 64% and Ethereum by 86% over that same period. Once thought to be a promising new way to fund new ideas and startups, ICOs (initial coin offerings) are now viewed with extreme skepticism, and all but disappearing.

From an outsider’s perspective, one could easily assume in this climate that the blockchain use case for art would be dead. But from the insider’s perspective, nothing could be further from the truth.

As the “get rich quick” ICOs and cryptocurrency speculation of late 2017 has subsided, the potential for blockchain to solve real-world use cases for art has only grown. Even I have been surprised by how resilient and fast moving things are in the blockchain art space during this span of cryptoCurrency free fall.

In this post, we talk directly with the key innovators in the space and look at some of the strongest signs of momentum in the adoption of blockchain for the world of art, including:

• Christie’s auction house partnering with startup Artory to roll out a blockchain pilot for the auction of the Barney A. Ebsworth Collection, estimated to exceed $300 million.

• Established artists like Ai Wei Wei and Eve Sussman exploring the blockchain and CryptoArt.

• Ambitious startups creating innovative tools and services making it easier for artists of all abilities to take advantage of the blockchain.

While we have seen fewer headlines on blockchain and art in the last few months, it has also been the most productive time period for the space. I’m not sure if there is causation here, but I’m certainly not willing to rule it out.

Christie’s to Record Sales on Blockchain

Horn and Feather, Georiga O’Keefe, oil on canvas, 1937

In my last article, “Art World, Meet blockchain,” I implied that large organizations like Christie’s would be better served teaming up with smaller, more nimble startups to explore technological innovations like blockchain. Christie’s has since made the right move in my opinion, forming a partnership with the blockchain title registry Artory.

Artory brings the rapid innovation of a startup, but with a known quantity at the helm in founder Nanne Dekking, who also serves as the current chairman of TEFAF (The European Fine Art Foundation).

Though pitching it as a pilot, I am pleasantly surprised that Christie’s chose the highly visible Barney A. Ebsworth Collection as their foray into blockchain. The Ebsworth Collection is widely recognized as the most important privately held collection of twentieth century American art. The collection is estimated to exceed $300 million total at auction and will be entirely recorded on the blockchain.

On a personal note, I am particularly fond of many of the artists who feature in this collection, as Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Marsden Hartley and others are well represented in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Woman as Landscape, Willem de Kooning, oil and charcoal on canvas, 1954-1955

I asked Christie’s CIO Richard Entrup how the use of blockchain might impact the Ebsworth auction experience and if we should anticipate further adoption of blockchain from Christie's moving forward. Entrup shared:

Christie’s leadership in global sales is reflected and supported by continued investment in digital platforms and initiatives that work for our clients. Our pilot collaboration with Artory is a first among the major global auction houses, and reflects growing interest within our industry to explore the benefits of secure digital registry via blockchain technology.

We are running this as a pilot and there is no risk or we would not be doing it. Christie’s will retain all information about the buyer. The certificate relates to the object, not the owner. We will consider the future use of blockchain in our business at the end of the project. As ever, any changes will be led by our clients’ needs.

I think this crawl, walk, run approach is the exact right one to mitigate potential concerns from their collector base while exploring the upside that blockchain could bring to their business and the art industry at large. It is clearly a win for Artory and a reflection of the trust Nanne Dekking has established in the art world. I asked Nanne for his thoughts on the partnership:

We are honored that Christie’s is teaming up with our blockchain-secured art registry for its upcoming sale of the Barney A. Ebsworth Collection of American modernism. The house will become the first major auctioneer to apply the innovative technology. For first-time buyers and experienced collectors alike, Artory provides: the reassurance that they are dealing with a vetted seller; that there will be an immutable record of the transaction; and that they will receive a certificate of sale from an independent third party—all of which encourage them to act with confidence.

Artory will create a digital certificate of each transaction for Christie’s, and the latter will provide their clients with a registration card to securely access an encrypted record of information about their purchased artwork on the Artory Registry. Artory not only gives buyers the confidence they crave, it enhances their entire experience. Offering up-to-date information from trusted resources about transactions and the market in general, Artory saves buyers time and money when performing due diligence. Furthermore, unlike current bills of sale, which are easily lost or forged, Artory’s standardized certificates of sale take the headache out of collection management, providing irrefutable proof of ownership without compromising buyers’ anonymity or privacy.

It’s essential for some of the larger institutions like Christie’s to come on board if blockchain registries are going to become mainstream in the art world. I’m rooting for Christie’s blockchain pilot to add real value in the form of better provenance and data transparency and hoping that it serves as a foundation for expansion and not just a one-time experiment.

Blockchain, Artists, and Exhibitions

Kevin Abosch (left) and Ai Wei Wei

While the Christie’s partnership signals interest among collectors for using blockchain to better catalog art, interest in and by artists has also never been greater.

{Perfect & Priceless} Value Systems on the Blockchain, a show at the Kate Vass Galerie in In Zürich , Switzerland, curated by generative art expert Georg Bak, will open on November 15th and run through January 11th, 2019.

The show features many of the most innovative artists working with blockchain today, including collaborators Kevin Abosch and Ai Wei Wei, Matt Hall and John Watkinson of CryptoPunks, and blockchain art pioneer Rob Myers.

While all of the works in the show explore “value systems” as the title implies, I find materiality as a secondary theme to be the most interesting lens through which to view the work. Or as CryptoPunks artist John Watkinson puts it, “Bridging the divide between the digital and the physical.”

One of my favorite works in the show is the Chaos Machine by the Distributed Gallery, an art collective from France. Side note, if you are an astute and regular reader of Artnome, you may remember the Distributed Gallery as the team behind the controversial Richard Prince token, whose anonymity I exposed, and whom I then interviewed in great depth.

Chaos Machine, The Distributed Gallery, 2018

Chaos Machine, The Distributed Gallery, 2018 (close up)

The Distributed Gallery’s Chaos Machine literally burns fiat (paper currency) and turns it into what they call a “chaos coin.” This is not a physical coin, but rather a blockchain-based cryptographic token. For me, the spectacle of watching the currency burn draws attention to the absurdity of wealth being stored and transmitted through such a seemingly arbitrary and fragile object as a paper bill in an age where all things are rapidly moving towards digitization.

Though there is no direct connection between the burning of the paper currency and the production of the chaos coin, it feels as if a transfer of value has been facilitated by the machine. Our mind establishes a cause and effect relationship based on a sequence in which one symbol of value is destroyed and another is born. The sequence also narrows the gap in the reverence held for established government-backed paper currencies versus the initially absurd-seeming chaos coin. Is a chaos coin really all that different from a banknote? The philosopher Bernard Aspe (as translated by Daniel Shavit) writes about Chaos Machine:

…it is because all the others place their trust in this strange object, the banknote (or the cryptocurrency unit), that I too can trust. I trust the trust of others. It is only in this way, only as trust that refers only to itself, that value «exists»…

…Behind the bill that is consumed, there is nothing - literally, and what is made visible here is above all nothingness…

…The new currency necessarily reproduces, for the most part, the aberrations of the previous one. Its main merit, however, is that it is more open about what is nothing to the principle of social interaction…

For me, Chaos Machine highlights how physical currency feels antiquated, clumsy, and vulnerable (not to mention government-dependent) in an age when music, books, and now art are increasingly moving towards the digital. With Chaos Machine, the Distributed Gallery has compressed the transition of digitalization which is being played out across decades into a single act. Simply insert the bill, watch it burn, and receive your new digital currency. This not only makes the transition to digital currency more visceral, but also makes for good theater.

CryptoPunks, printed version with paper wallet and wax seal

In contrast to Chaos Machine, the work being shown by Matt Hall and John Watkinson of the CryptoPunks runs the process of digitization in reverse. They will present the first ever printed CryptoPunks, displayed in a grid of nine unique artworks.

The CryptoPunks are a generative art project comprised of a series of 10k pixelated portraits of punks with proof of ownership stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Matt and John famously released the Punks into the world for free in 2017 as one-of-a-kind digital collectables that anyone could claim. An economy quickly emerged around the characters, with the more rare Punks selling for thousands of dollars.

CryptoPunks has helped to prove out and popularize the application of digital scarcity to digital art on the blockchain as pioneered by projects like Rare Pepe Wallet. Where Chaos Machine took currency born in the physical world and turned it into a digital currency, Matt and John are taking their Punks, born digital, and giving them a new material existence as printed work for this show. It was important to them to communicate that as digital art, physical representations are only artifacts of the genuine digital asset. As John explains:

For this show, we tried to bridge the divide between physical and digital art, while still reinforcing the point that the digital, cryptographic asset represents the true "ownership" of the work, as opposed to the physical print. We did this by including with each print a "paper wallet," which is a set of 12 words that encode an Ethereum address (using the BIP-39 standard). So that it wasn't seen as subordinate to the print, and to have a little fun, the paper wallet was sealed with a custom CryptoPunk wax seal. The buyer can decide to either open the envelope and claim ownership over the Ethereum address that owns the punk, or they can simply leave it sealed, and include it with the print if they resell the work. So, one of the earliest forms of security is brought together with one of the most modern to make these works both physical and digital.

One way to think of these printed representations of the Punks is as a physical proxy for their digital equivalents. The work of another artist in the show, artist Kevin Abosch, has long explored the idea of proxies, first through photographs as proxies for the people and objects captured within them, and more recently, through tokens and tokenization as proxies.

In his work IAMA Coin included in the exhibit, Abosch created 100 physical artworks and a limited edition of 10 million virtual artworks. The physical works are stamped using the Abosh's own blood with the contract address on the Ethereum blockchain corresponding to the creation of the the 10 million virtual works (ERC-20 tokens).

Artist Kevin Abosch harvesting blood as material for his IAMA Coins

In my interview with Abosch last spring, he provided more background and detail on the IAMA Coin project:

My IAMA Coin project really is the culmination of everything I am about: identity, existence, value, human currency. And it's just a function of me being an artist with a bit of success and feeling a bit commodified... as I have said in the press already. And I started to imagine myself as a coin. In fact, I started looking at of all of us as coins, and wondered what that would look like, all of us as coins in the hands of the masses, and wanted to do that in some kind of elegant way. So naturally I started to look at the blockchain.

But still I was thinking, "I'm an artist, I'm not trying to raise money for a company, so I will tokenize myself..." and you saw how I did that - the blood, the physical work, and the virtual work of my IAMA Coin project. It has been a bit of a challenge for some people as to how an ERC20 token itself can be a piece of virtual art, or it is a placeholder for art, whichever you prefer. I think when it comes to blockchain plus art, this would be a rather extreme position.

Abosch’s second work in the exhibition is a collaboration with Ai Wei Wei called PRICELESS. It further explores the idea of proxies and asks the question, “How and why do we value anything at all?” by tokenizing photographs of moments the two artists have shared. Abosch says:

I have been using blockchain addresses as proxies to distill emotional value for some time now, and with Wei Wei, we “tokenized” our priceless shared moments together. Some of these moments on the surface might seem banal while others are subtly provocative, but these fleeting moments like Sharing Tea and Walking In A Carefree Manner Down Schönhauser Allee or Talking About The Art Market are the building blocks of human experience. All moments in life are priceless.

Each priceless moment is represented by a unique blockchain address which is “inoculated” by a small amount of a virtual artwork (crypto-token) we created called PRICELESS (symbol: PRCLS). Only two ERC20 tokens were created for the project, but as they are divisible to 18 decimal places, these works of virtual art could potentially be distributed to billions of people. Furthermore, a very limited series of physical prints were made.

One of the two PRICELESS tokens will be unavailable at any price. The remaining token will be divided into one million fractions of one token and made available to individual collectors and institutions. These artworks of course may be divided into much smaller artworks, as the PRICELESS token is divisible to 18 decimal places. It is not unusual in the art world for large works to be priced higher than similar smaller works; so should a larger fraction of PRICELESS have a higher price than a smaller fraction. One of those peculiar ways we value things — greater size/quantity = greater value. The question is, if one token is priceless and truly unattainable, then how do we value the other token which is made available?

My understanding is that the photographs are not for sale and the physical works are printouts of the wallet address that contain a “nominal amount of PRCLS token.” In this sense, the wallet addresses are a proxy for the photographs, which are in turn a proxy for the moments shared between the two artists.

Printout of a PRICELESS wallet address

As described by Abosch above, there is also a second PRICELESS token which is being distributed and is divisible enough so that everyone on the planet could receive a share.

According to the smart contract, I happen to be one of the first people to receive a share of the token, and I have enough that I can give a fraction to every person on the planet. If you are interested, email me your MyEtherWallet address at jason@artnome.com and I will send you a fraction. As a collector of Abosch’s art, I will warn you he often scrambles traditional value systems so much that you are left uncertain as to what it is you own (if anything) and what that something is worth - and I think that is exactly the way he likes it.

Ai Wei Wei is not the only well-known artist from the more traditional art world exploring the use of blockchain. Renowned artist Eve Sussman who is best known for translating well-known masterworks into large scale re-enactments has teamed up with Snark.art to create a piece called 89 Seconds Atomized.

The work is based on her well-known piece 89 Seconds at Alcázar, a live re-enactment which meticulously creates the moments directly before and after the image portrayed by Diego Velázquez in Las Meninas (1656). The piece debuted at the 2004 Whitney Biennial to great acclaim and can be seen in it’s original form below.

According to Snark.Art:

89 seconds Atomized shatters the final artist's proof of Eve Sussman's acclaimed video 89 seconds at Alcazár into 2,304 unique blocks, to create a new artwork on the blockchain. An experiment in ownership and collective interaction, the piece can be reassembled and screened at will by the community of collectors.

I received a sneak preview of 89 Seconds Atomized at a well-attended blockchain art event hosted by Elena Zavelev and the New Art Academy at NYU this past October where Sussman gave an artist’s talk and presented the work to the audience.

Sussman provides more detail on her motivation to explore the blockchain for her recent piece in the video below.

This project is Snark.art’s first collaboration as part of their mission to “…create a distributed system of art ownership and creation while also offering an entirely new crypto-investment opportunity and point of entry to the blockchain world.” I’m looking forward to following their future artist collaborations.

Blockchain Startups, Tools, and Innovations

Perhaps you are not Ai Wei Wei or Eve Sussman, but you too would like to put your work on the blockchain for better provenance and the opportunity to sell your digital art. What about the rest of us?

There are now a dozen or so blockchain-based art markets that cater to artists of many ability levels and experience. Markets like SuperRare are evolving quickly and have even become a place for traditional auction houses like Christie’s to source talent. The French artist’s collective Obvious that recently sold their Portrait of Edmond Belamy for $450K were contacted by Christie’s after they were discovered on the SuperRare blockchain art market.

I asked the SuperRare folks what it was like to hear that Obvious had been scouted form their market place:

It was exciting and somewhat surreal to see Obvious get picked up by Christies and have such a successful auction, after starting to sell their digital works on SuperRare earlier in the year. It's fantastic to see this much attention on creators who are experimenting with the intersection of art and new technologies, whether AI or blockchain. I think this is just the beginning of a big shift in the way we think about art, value, and the potential of computers to augment human creativity.

In addition to pioneering the lively and active SuperRare market, Pixura, SuperRare’s parent company, has announced they are making it possible for anyone to launch their own market for art and collectibles on the Ethereum blockchain.

With Pixura, the goal is to lower the barrier to entry for building crypto collectible applications. When we launched SuperRare, we got contacted by a lot of creatives, entrepreneurs, and even web developers who wanted a digital asset marketplace for their idea, but didn't have the means to do the blockchain engineering themselves. So we're launching a platform that lets anyone deploy a digital asset marketplace in minutes, without writing any code. The possibilities of this nascent technology is super inspiring, and we're excited to see what people build on it.

This is huge, and I think it gets at what most artists really want: a turn-key, Shopify-style solution for selling their own digital art and collectibles on the blockchain. From early on, most of the artists I spoke with were concerned that their carefully crafted personal brand might be thrown off if they were just tossed in with dozens of other artists at random on a catch-all marketplace. For example, if I paint impressionistic floral still lifes and you paint bloody skulls, I may not want my work to be juxtaposed next to your work (or maybe I do?), but existing blockchain marketplaces do not give artists that level of control.

I personally can’t put to rest the idea of launching an Artnome gallery for digital art built on the Pixura platform. I’d like to launch a heavily curated digital gallery with a small number of works by an even smaller number of artists. I’d want my gallery to celebrate artists as heroes - the way I read about them and experienced them when I was growing up. In an age when it is no longer popular to think of artists as geniuses, I still see great art and artists as transcendent and worthy of our greatest admiration. To be honest, I miss the romantic myth-making put behind artists like the abstract expressionists that made them feel so much larger than life to me. Curation, of course, flies in the face of blockchain and decentralization - but we already have several great distributed blockchain art markets, and I want to build a house of worship for amazing contemporary digital artists, dammit. I’ll get off my soap box - but feedback is welcome here, both for and against.

One thing that would hold me back from building a blockchain market is how complicated it still is for the average person to grasp blockchain. Getting your first cryptocurrency requires connecting your bank account and downloading third-party browser plugins like MetaMask in order to transact. While a recent Twitter poll I took with 193 respondents suggests almost 75% of people are open to collecting digital art on the blockchain, most people would agree that user experience is the number one thing slowing down new user adoption of cryptocurrency and collectibles.

Twitter poll taken from my @artnome account

Luckily, startups like Portion.io are investing heavily in UX (user experience design) to help streamline the process. Portion is a blockchain Dapp that allows anyone to be their own auction house on the blockchain. It is still early in their development, but they officially launched their beta last month with a collection of digital sneakers from artist Robb Harskamp. The first thing I noticed when buying my Harskamp Air Jordan 3 Retro Tinker from Portion is that I did not need MetaMask - and I didn’t miss it.

Air Jordan 3 Retro Tinker, Robb Harskamp - 1/1, Artnome digital art collection

While those who have come to like MetaMask can either "safely generate a new wallet" or use "MetaMask when the functionality is built in", Portion has effectively removed a step for new buyers, making it easier to get started. I spoke to Portion CEO Jason Rosenstein about the importance of simplifying UX for blockchain markets:

Currently, there are as many crypto users as internet users in the year 1994. For blockchain projects to truly take off, I believe the key will be taking the cryptic out of crypto. There will come a point when people won’t need to know the underlying technology of a particular application is interacting with the blockchain. For example, when you send an email, not many people give a shit about the amazing underlying TCP/IP protocol. For crypto projects to succeed in the future, they must cater to the general population by improving UX/UI and investing in R&D to reduce barriers to entry.

Interface for the new Portion.io Dapp

Though Portion.io launched with a digital marketplace, their plan is to quickly move into the physical space, as well, allowing anyone to auction digital and physical goods with the many advantages that come with transacting via cryptocurrency.

Indeed, the physical art market dwarfs the relatively new and niche market for collecting digital art. This was never more apparent to me than at the social hour after Christie’s blockchain conference in London. Everyone there worked in the art trade in one form or another, and they were all hungry to learn how blockchain related to the trade for art and other physical luxury goods.

The BAC (Blockchain Art Collective) has an excellent head start on building out a solution for authentication and tracking of physical art that combines IoT (internet of things) and blockchain technologies. I spoke with Jacqueline O'Neill, executive director, about what makes BAC unique:

Blockchain Art Collective has chosen to tackle the physical art space first and foremost, as our blockchain and trusted IoT solutions have been in development with our tech partner Chronicled since 2014, and they bring a lot of unprecedented value to the art world.

What anyone from an artist to a gallery to an auction house to an art logistics company should understand is that we now have the capacity to create the same level of physical scarcity - which relies on a variety of security-related, technological features made possible by blockchain and trusted IoT - for physical art in the way we are seeing digital scarcity for digital art.

This one-to-one, tamper-evident, and encrypted physical-digital link improves the not-so-unfamiliar barcoding system for managing any volume of art assets by combining the role of the artist's signature, a physical or digital certificate of authenticity, and a physical or digital catalogue raisonné into a single, secured identity that can stay with an artwork over the course of its life.

Additionally, we can now connect that unique artwork with a rich digital life that protects its authenticity, tracks its provenance, and unlocks new vehicles for artists and arts institutions to monetize their artworks.

Blockchain Art Collective tagging sticker

A large part of what I find compelling about BAC is that it was spun out of Chronicled, who have been deploying decentralized supply chain ecosystems and building protocol-driven solutions to enhance global trade across key industries since 2014. That experience and know-how combined with O’Neill’s art background and passion for the solution give it a real shot of catching on as a widely used solution for physical art.

Conclusion - Is Art Blockchain’s Killer App?

So what would it look like if art was Blockchain’s killer App? What would it take to successfully integrate blockchain into the art world and solve real-world problems? We would probably want to see some of the biggest institutions like Christie’s experimenting in a high-profile way with blockchain. Check. We might also want to see some of the world’s most influential living artists, people like Ai Wei Wei, experimenting with blockchain as subject matter and and as a medium. Check. And given it is still the early days, we’d want an army of startups and creative technologists working around the clock on R&D to improve and invent new solutions. Check.

I have been trying to tell people for the better part of a year now that the blockchain use case for art has very little to do with the cryptocurrency craze of late 2017. The popular opinion among most innovators in this space is that the volatility and press that came with the bull market may have done more harm than good for those trying to build out actual solutions. So perhaps we should not be surprised at all by the signs of growth and strength in blockchain and art. It may not be getting as much press as a few months ago, but I would not take your eye off the blockchain and art space.

The Truth Behind Christie’s $432K AI Art Sale

Christie’s just sold the first piece of AI art to be offered at a major auction house for $432,500. The piece was consigned by Obvious, a group of three friends from France with no formal art training.

There have been a lot of questions surrounding the creation of the work sold at auction, including:

• Does AI artist Robbie Barrat deserve credit for this work?

• Why did Obvious exaggerate the role of the algorithm?

• Did Obvious really say they were considering “patenting ‘their’ algorithm”?

• What role did Obvious actually have in making the Portrait of Edmond Belamy?

• How does Obvious view AI and art moving forward?

In this interview, I speak with Hugo Caselles-Dupré, the tech lead from Obvious, and ask the questions above to cut through speculation and get answers straight from the source. I believe Hugo is being candid and transparent in this interview (even when it is not in his favor).

My interview with Hugo is extensive and gives his unfiltered point of view. Because I have given Hugo over 6,800 words, before we dive into the interview, I’d like to share some thoughts from other members of the AI art community to offer some balance to this story.

I asked respected AI artist Mario Klingemann who deserves the credit for the Portrait of Edmond Belamy. He shared:

“The question of who deserves the credit here is not so easy to answer. One important aspect is that this work was made in the context of art and not in that of science, so there is no obligation to cite prior work or list the tools and frameworks that you use to create your art.

“When it comes to Ian Goodfellow's GAN, I see that as a production tool, similar to Photoshop in digital art or a brush in painting. As far as I know, Ian does not identify as an artist or label his creation as an artwork, so while I would see it as good etiquette to mention that his or other researchers' work was used in one's work, I would not go so far to give him artistic credit for all the creations that get made by using it.

“Now, with Robbie's contribution, it's something else - he curated the training data set, trained the model, and put it on GitHub. So in the end, Obvious just had to fork it, have it produce a number of images based on random feature vectors, and finally make their selection. So you could say that Robbie did two thirds of the work involved in this process.”

02472, Mario Klingemann, created using GANs

Another highly respected artist, Tom White, has been exploring AI and art since the mid-1990s. Tom shared that he believed that Obvious used a similar codebase and the same training set.

Outputs from Robbie Barrat's 2017 art-DCGAN project run by Tom White

Indeed, Tom ran Robbie’s model himself and was able to come up with images that look almost exactly like the Portrait of Edmond Belamy. It is Tom’s opinion that the Portrait of Edmond Belamy is a work of “appropriation.”

Hugo’s thoughts on this are covered in detail in the interview below. He did ask that I include this video as partial proof that Obvious did train their own GAN.

Lastly, this is the second part of my interview with Hugo. In part one we focused on how Obvious went from failing to sell their work on eBay to making $432,500 on a single print at Christie’s. It is not required that you read the first part of the interview to proceed with the second part, though I do recommend it if you have the interest and the time.

I hope you enjoy the interview.

Interview With Hugo Caselles-Dupré

Does Robbie Barrat deserve the credit for the Portrait of Edmond Belamy?

JB: Okay. So I am going to ask the hard questions, but I think this is important because I know you want to clear the air with this interview. Would you say that Robbie deserves credit for a percentage of the work you created? Or would you say he built the camera and you used the camera? How do you think about this?  

HC: Yeah. I think this is a good question. We ask ourselves this question a lot, too. And we're like, 'Okay, what can we do with this?' But in the end, the fact that we did this physical piece and we signed with the formula is something that we wanted to do, and I think it has a lot of responsibility in the exposure of our project, too. So we owe him a lot, and that's what we said to him, that we wanted to be up front with him. So we owe him a lot. We wish him success. And we hope that if people like our project, they'll go to his project, too, and check out what he's doing. So we think he deserves something in this whole situation. And then, I considered even more. What can we really do?

JB: It’s just a matter of making it clear, and this interview is the exact right place to do it because we go a bit deeper. So could you have made the Belamy project without using Robbie’s code?

HC: Yeah, yeah, I really think so, because we had our eyes on many different data sets. We already knew that we wanted to do something like a classical art movement, like portraits or something like this. We already had this in mind. And so when we saw this, it was like, 'Okay, this is really convenient, so we can try working with this.' Yeah. We would have definitely found a way to do it ourselves. Before going over his code, I was already doing lots of things with GANs for my master's degree, so I already had lots of things going on with GANs. It was just a matter of collecting the data sets, and we would find a way because we have some scraping abilities. We used his code mostly for the scraper. So we used his scraper for getting all the data with the art. And in the end, the code that created the Belamy collection is the one that I -- the actual GAN permutation is the one that I talked to you about.

JB: The PyTorch DCGAN?

HC: I was already doing this with my master's degree. I was already involved in the GAN coding.

JB: You used the scraper mostly to gather the images?

HC: Yeah. Gather the data. So it's a Python script that when you run it, it collects all the data, like for the portrait class, for example. So you can collect all the data of the portraits.

JB: Where did you get the images?

HC: In the wikiart.com.

Why did you say, “Creativity is not only for humans,” implying that AI was autonomously making the work, even when you knew that was a false statement?

JB: What about your narrative that “creativity isn’t only for humans”? Were you playing up the machines and now saying that is not what you meant?

HC: Yeah. Exactly. I think that's what happens when you're doing something and nobody cares, then you’re just goofing around and doing really clumsy stuff. And then when everybody has this view, then they go back to what you did before and then you have to justify it. We kept justifying, because we still think that this part of the GAN operator that creates the images is really interesting and there is some form of creativity there … and we just thought it was cool to just do it like this. For us, it was just a funny way to talk about it.

JB: You didn't know you were going to be under the microscope.

HC: If we knew we were going to have to 400 press articles on what we do, we most definitely would have done that. But at [that] moment we were like, 'Yeah, it’s silly, okay, whatever, let's put this.' But retrospectively, when we see that, we are like, 'That's a big mistake.'

JB: All you can do is admit the mistake. What creative behavior do GANs exhibit? Many feel they don’t exhibit creative behavior.

HC: For me, the fact that you give it a certain number of examples and then you can continue to see results in the latent space, for me, the gap has to be [bridged]. So necessarily, there's some kind of, like, inventing something. So I guess there is some kind of creativity for me… because creativity is a really broad term, so it can be misunderstood, because creativity is something really related to humans. But at the basic, low level, it was given a set of images, it can create images that does not belong to the training set. So that's something that is transformed by the model, and there's some kind of creativity. So it's just a way you interpret the word "creativity." Maybe from certain perspectives you can say it's creativity.

JB: So it sounds like you believe it is dependent upon your personal definition of creativity? Some people say GANs are just are approximate distributions and that is not really creative - but it sounds like you think it is creative?

HC: Yeah. It's like, whatever you think creativity is, if we fit on the same definition, we are obliged to agree on something. So if we go to the same definition that creativity is something like, let's say, this ‘Concept A,’ then GANs will fit this concept. Or not? It's just a point of view thing, I guess -- and I understand that people can argue that [it’s] not great, we understand that, but it's just a point of view.

Did you claim you were going to “patent” the algorithm even though it was not yours?

JB: So there was an article where you are quoted saying you decided not to patent your algorithm. You mentioned to me that you never actually said that. But the formula on the front of your painting is by Ian Goodfellow, but you don’t credit him there.

HC: Yeah. Yeah. “Belamy” is translated to “Goodfellow” in French. So I think this argument is really not good, because we said many, many, many times that “Belamy” is the French translation for “Goodfellow,” because we admire Goodfellow and that he created GANs, and so we put the formula there. So it's a mathematical expression -- it's not ours, it's not his. It does not belong to anybody. So it's exactly like GANs, but we have the respect to pay to Goodfellow because he created this paper, but it's open source. So we never thought something about copyrighting the GAN algorithm. It doesn't make sense. Because for me, as a researcher in machine learning, it's really ridiculous to think that, because, like, you cannot put a patent on a theorem or an algorithm because it's part of the general knowledge of humankind, and anybody could call it in their own and use it. It's part of general knowledge. So yeah. There's more and more phrases in articles [that] we never said.

What contributions did Obvious make in creating Portrait of Edmond Belamy?

JB: So somebody else wrote the GAN code you used, correct? Did you use DCGAN for the Belamy painting?

HC: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So we used DCGAN. It turns out this is the implementation available in PyTorch, it is the Soumith Chintala repository, so we used that because we tried both variants, because in my research I already had the code for many different types of GANs, so I already had code. And in the end, when I did the full search, DCGAN was fine. It was not [about] technological performance; we were just like, 'Hey, it's just this new way of using GANs.' I guess something like Big GANs, it's interesting for AI art, but it's also research. Like, there's an actual technological innovation with GANs, and we didn't claim to do something like this. We just wanted to have a regular GAN that worked well and allowed us to do what we wanted to do.

Because right now we are working on a project with 3D GANs, and I guess this time the technological innovation is a bit better, I guess. We are in contact with some researcher at the Max Planck Institute to use one of their models in order to create and train a GAN. And in this project, I think we are getting more involved in how it works. But since it was our first project … everybody's got to start somewhere, so you start with this. It seems like a reasonable idea. This project seems good. So let’s roll with it. So yes, we used this GANs, which we did, and we curated the assets in order to have the best result that we got. We tried many super resolution algorithms, and so we tried one with GANs, we tried others that don't really use machine learning techniques, more traditional techniques. And in the end, we found an enhancer, and so that worked really, really great and that gave really beautiful results, so we were like, 'We think it's really cool, and we are just going to stick with this.'

So yeah, we just tried a bunch of things, and when we thought the result was correct enough for our first project, we said, 'Okay, now let's try to show it to the world' and maybe use it to finance our further research and see where we can go with it. Because the actual first idea was, like, 'Okay, let's try this.' If we manage to have a little bit of expression and people are interested and we start new projects, then we'll continue with that. If nobody cares, we're just going to stop working, and then my two friends were planning on getting back their job, and we would stop and we would continue with our lives -- I have my Ph.D., they have jobs -- and we go on with our lives. And the fact that it blew up really changed everything.

I guess, yeah, a really big misconception [about it is] that it's just our first project, so we wanted to do this.

JB: Some of the engineers I have worked with would call this using off-the-shelf technology. There is not a lot of technical innovation going on here on your part. If it’s not technical, then where is the innovation in the Belamy project?

HC: So for this project, we guessed that the innovation with it is … we presented it in such an easy, not subtle way. Since it's really easy to comprehend, I think that's what the innovation is. But since it has resonated with so many people, is that there must be something here that is different to what was done before. But at first, we wanted to do something original, something unique. But you can't really control what people think of what you are doing. So yeah, maybe the fact that it was really accessible was the key. But we don't really know. So for further projects, we have lots of ideas.

But also one thing that must be really considered here is that we don't have any money. We don't have any computational power, so we spend lots of money on just trying this first project, and when we feel that we've got enough results, we stop there, because it was costing us money and costing us time, so we couldn't really afford to do something really innovative, because if you don't have the computational power, you just can't. So of course, I knew about progressive GAN from the day that they posted it on Reddit, and I wanted to try it the day after, but I just couldn't. So it's exactly the same thing with the big GAN papers, it's like, 'Okay, it requires like 512 GPU cores,’ something that we don't have, we don't have the budget for this. So for now, if you wanted to train this, you just can't. So yeah, we want to do this innovative stuff, but we've got to start somewhere to get some financing and continue working, having some credibility, having opportunities to get to access to more computational power. It was a way to have the means of doing something really innovative. At the time we created the Belamy Family, we didn't have the means to do something really creative -- or, I can’t really say that. It was really hard for us to try something really innovative, because when you try something really innovative -- and I see it in my research, too -- you need to try and fail a lot. So if you fail, you are going to train that model for nothing, and then you have to pay for it. So we couldn't really afford that.

Why didn’t you open source your code?

JB: A few more quick questions. I let some folks know I was interviewing you and asked if they had any questions. Someone is asking if you really want to make this understandable to the public, why don’t you open source the code?

HC: Yeah, okay, why not? But it's already -- we can do it, but it's already open source. It's like, what I told you, we used DCGAN, so yeah, it's already online. But we can do it if some people are interested. But mainly we just want to point to different things that we used and that's what we did also in our Medium blog post. So there is this DCGAN PyTorch repository. We also were inspired by the art-DCGAN repository of Robbie Barrat. …We can release the version of the data set that is curated, but yeah. It's not really interesting. We just removed all the paintings that have double faces or that were really like a real portrait. But we are not against open sourcing. For me, open sourcing this would be like taking someone's code and open sourcing it, like, it’s not yours, just point to where you get this code, and I got this code there at Robbie Barrat’s GitHub and Sumith’s GitHub. You can just use it. These tools are already available.

JB: So open sourcing it would imply that you are taking more credit than you want to take because you did not actually write any code?

HC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you're making a good point. If I was in the shoes of Robbie Barrat, I wouldn’t like to see my code on something that Obvious released because, yeah, it's my code. And we already with lots of journalists talked about him, saying we were inspired by what he did, and on our main blog post, the link to his GitHub is available. It's one of the first things we talk about. And we are also really up front with him with this -- like, when we did this, we were like, ‘Okay, we need to send him a message and ask him if he's okay with that,’ and so he told us he was okay, and he told us, “Okay, I thought you were using just the code but not training models.” And then we said, “No, no, we trained our models. We tweaked the hyper-parameters to make it work.” We really had fun with it, and in the end, he said it's totally okay. And he asked us to make references to his code, and that's what we did on our website. We wanted really not to steal his ideas or to steal his code, we wanted to be really honest with him.

Where are GANs going from here?

JB: Given that you have some passion around art, how do you look at AI and art in general? What is AI adding to art, who is making interesting work, how do you position it relative to the larger sphere of art and your own passion for it?

HC: I think one of the reasons we got so much exposure is that AI art is something that is revealing what people think about AI, and revealing the fear and the misconception about AI. And that's why it also gets so much attention. So in the art spectrum, I would say this is really interesting because this is really showing something about this society, and so in this way, I guess art is a great way reveal the mood of society and what people are thinking right now. So this is really representative of the current atmosphere around AI and around all the misconceptions. So I think that's one of the reasons AI art is also interesting, because it goes to show something about the humans of today. I see that GANs were created in 2014, [and] the first results were not that great. Now, every six months we get a really big leap in technology — so we got GANs, then we got DCGANs, [then] we got Progressive GANs, then we got Big GANs that were the first result with the faces that were realistic. Then Progressive GANs was a big leap. Then Big GANs really, I think, is a huge leap, too, because that diversity of images is really big. So from the technology point of view, since the researchers were being really fast, I think that there will be more and more possibilities around this technology.

And it's not only GANs, because GANs is a huge example and something really interesting right now, but we won't be interested in AI research, there will be more breakthroughs in the future because people are putting lots of effort into doing AI research. So I think there will be more and more tools that are created, and that should create new artists and new art and new artistic approaches using these tools. Because we really do think that this tool is something incredible. When we talk about photography, we really meant it that when photography first appeared, it was just like a technology for highly qualified engineers, and so we do have the same thing with AI tools right now. So maybe AI could be something like photography that sparked a whole new art movement. So we hope it's that way, but we can't really know for sure. I don't know if it will last as long as and will be as important as photography, but I think there is a good chance.

JB: I look at something like Google Deep Dream, and once the code became open source, anyone could add photos. When I added photos, I was at first amazed, thinking, “This is better than Salvador Dali,” but after about 10 of them it loses its novelty. So nobody gets excited about Deep Dream images anymore because they realize even their grandmother can do it with the click of a button. How will GANs be different from Deep Dream?

HC: I see what you're getting at. I think here again we can compare it to photography. Anyone can take their cell phone and take anything. And so what makes photography really incredible or really interesting? And so I think as in photography, you have to add craftsmanship which will be [amplified] with your tool, and the message that is conveyed. When you see photographs of Weiwei with his middle finger and things like this, you see, anyone could have done this photography, but the way he did it was really relevant and was attached to a strong message. So that's why it's really important. And so I think that as time goes on, we will see that artists with the best ideas, I would say, or the most creative way to use the tools, will eventually be recognized for this and not just using something really new or something like that. And so that's exactly something that could be said, too, is like, ‘Okay, you are just using Deep Dream for GANs.’ We totally agree with that. In order for people to start getting cameras and take photos — and so for the great artists of tomorrow to rise, then you need to present technology.

Also, I think that what we do may spark people to get to know this tool and maybe be more creative than us. And we don't care. We're not in a competition. Since we want to make this technology shine, and so that more and more people know about AI, know about machine learning -- I'm passionate about machine learning, so I want people to know about it. I want them to know how great it is and how interesting it is. And I think in the end, you cannot fool people -- artists will eventually get sorted out and the best will naturally rise. This process has been seen for a million years, and it's always the same thing. We hope and believe that the best artists will get what they deserve and get the exposure that they really deserve.

So I think it's the craftsmanship that will be the most determinant thing in why AI art is interesting in the future. I don't think it will be a succession of technological innovation and stuff like this. I think already what we have right now, you can explore it in so many ways that there are things to be created that are potentially masterpieces. And you need that work and you need that dedication to find a way to find these masterpieces.

JB: When you project forward from your description it sounds like humans are going to become more and more important in what differentiates good art in GANs, not less and less. The public has this dystopian vision that AI is going to replace artists. But what you just described is the opposite.

HC: I totally agree with that.

JB: What are some examples of humans making good GAN art? What is good GAN art?

HC: Yeah, what is an example of good GAN art? To reproduce something that was done before is something that has been done a lot through the history of art. I think that's a bit of what we do. Like, portraits have been something really important in art for a long time, and reinventing portraits and seeing it from a different perspective is something that is interesting. So we were inspired by that and we thought that it was a really striking way to show how it's really interesting.

What you are saying is that I don't think that machine will replace artists and things like that. In the end, art is made for humans, so it needs to have this human part. And I guess that's also one thing that is in our work, is that it is really goofy and human in a way, so I guess that's why it resonated for people, too. Like, if you make something really striking for the machine, we couldn't comprehend it, so it would stop being interesting for us. And in the end, it's people that enjoy art, not machines, so it doesn't make any sense that the human part is totally removed from the art process.

Collective Behind Christie’s AI Art Tells All

This week, an “artist collective” from France calling themselves Obvious will be auctioning their first attempt at AI art, the Portrait of Edmond Belamy, at Christie’s, one of the most prestigious auction houses in the world. Early on the group suggested that the algorithm deserved the full credit, implying the art was created autonomously by AI. Every major media outlet ran with this story. The problem is, it is not true.

Portrait of Edmond Belamy to be auctioned at Christie’s

What follows is part one of my full hour-and-a-half long interview Obvious’ tech lead, Hugo Caselles-Dupré.

When Hugo shared with me that the media had gotten his story all wrong and it was really frustrating him, I offered to give him a longer format on Artnome to tell his side of the story. I believe this interview is the most accurate and thorough description of how three friends with no artistic background went from failing to sell AI art on eBay to being named one of Time’s “50 Genius Companies of 2018” and being the first AI artists to have work sold at Christie’s.

In the first half of the interview, we cover how Obvious started using GANs (generative adversarial networks) and how their work ended up at Christie’s. In the second half of the interview, I ask what contributions they made in creating the Portrait of Edmond Belamy, why they exaggerated the amount of credit the algorithm deserved in making the art, and if they believe Robbie Barrat deserves credit for the Portrait of Edmond Belamy, since they used his code and based the project on his prior artwork.

If you are simply interested in the highlights and the general gist of the interview, you can read my summary, an article I wrote called “The AI Art At Christie’s Is Not What You Think.” That said, Hugo’s story is fascinating on many levels, and if you have the time, I do recommend taking in the full interview.

Interview With Hugo Caselles-Dupré

Jason Bailey: So you are the computer science member of the team?

Hugo Caselles-Dupré: Yeah, exactly. I'm actually the one who discovered the algorithm during my research. And I talked about this with my friends, and then we wanted to do this project together. Because, as you may know, it's my friends with which I live. We've been friends since high school. We live together, and we always wanted to do something together, and we settled down on this art project. And then rest happened.

JB: A lot happened really quickly, right?

HC: Exactly. Yeah. I guess the main point of what I was saying to you earlier is that, yeah, we were like struck at the proportion that this took for us. It's, like, really unexpected what started as a side project became so important. We were really overwhelmed with all the noise around this.

JB: I don’t think the press is getting the story of AI art right. It sounds like you also feel like the media is getting it wrong? It also seems like people from the AI art community are frustrated with you. It appears you are saying certain things in the press, but from what I understand, you believe a lot of that is because the press are twisting what you say?

HC: Yeah. For sure. I think if I was not involved in this project, if I saw these articles, I would be very skeptical. I would think that this is some kind of fraud. I don't know if you saw the recent Reuters article about this. It was pretty shocking because the whole article is quite nice, I would say, and the video is cool. So they were like, ‘We want to do this interview with you. We want to come to your flat. We want to see who prints the artworks. We want to see who is your mentor, the one who bought the first piece.’ So they wanted to do something really complete so we thought, ‘Hey, it's a great way to show what we wanted to do.’ And so when we saw the title is like The artist as an algorithm: robot-made Rembrandt for sale, it's like, ‘What?’ It's like, we don't work with robots at all; we have no affiliation to Rembrandt. It would be a disgrace to say that what we do has anything to do with what Rembrandt did.

So when we saw that, we met the journalist, and they were like, ‘Ah, yes, sorry, but that's how it works.’ And also, it's pretty hard for us to control this, because for example, Reuters, they set up all this information, so there is a news article, there is a video, and then they send it to their clients, and their clients just take it as it is. So we had many other articles with the same title and with the same information that we we didn’t really want to show because it doesn't represent what we really wanted to do at first, and which is pretty simple, and that's really presumptuous. I guess it's just like we all three guys … thought that GANs was something that people should know about and really wanted to show what AI really is today. It's even harder for me because, as a researcher in machine learning, I really want the people to know what AI is right now, because there is a lot of hype around it, there are a lot of stories about it, and it’s all influenced by the culture. A lot of this cultural background makes it so that it's really easy to have this misconception about what is AI. And so we figured out GANs were a great way, an easy way to show what AI is.

Right now it's like a computer program that can do something that we find impressive, but it is not really that impressive in the end, because if you think it's some kind of robot with a human-like mind, okay, it's really, really impressive, but it's not -- but still, it's pretty impressive that a computer program can create really interesting visuals and realistic photos from only examples. So we think it was really a great way to show what AI is, and then it really turned out in a really different way. And we totally understand that the whole community around AI and art took this as a really bad thing, because for them, I think that they feel that what they do is not represented as it is, as they think it is. And now, we agree with them, but we can't really convey this message because we are being a big misrepresented.

JB: Of the three of you, you are the technical one, so when there are reports that are technically incorrect, it looks bad and backfires on you?

HC: Exactly. Backfiring on me really bad. I was a bit worried at first, and then in the machine learning Reddit [forum], there was a post about this Reuters article, so I was like, ‘Okay, this is too much. I need to react to this.’

Because at first we were like, ‘Okay, let’s not react to things.’ We don't want to upset anybody. We don't want to make drama of it. We just want to do what we want to do. And so this post on Reddit, I feel that it was really conveying a bad message to the research community. And so I responded, and I saw that the whole community was upvoting my post and saying, ‘This sucks. This happens a lot on the general media about AI. You need to keep on working on pointing to the right stuff.’

And that's why, on the website, we have an announcement where we say what we really think and why we wanted to do that, and that no, we are not inventing algorithms. That's why we call the collection the Belamy collection, it’s a tribute to Ian Goodfellow, which is a scientist that I really admire. Because, yeah, all of the sites, they are really pushing that misconception around AI. And for my friends, it's also different, because now, even though they don't come from a scientist's background, now they do know lots about GANs and how they work. And so for them, it's so hard to convey a message and to really say what you want to say.

JB: So Mario Klingemann’s quote in a recent Art News article says, “Pretty much everyone who is working seriously in this field is shaking their head in disbelief about the lack of judgment when it comes to featuring Obvious, and of course, Christie’s decision to auction them out of all artists who work with neural networks.” For artists that have worked for five to ten years on AI like Mario, it is frustrating to see someone come to GANs with no artistic background, use a stock GAN, and end up at Christie’s. How would you respond to them? Do you understand why they would be frustrated?

HC: Yeah. And we totally and actually agree and understated how they can be frustrated by that, because they have been putting a lot of work in what they do, and we really admire them because some of their pieces are really, really interesting, really creative. And we were inspired by that, too.

I’ve done some artwork when I was young, I took some painting classes and things like that. We haven't been working with art and AI for a long time. And at first, it was just like a really cool way to present what GANs are. First, you are doing this portrait and making it really accessible, because the fact that you put in it a golden frame and put this signature on it, it's really easy to understand ... For us, we thought it was a way to start great conversation, great debates, very easily.

But yeah, we were very surprised when Christie's came to us and said, “Okay, we want to auction this.” For us, it was impossible to refuse that because it was such a great opportunity to show this technology to a much larger audience and lots of people, and to present to them what I do in my research and what we are really interested about. So it was a great opportunity. It was a way to put light on this whole community that we love and that we have been following for a long time that we think deserves lots of attention. We think that this community's really great and should have more people know about it.

So at first it was, ‘Yeah, cool, we are going to help them, we are going to make the community even greater.’ And if more people know about it, it could be a great thing. And for us, there was no competition or something. We were just like, ‘Let's do it.’

JB: I think early on the perception was that you had little interest in art and were pushing really hard on selling the work on Twitter, eBay, and other locations. This gave the impression you cared more about selling than making art. So when you showed up at Christie’s, people filled in the blanks that you must have just been good at marketing and tricked Christie’s into selling your work. I think many people are thinking, ‘Here are people who found an existing algorithm and immediately tried to find a way to sell the results.’ How would you respond to that?

HC: So at first we were like, ‘Okay, this project is cool and we want to do that.’ And then we also worked hard on this. So I was beginning my Ph.D., and my friend was working part time in his job and part time doing this project. So we had something to try. So it took us a lot of time. And the other person, the other member here was like full time on the project. So we also needed a way to make this work, and we needed to finance ourselves, to pay our rent and to pay for food. We're like, ‘Okay, if we want to pursue this, we have to find a way to make it work for us.’ So we were like, ‘Okay, if we make paintings, if we make artworks we're going to sell them, and eventually we can bootstrap and we can continue doing this and experimenting with all this stuff.’ Because GANs was just the beginning, it was the first project we were working on. And we think that since this technology and many other algorithms have so much potential, then we want to -- it's just our first project, so we want to make it work. And maybe if we have a little bit of success, we can continue.

And so, yeah, we felt like, ‘Okay, we need this money, so we need also to sell them.’ So we got in touch with all the people that could help us meet galleries or meet art collectors. So at first, people in Paris were just like looking at us, and we went to actual galleries, saying, ‘Okay, we are doing this. What do you think about this?’ And they were like, ‘It's worthless. You can just stop it here. It's not interesting.’

So we pushed and continued to meet people. And then we met with Nicolas Laugero-Lasserre, who was first a bit skeptical, and then interested in what we do. So he was interested, and then, like, ‘Okay, I'm willing to help you. I'm willing to finance you and to buy your piece, and to start this adventure with you. I will put this first artwork in my gallery in Paris.’ So with this, we got a little bit of press coverage. People were starting to take us a bit more seriously. They were like, ‘Okay, this may be interesting.’

So we met a few more people. And then we did a lot of events in Paris, actually. We went to a lot of different cultural events where we presented what we do. We were talking with people presenting GANs, saying, ‘Hey, we are doing this. This is similar technology. You should hear about it. It's really cool,’ and so on and so forth.

And then, it's actually Christie's that Tweeted us saying, ‘Hey, we've done this blockchain event.’ And we were a part of the SuperRare website. So SuperRare was a really good way to work this out. And so when [Christie’s] saw this, they thought, ‘Hey, these portraits could really fit into what we do at Christie's, so let's do it.’ We were like, ‘Okay, sure.’

It happened so fast for us. First, it was really unexpected that so many people could get so excited about this. For us, it was a just a way to create something together, have fun, do something creative, presenting a new technology. We are interested in technology; we are interested in art, also. And so it was really a fun experience.

And now it's beginning to be less and less fun because we have no control over what is happening to us. We can't really control it now, so we are just passive at the moment. We are like in the middle of the storm. We're just waiting for someone like you to just demystify this whole story and say, '‘Okay, this is really the story.’

It's not that strange or malicious. It's just the story of a few friends that just wanted to do something cool together. And it just went out of control because of the way AI art is in the world right now, I guess.

And that's something that really struck me when I went to ICM, the International Conference on Machine Learning. I went to it in Sweden this summer … and I really understood at this point how big the AI bubble was. And so when I saw that, I was like, ‘Okay, this could really go wrong. People are really, really crazy about AI.’ I thought, ‘We are doing this innocently,’ I guess, and now we think that there can be real consequences and real misconceptions.

And some of the comments, we really agree with this. It's like, what we do is not that complicated, or it can be qualified as not really very original compared to what is done in the AI art community. And we totally agree with that, because it was just the first project. It's the first project. You've got to start somewhere. And we started there. And we didn't know that it would be the thing that journalists would be crazy about, and that Christie's would be willing to do something like this. I don't know. It's the choice of Christie's, so I don't want to blame them, because for me, it was a great opportunity. I think that it would have been a great thing to take not one piece, but a few pieces from several artists that would be representative of what the AI arts sphere is right now. But yeah, they wanted to do this, and they want it to go fast. We totally understand why [they wanted] to do this fast, as they have lots and lots of other things to do. But yeah, much of the comments we just agree with. We are just a bit sad that we don't really have a way to talk about it, and I think people are seeing us and believe that we are people that we are not really. We are just, like, three 25-year-old friends that wanted to do something fun.

JB: So it sounds like everybody has to start somewhere. This was was your first project; you were excited to get some funding because that meant you could keep learning and working on the project. When people don’t have the backstory, they assume you were the computer scientist and the other two members must have been marketing full-time.

HC: I think that's really a good point you're making. And I think it's a bit sad, also, that you need to have this art background to have respect for art. I don't really feel like I don't have any respect for art. I've been around art since I was born. In my home there are lots and lots of artworks. I had the chance with my parents to travel the world and to see the greatest museums. I have a lot of respect for art. But because I'm a computer scientist, that doesn't mean that I can’t come to something related to art, also. And also, I think maybe Christie's just didn't know about this AI art sphere? And I think that's something that you feel in the article, too, is one of the first sentences is, I think, ‘With the ongoing talk about Christie's and blockchain, we wanted to do something with AI.’ And so that's kind of where this started.

But we also don't understand why they didn't do something with Robbie Barrat, too, because he was there. He had 300 different nudes at the blockchain event.

JB: I actually worked with Robbie Barrat and SuperRare on the project where we gave out the 300 frames from a single AI nude in London. In terms of whether or not you have to have an art background, I think anyone can make art or become an artist, and that is a good thing. But this is more nuanced than that. For example, if I took someone’s Processing.js code and made a few tweaks and won the Turing Award, you would be offended as a computer scientist. Anyone can be a computer scientist, just like anyone can be an artist, but I’d have no business getting the highest honor in computer science for tweaking some code as an amateur programmer. You know what I mean?

HC: Exactly. Exactly. I feel like the most important people in AI and art, yeah, I really am interested in them. If I'm trying to get in their shoes, I would be surprised, I would be shocked. I really understand.

We do have respect for all this community, and we also hope that this whole event will shed light on all this community and have them bring them more good attention and have them get to where they want. Because we don't feel like it needs to be a competition. This whole event has turned this into a competition, and it's really sad.

But also, it's just a choice. They made a choice and they just have to deal with it. Christie's made the choice, and we just have to roll with it. And hopefully it will bring the best for every one of us.

JB: So we have talked about how you ended up at Christie’s. Let’s now dig into what it is exactly that you do in making your art vs. what the machine does. What aspects do you think are creative where you are making contributions?

HC: Exactly. So we're doing exactly what people working with GANs are doing, which is to curate data sets. I don't know if everyone does this, but we manually go over every piece of data in the set and we want to change it so that we get to the specific data set that we want, and then we train the model. We try to find the best hyperparameters and the best moment to stop training in order to have the best result. So we did that with our project, and with the projects we did on SuperRare, too.

So it's the three of us iterating together, trying out things, trying to find the best result, and using GANs as a tool. So this tool is like -- as we said, lots of time before, GANs are like your paintbrush, but it's like kind of an enhanced paintbrush because it automatically creates images. And so, yes, it's an artist's tool or an artist's medium, if you want, but I would say also … it's not directly comparable to brushes because the whole image created by the tool is kind of interesting, too.

I think also something that is potentially worth noting is that we are all in this community, and we are really used to this tool, but [most people] are not used to this tool. So I think that's what we did… So this part of creativity where there is a small part, but a significant part, of the process where the algorithm creates the images, even though [there are many other] layers, and [without them], there couldn't be any artwork. But this part is also interesting, and it's very important, I think, for the general audience to understand this part -- in order to understand what is AI right now, it is a computer program where at this moment, it can create something automatically. A robot’s not anything like that. But there is something a bit creative by the algorithm, which is pretty interesting, and it is worth noting. We are not saying it's the only part that is interesting of the whole work, but it's worth noting.

So that's why we wanted also to have the formula on the canvas. That's just like a way to show, ‘Hey, it's also pretty interesting.’ Because most of our time, we did it doing events in Paris and meeting people, and we saw how you have to present GANs in order for some people to understand them the most easily. And so with this back and forth discussion with actual people, we said that this was interesting, and that by doing this, with this portrait with the frame and showing the signature, it was really easy for people to understand that, ‘Oh, okay, it's the computer, it's not a robot.’

It's not like the whole portrait is made by machines. There's, like, this particular part that is done by the machine, but the whole rest is done by the artist and is the most important part.

And also … since there is a significant conceptual part to AI art, I guess because of all this AI stuff, it was, like, the most easy way to show these conceptual parts to the general audience. And once again, we totally agree that for people that are really used to it, it's really not that well said, it's not really nicely put. But I guess for other people and for [the] broader audience, it's an easier way to comprehend what GANs are.

JB: So somebody else wrote the GAN code you used, correct? Was it DCGAN that you used for the Belamey painting going to auction at Christies?

---

Thank you you reading part one of the interview.

In Part II of the interview, we dig into what contributions Obvious feels they made in creating the Portrait of Edmond Belamy. I ask Hugo why Obvious told everyone that the algorithm was responsible for making the art if they knew that that was not true. I also ask if they think AI artist Robbie Barrat deserves a large percentage of the credit for the portrait, since it borrows so heavily from his code and his artwork.

As always, if you have ideas or questions, you can reach out to me at jason@artnome.com

If you have not already signed up for the Artnome, newsletter you can easily do so below. Thanks!

The AI Art at Christie’s Is Not What You Think

This month, Christie’s will become the first auction house to bring a piece of AI (artificial intelligence) art to auction. The work is titled Portrait of Edmond Belamy and it is by the French artist collective Obvious. This story has captured the public’s imagination and has been all over the mainstream media. And what the media have told you… well, it is all wrong.

Hugo Caselles-Dupré, the technical lead at Obvious, shared with me:

I’ve got to be honest with you, we have totally lost control of how the press talks about us. We are in the middle of a storm and lots of false information is released with our name on it. In fact, we are really depressed about it, because we saw that the whole community of AI art now hates us because of that. At the beginning, we just wanted to create this fun project because we love machine learning… …If I was not part of this and saw the articles that are coming out, I would think it was a scam or not right.

I can vouch for Hugo. Many in the AI art world have come to despise Obvious and see them purely as marketers or charlatans who scammed their way into Christie’s by making false claims about AI’s current capabilities. Is this a fair assessment? In this article, we pull from an hour-and-a-half-long interview I conducted with Hugo to explore these questions:

• How did three friends with no artistic training end up at Christie’s selling their very first piece?

• Why did Obvious imply that machines were doing all the work in AI art when they knew it wasn’t true?

• How might this have undercut the rest of the AI art community?

• Did Obvious simply repurpose ideas and code written by other developers and artists?

• If so, do artists like Robbie Barrat, whom Obvious borrowed heavily from, deserve a percentage of the credit and perhaps the sale?

• If not, where is the technical or artistic innovation on the part of Obvious?

• What does this work going to auction say about our understanding and feelings about AI as a society?

• Is it worth bidding on this work, and if so, what would I pay?

Machines are not making art on their own

Early on Obvious made the claim that “creativity isn’t only for humans,” implying that the machine is autonomously creating their artwork. While many articles have run with this storyline, one even crediting robots, it is not what most AI artists and AI experts in general believe to be true. Most would say that AI is augmenting artists at the moment and the description in the news is greatly exaggerated.

AI artist Robbie Barrat points out that with AI art created using GANs (generative adversarial networks):

• A human chose the data set

• A human designed the network

• A human trained the network

• A human curated the resulting outputs

In fact, when pressed, Hugo admitted to me in our interview that this was just “clumsy communication” they made in the beginning when they didn’t think anyone was actually paying attention.

I think that's what happens when you are doing something and nobody cares, then you’re just goofing around and you are really inconsistent. And then when everybody has interest, then they go back to what you did before and then you have to justify it. We kept justifying, because we still think that this part of the GAN algorithm that creates the images is really interesting and there is some form of creativity there, but we were just doing some really clumsy communication of what we did, and we just thought it was cool, so we did it like this. For us it was just a funny way to talk about it. If we knew we were going to have 400 press articles on what we do, we most definitely wouldn’t have done that. But at this moment we were like, 'Yeah, okay whatever, let's put it like this.' But retrospectively, we are now like, 'That's a big mistake.'

Hugo further explained:

Right now it's like a computer program that can do something that we find impressive, but it is not really that impressive in the end, because if you think it's some kind of robot with a human-like mind, okay, it's really, really impressive, but it's not.

How Obvious angered the AI art community

Obvious’ “clumsy” choice early on to give all the credit to the machine for the creation of AI art dramatically undercuts the creativity and effort that other AI artists put into their work. So of course other AI artists are furious with Hugo and Obvious. Wouldn’t you be? Hugo continues:

And we totally understand that the whole community around AI and art took this as a really bad thing, because for them, I think that they feel that what they do is not represented as it is, as they think it is. And now we agree with them, but we can't really convey this message because we are being a bit misrepresented.

In addition to completely undercutting their efforts by falsely attributing 100% of the credit for AI art to machines, AI artists are also mad that Obvious stole the spotlight with work that is seen as basic and derivative. The idea behind the Belamy project borrowed heavily from one of Robbie Barrat’s earlier projects that uses historical portraits to train a GAN to generate AI art.

Robbie Barrat’s Portrait GAN project which predates Obvious and was a primary source of inspiration for the Belamy project. It also provided the scraper needed for gathering images off of Wikiart.com

Maybe you are thinking that that’s a pretty broad project idea. Shouldn’t other artists be able to explore that, as well? Sure, but Obvious also admits to using the exact same scraper for getting the portraits from the exact same website, Wikiart. And who wrote the scraper that Obvious used? Robbie Barrat.

Where is Obvious’ innovation and creativity?

I asked Hugo, “Does Robbie Barrat deserve credit for a percentage of the work Obvious created?”

Yeah. I think this is a good question. We ask ourselves this question a lot, too. And we're like, 'Okay, what can we do with this?' But in the end, the fact that what we did is this physical piece, and that we signed it with the formula is something that we wanted to do. I think that has a lot of responsibility in the exposure of our project, too. So we owe him a lot, and that's what we said to him, that we wanted to be up front with him. So we owe him a lot. We wish him success. And we hope that if people like our project, they'll go to his project, too, and check out what he's doing. So we think he deserves something in this whole situation. And then, I considered doing more. What can we really do?

That sounds to me like Hugo is saying Obvious’ main innovation was printing out the image and including Ian Goodfellow’s algorithm on the front. He reiterated this idea further into our interview, saying:

For this project, we guessed that the innovation with it is just like since we presented it in such easy, not-subtle way, since it's really easy to comprehend, I think that's what the innovation is. And I guess -- because I don't really know -- but since it has resonated with so many people, is that there must be something here that is different than what was done before. But at first, we wanted to do something original, something unique. But you can't really control what people think of what you are doing. So yeah, maybe the fact that it was really accessible was the key.

Hugo acknowledges that Obvious has made no technical innovation here, nor have they written any code. In fact, Hugo is frustrated that Reuters falsely implied that he was considering “patenting his algorithm,” as the algorithm was actually written by his hero, Ian Goodfellow. He shared his frustrations with me:

For me, as a researcher in machine learning, it's really ridiculous to think that because, like, you cannot put a patent on an algorithm because it's part of the general knowledge of humankind, and anybody could call it their own and use it.

Hugo adds:

Some of the comments, we really agree with this. It's like, what we do is not that complicated, or it can be qualified as not really very original compared to what is done in the AI art community, and we totally agree with that because it was just the first project. It's the first project. You've got to start somewhere. And we started there.

Robbie Barrat’s take on Obvious

I wanted to avoid the same mistake other publications have made in over-focusing on Obvious’ perspective simply because they have work going to auction. I asked Robbie Barrat how he felt about someone using his code and having a very similar project end up at auction at Christie’s.

I'm glad that a deeper article is being written about this - most other articles published are very shallow and sensationalist, matching the work in question.

As for me getting more credit - that doesn't bother me too much. There were people experimenting with GANs years before me (people like Tom White, Mike Tyka, and Mario Klingemann). I'm more concerned about how out of all the really compelling work done by the people in the AI art sphere, this uninspired low-res GAN generation and the marketers behind it are the ones who get the publicity.

It's unfair to the actual artists doing real work at this intersection; the ones that are doing more than just plugging a ton of paintings into a pre-packaged algorithm and inkjetting the results. People like Helena Sarin, who sketches by hand and trains neural networks to augment her sketches, or Mario Klingemann, a "neurographer" who uses chains of multiple neural networks to create extremely compelling art, or David Ha, a research scientist and artist who wrote "sketch-RNN," a neural network trained on pen strokes of drawings, that can predict the next pen stroke in a drawing to either draw all by itself or collaboratively with humans.

How did Obvious end up at Christie’s?

So are Hugo and Obvious horrible monsters out to steal credit from more deserving artists and then clamoring to get Christie’s attention to make a quick buck? I don’t think so.

In fact, I actually like Hugo. We have a great deal in common, as we are both very excited about the intersection of art and tech. In particular, Hugo’s passion for machine learning is contagious. So what the heck happened here?

What I believe really happened here is three friends made their first project using GANs (the Belamy series), and they admit it is a simple one. As Hugo says, “everyone has to start somewhere.” They used code, project ideas, and algorithms written by other developers and artists because it was a quick and inexpensive way to get started. Most people start by learning from other people’s code (they just typically stop short of selling the results at Christie’s).

Obvious profile on SuperRare.co

Obvious’ first AI project was fun and they wanted to do more projects and to get better at it, planning on becoming more creative as they went along. But they had rent to pay and needed to find a way to fund further experimentation. After being laughed out of several galleries in Paris, they found a single collector, Nicolas Laugero-Lasserre, who was willing to buy one of their works. Christie’s then saw Obvious’ work on the blockchain art market of SuperRare, and it was Christie’s who reached out to Obvious. Again, from Hugo:

We were very surprised when Christie's came to us and said, “Okay, we want to auction this.” For us, it was impossible to refuse that because it was such a great opportunity to show this technology to a much larger audience and lots of people, and to present them what I do in my research, and what we are really interested about. So it was a great opportunity. It was a way to put light on this whole community that we love and that we have been following for a long time, that we think deserves lots of attention. Yeah. We think that this community's really great and should have more people knowing about it.

This counters the narrative that many (including myself) constructed of Obvious clamoring for Christie’s attention. And as Winston from Ghostbusters famously said “…when someone asks you if you’re a god, you say yes!”

What value do we put on Portrait of Edmond Belamy at auction?

If I could afford it, I’d personally be making a very aggressive bid on Portrait of Edmond Belamy. There are easily 20 other AI artists whose art I strongly prefer to the Belamy series by Obvious and whom I think are far more deserving of all this attention. But the misunderstanding surrounding this AI portrait is the perfect mirror for where we are currently at in our collective understanding of AI as a society. This is not lost on Hugo, who explained:

…I think it is also one of the reasons we got so much exposure, AI art is also revealing what people think about AI, revealing the fear and the misconception about AI. And that's why it also gets so much attention. So in the art spectrum, I would say this is really interesting because this really does show something about this society, and so in this way, I guess AI is a great way reveal the mood of society and what people are thinking right now. So this is really representative of the current atmosphere around AI and around all the misconceptions around it. So I think that's one of the reasons AI art is also interesting, because it goes to show something about the humans of today.

Put another way, most of us are simply not yet equipped with the knowledge required to understand AI, never mind something as complex as art created using GANs. AI will only play an increasing role in our lives moving forward, and AI art is already a rich and promising genre, even in its earliest stages. So Portrait of Edmond Belamy will always have an important place in the history of this genre, deserved or not, as the very first piece of AI art auctioned at a major auction house. The press that it has generated is now part of its provenance, and I would be very surprised if Portrait of Edmond Belamy sold for anything less than triple its estimate of €7,000 and €10,000 (approximately $8,100 to $11,600). And even at that price, I believe it would be a steal.

As we saw with Salvator Mundi last year and with the Banksy last week, the most prestigious auction houses, like museums, have the ability to elevate art and increase its value by putting it into the spotlight, shaping not only the narrative of the work, but also the narrative of art history. For this reason, while I do not agree with Christie’s choice for the first AI artwork to bring to auction, I am grateful that they have put a spotlight on a genre of art that I love. I hope that Hugo is right and this is just the first of many auctions, and the many other deserving pioneers of AI art find their way into museums and private collections.

As for Hugo, he is not perfect, nor am I, nor likely are you. But I agree with him that the mainstream media has done us all a disservice by making outlandish claims about AI art and missing the real story behind the first piece of AI art to go to auction.

I will publish the full interview with Hugo later this week. I hope you enjoy it.

Myth Busting Banksy

The recent incident around Banksy embedding a shredder into the frame of his Girl With A Balloon has caught the world’s attention.

As a nerd obsessed with the intersection of art and tech, I too was sucked in over the weekend in trying to unravel the mysteries behind Banksy’s self-shredding painting. I believe I bring a unique perspective to the mystery. I spent five years of my life working alongside expert scientists and engineers investigating mechanical device failures and patent-infringement cases. My job was to create demonstrative evidence in the form of hundreds of courtroom exhibits. Additionally, I come from a family with varied engineering and science backgrounds: my younger brother Matt (a computer scientist), my older brother Brian (an embedded systems engineer), and my father (who designed battery-operated implantable medical devices for several decades). I reached out to them for some assistance.

In this post, we look at the key questions and offer up some likely answers (from an art nerd perspective). I also evaluate what this event says about Banksy and Sotheby’s moving forward.

We will start by looking at the key engineering questions:

• Could a device that had been in the frame for up to 10 years have the battery life to listen for a remote trigger?

• Was there a functional shredder in the frame or was a pre-shredded work spooled out?

• Was the shredder shown in Banksy’s video the device used to shred the painting?

We will then follow up with questions around the potential for collusion between Sotheby’s and Banksy and what each scenario implies.

• Was Sotheby’s aware of the prank, and perhaps complicit?

• What does it say about Banksy if he colluded with Sotheby’s?

• What does it say about Sotheby’s if they did not know ahead of time?

Examining Banksy’s frame

#1 THE BATTERY LIFE
The question that came up the most often is, “How could the battery stay charged in the frame long enough?” This question applies both to the shredder and for the the remote triggering device.

According to my older brother Brian, this one is easy:

We're getting 10 years of standby life from our cameras on 2 AA batteries. They are contacting a base station for instructions a couple times a second and will run for 10 years if no video is taken.  I'm amazed at how little power is used by the wireless processors I'm working on now.

Brian also pointed me to an article on Hackaday which agrees with us that a “‘prime’ battery (that is, a non-rechargeable battery) could last long enough to be able to trigger and shred the painting. I think we can say the myth of a battery not being able to last long enough is BUSTED.

For the sake of argument, here are two other plausible theories that have also surfaced that also seem like reasonable ways to do this without alerting Sotheby’s. First, Banksy’s authentication board ”Pest Control” reportedly had access to the frame ahead of the auction and could have swapped out the batteries. Second, they could have hidden a manual switch in the frame to activate the battery (unused up to that point) at the auction.

#2 IS THERE A FUNCTIONAL SHREDDER IN THE FRAME OR JUST A SPOOL?

The device in Banksy’s video shows roughly 38 Exacto® blades lined up inside the frame. While this looks badass, it does not look anything like the mechanism inside of a traditional shredder.

Banksy Shredder

Traditional Paper Shredding Mechanism

A traditional shredder uses two rollers with interwoven blades: very different-looking from Banksy’s device. Of course, there is more than one way to shred a painting… but surely Banksy would search for a DIY tutorial first? I did a search and there are some great DIY tutorials, but none that look anything like Banksy’s Exacto® approach.

So now we are to believe that Banksy opted out of using an existing approach (despite there being many available) and instead chose to design something from scratch? Okay, strange, but I’ll buy it. But how likely is it that 38 X-Acto® blades would perfectly shred a large painting with zero tears or rips? I’m not sold, and would consider this myth busted had I not gone through the trouble of counting both the number of blades and the number of shreds. I come up with 38 for both. While I may not have arrived at the exact right number (the images were grainy), they feel like too good of a match to have been an accident.

So how did these static blades make such a clean cut? I think the curl at the bottom of the painting explains this. The curl would suggest it had been spooled up on a roller for quite some time. Some have suggested that a second shredded painting was spooled out and the first one is still intact in the frame. This seems unlikely to me, as one would only need to open up the frame to be rewarded with a second artwork.

I came to the conclusion that calling these X-Acto® knives a “shredder” is somewhat generous. More likely is that the first six inches of canvas was pre-shredded and then spooled onto the roller. The remaining painting was simply dragged further across the blades. As my younger brother Matt describes it:

If you look there's a good six inches of white canvas below the image.  The section was already shredded and behind the frame... then using the same principle as scissors through wrapping canvas, it dragged the remainder through... the blades were already embedded in the canvas. It is way easier to continue a cut than make a fresh one. This also explains the angle of the razors. Sliding canvas across angled razors would be cleaner if precuts were made.

My younger brother Matt did not go to art school or design courtroom exhibits, but here is his highly technical illustration of the pre-sliced painting on the roller:

A lot of people that read the original version of this article pushed back hard on the orientation of the X-Acto® knives. To help alleviate these questions, we have added the video below showing a razor blade cutting treated canvas like butter. MYTH BUSTED.

Matt also points out that:

Something to consider... if it was pre-shredded, than the canvas would have little to no rigidity... so no way it could push through anything. So either an opening that had to be visible or there's a motorized opening that was triggered. I don't see evidence of a motorized opening.

This is a great point, and one we will revisit when we question whether or not Sotheby’s was in on the gag.

So our conclusion for the engineering questions?

• Yes, a battery can last for up to 10 years; there are also other plausible theories that do not implicate Sotheby’s

• Yes, there was a functional shredder (in the loosest sense of the word)

• Yes, the work was partially pre-shredded and spooled

• Yes, the device in the video is the one that was used to further shred the painted during the auction

Let’s now look at whether or not Sotheby’s was involved, and if so, just how much detail they likely knew about ahead of time.

The Banksy was the last work auctioned

Now that we agree that the frame did shred the painting during the auction using the device shown in the video Banksy released, we can look at what the likelihood is that Sotheby’s was involved in the prank, and if so, to what degree.

There were 67 lots in this auction, and the Banksy piece was the very last piece auctioned off. Had the Banksy piece been auctioned, say, 10th or 30th, the distraction from the beeper and the self-destructing work would certainly have interrupted the sales of many of the many other works sold that day. Sotheby’s reputation, their ROI, as well as the ROI for consigners, required that the Banksy piece be sold last.

How likely is it that the Banksy piece went last by sheer luck? To put this into perspective, there are 38 numbered spots (1 through 36, plus zero and double zero) on a roulette wheel. If you put $1k on the highest number, 36, and it comes up, you win $35k. If that were easy to do, we’d all be retired. Now imagine the board has 67 squares (one for each lot in the Sotheby’s auction). The odds are almost twice as bad that your number comes up. In short, the sequencing of the sale was very likely no accident. I believe Sotheby’s intentionally put the Banksy piece last.

Didn’t Sotheby’s inspect the work?

Many people (including me) have a very hard time understanding how Sotheby’s experts could have examined the work without having noticed anything unusual. The frame is enormous relative to the painting, and many other versions of this same work have been sold without cartoonishly large frames. Wouldn’t one of Sotheby’s experts ask questions about this?

According to Marion Maneker from Art Market Monitor:

Sotheby’s did notice the frame and asked to remove the work from it. Pest Control said that the frame was integral to the work and removing it was not an option.

Maneker wrote that Sotheby’s often receives works with “artists frames” with instruction that the work and the frame must stay intact. Sotheby’s commented that they had assumed the gaudy frame was just one more attempt by Banksy to poke fun at the establishment.

But what about the slot at the bottom where the painting was spooled out? There is no evidence in the video of a trap door, and as my brother Matt pointed out, the shreds would lack the structural integrity to be pushed out a paper-thin slot. Wouldn’t the slot have been rather large and rather obvious to the experts at Sotheby’s inspecting the work? And then there is the weight of the frame. This thing must have been super heavy with batteries and sheet metal inside, even for its enormous size… yet somehow it made it through inspection?

I believe Sotheby’s played along

Morons (White & Gold), 2006, Silkscreen on paper - Edition 150

I believe that while Sotheby’s was likely not fully aware of what was going to happen, they had a suspicion that something was up and played along for the sake of theater. To minimize the disruption, they put the Banksy work last, but until the shredded work scrolled out the bottom of the frame, the exact nature of the prank was not clear to them. I suspect that Sotheby’s knowledge was limited to knowing something harmless was up that potentially could benefit them as a PR stunt.

It would be analogous to Banksy holding a giant sign with tape on it and Sotheby’s noticing this and graciously winking and turning around so it could be placed on their back. Sotheby’s then acted surprised when others pointed out that the sign read “kick me” and claimed to have been “Banksy’d” and then soaked up the press.  

Had Sotheby’s actually been completely caught off guard by a man with a remote detonation device and large frame concealing electronics making a beeping noise, one would assume they would have jumped into action assuming the worst. Instead, the porters calmly shepherded the work out of the room and returned to the activities of the evening. I assume Sotheby’s was familiar with the person who had the triggering device (if not also familiar with the specifics of the plan). Otherwise, one would hope the culprit would currently be in police custody for questioning.

What this means for Banksy and Sotheby’s  

If Sotheby’s had been complicit in planning the act, it would be pretty damaging for Banksy. There is nothing less cool than being a sock puppet for the industry you are claiming to rebel against. As it is, the shredding immediately drove up the value of Banksy’s work, which makes many wonder what his true motivations are.

I believe Banksy’s people (Pest Control) let Sotheby’s know something was up but saved the details for the great reveal. Score one for Banksy, though there are many other ways he could have protested if they wanted to make the point without benefiting financially from the protest.

Time will tell, but this appears to be a “lose, lose” scenario for Sotheby’s. If they were complicit in staging this, they have effectively turned one of the most prestigious auction houses into a bad episode of Storage Hunters. They lose credibility in an industry where credibility is all that matters. If they were not complicit, they look disorganized, unprofessional, and gullible, at best.

Updates and Corrections

• Marion Maneker, my go to source for all information on the art market, has informed me that:

Banksy has a 1 in 42 chance of getting the last lot. The first 25 were a single owner sale. He would not have been in the first dozen lots for a variety of reasons. So now 1 in 30 possibly fewer. Not clear the lot had to be last to pull the prank. Would have been better there in the middle of the room held by two porters.

• Several insiders have told me Sotheby’s had no clue. With one asking to remain anonymous stating:

Sotheby's knew the frame was overly large and requested to open it which was refused by Pest Control. I can guarantee you that they weren't in on it. They had no idea.

• Another insider asking to remain anonymous stated:

The head of sale put it last bc the consignors would not sell unless it was in the evening sale. The consignor is Banksy. The person who acted as a beard insisted on evening sale. He gave it to him but he was annoyed so put it last. There is no other possible consignor.

As always, thanks for reading and feel free to reach out with ideas at jason@artnome.com. If you enjoy the articles be sure to sign up for the Artnome newsletter below.

Quantifying Mark Rothko

Yesterday was Mark Rothko’s birthday, and I wanted to celebrate by sharing some stats from the Artnome database on one of my favorite artists.

Born on September 26th, 1903, Mark Rothko would be 115 years old today. Though he tragically cut his own life short at the age of 63, Rothko left us 836 known paintings that were created over a 46-year span. This translates to roughly 18 paintings a year, more than one per month. Of course, no artists’ production is a constant; there are fat years and lean years of production.

Rothko began transitioning from his more surrealist-style paintings into his more abstract signature “multiform” style in 1947. That same year would also be his most productive, yielding 43 paintings, more than double his annual average production. As with most artists in our database, his leanest years came at the very beginning and very end of his career, producing just two or three works per year in those years.

Mark Rothko Painted 23.3k sq. ft. of Paintings

Rothko painted a total of 23,342 square feet, or approximately the surface area of five regulation NBA basketball courts combined.

Though he moved to smaller works on paper on doctor’s orders when his health was beginning to fail later in life, Rothko was known for painting vast and immersive canvases throughout most of his career. We can see how the size of his canvas evolved over his career in the graphs below. The spikes for 1965 and 1966 coincide with the work he created for the Rothko Chapel.

Mark Rothko Outliers

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum), 1962, oil on canvas, 60 x 57 in

The average size of a Rothko painting is 60.4” x 52.6”. And while every Rothko is unique, the most “average” Rothko, by dimensions, would be his 1962 painting Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum), which measures in at 60 x 57 inches.

I had the awesome pleasure of visiting Rothko’s widest single canvas, Panel Two from the Harvard Murals painted in 1962 which stands 267.3 x 458.8 cm at the Harvard Art Museum in 2015.

Mark Rothko, Panel Two from the Harvard Murals, 1962 tempera on canvas, 267.3 x 458.8 cm

The Harvard Murals were damaged and had been kept in storage until a brilliant team of conservationists developed a technique for projecting light onto the canvases so that Rothko lovers like me could see them in something close to their original glory. While some criticized the approach, for an art nerd like me, the intersection of art and tech on this project was near nirvana. (Coincidentally, the Harvard Fogg also has the tallest painting by Jackson Pollock. I am a member and work a block away - the museum is art nerd heaven, and I’m lucky to have such great access.)

Rothko’s tallest painting is the center panel of the North Wall Apse Triptych in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas (on my bucket list). At 457.8 x 267.3 cm, it is listed as just 0.6 cm taller than the other panels.

Mark Rothko, Rothko Chapel, 1964-1967 Houston Texas

The smallest painting by Rothko listed in his official catalogue raisonne is actually a tie between two paintings: Untitled (still life with mallet, scissors and two gloves), 1938/’39, a mere 7.5 x 12.6 square cm, and Untitled (still life with radio), 1938. Both are oil and gesso on board. I was able to locate the Untitled (still life with mallet, scissors and two gloves), which resides in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., but could not locate an image of Untitled (still life with radio).

Mark Rothko, Untitled (still life with mallet, scissors and two gloves), 1938/’39, 7.5 x 12.6 cm

I’m often asked why I spend so much time and money gathering data for the Artnome database. For many, quantifying art seems pointless and potentially disruptive to the real purpose of simply enjoying art. To these people I explain that when I love something, I simply want to know as much about it as possible. Without the context of a basic macro view of the complete works of an artist, how do we know what large, small, wide, or even rare really is?

I also believe that given the prices being paid for paintings by artists like Mark Rothko, collectors and institutions will soon come around to demanding the same level of data on art as they have in all other areas of their lives. Rothko’s most expensive work to date is his Violet, Green and Red, 1951, painting which reportedly sold in $186M in 2014 through private sale. By blending auction data with data on the complete works, we can go beyond a short and fun analysis like the one in this post and look at what factors actually make a work like Violet, Green and Red unique and provide valuable insight to collectors.

Mark Rothko, No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red), 1951, oil on Canvas, 230 x 137 cm

If you would like to learn more about my database project, you can read more in this Artnome article or read Oliver Roeder’s excellent article in FiveThirtyEight which is, in my opinion, still the best place to get the background on my moonshot Artnome database project. As always, you can reach me at jason@artnome.com with any questions or suggestions.

For fun, I am concluding with this stealthy photo I took of a museum goer “twinning” with a Rothko at the Boston MFA show last November. If you haven’t already - don’t forget to subscribe to the Artnome newsletter!

Stealth photo I took of a man “twinning” with Mark Rothko’s x at The Museum of Fine Art in Boston

Generative Art Finds Its Prodigy

In our last article "Why Love Generative Art?" we had a blast putting the genre into the context of modern art history. In this article we interview contemporary generative art prodigy (my words, not his) Manolo Gamboa Naon from Argentina. 

Manolo's work feels like it is the result of the entire contents of twentieth-century art and design being put into a blender.  Once chopped down into its most essential geometry, Manolo then lovingly pieces it back together with algorithms and code to produce art that is simultaneously futuristic and nostalgic. His work serves as a welcome (and needed) bridge into digital art and an antidote for those who see the genre as cold, mechanical, and discontinuous with the history of art.

We couldn't be more excited to share our interview with Manolo, his first to be published in English. But before we dive in, let's have some fun and deconstruct a few examples of his work. For me, seeing his work side by side with the masters of twentieth-century art highlights just how well it holds its own. 

bbccclll - Manolo Gamboa Naon, June 20, 2018

Arrowhead Picture - Wassily Kandinsky, 1923

Composition 8 - Wassily Kandinsky, 1923

I see Wassily Kandisnky as an obvious artistic influence on Manolo. The two share a masterful use of color and composition and an interest in exploring spiritual and psychological effects of color and geometry. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Manolo's series of works titled bbccclll, which have all the rhythm and beauty of Kandinsky's early-1920s lyrical abstractions. Kandinsky said of abstract painting that it is "the most difficult" of all the arts, noting:

It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for color, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential. 

Manolo's visual poetry checks all of these boxes and does it through code and pixels alone. His poetry is most evident in the range of styles and emotions he can elicit from the most basic elements of geometry. For example, let's compare Manolo's Kandinsky-esque bbccclll with a work that feels closer to Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Manolo's CUDA. We can quickly see how Manolo triggers a completely different range of emotions by shifting the color and placement of just two basic elements, the circle and the triangle. 

CUDA  - Manolo Gamboa Naon, June 5, 2018

Circular Shapes Sun and Moon - Robert Delaunay, 1912,1931

Prismes électriques - Sonia Delaunay, 1914

Indeed, Sonia Delaunay sounds as if she is referring to Manolo's sensitivity to color and prolific body of work when she said: 

He who knows how to appreciate color relationships, the influence of one color on another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised an infinitely diverse imagery.

Another one of my favorite works by Manolo, ppllnnn, has a really strong Max Ernst vibe for me. The highly detailed and organic texture of this work reminds me of similar textures that Ernst was able to generate by pioneering techniques like frottage and decalcomania to introduce complexity and randomness into his own works.

ppllnnn - Manolo Gamboa Naon, July 31, 2018

100,000 Doves - Max Ernst, 1925

The Gramineous Bicycle Garnished with Bells the Dappled Fire Damps and the Echinoderms Bending the Spine to Look for Caresses - Max Ernst, 1921

Ernst, always open to surprise and chance, once said: 

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

As you will see in our interview, invention, discovery, and revelation are also at the core of Manolo's art-making process.

Before starting the interview, I'd like to  thank Artnome's brilliant digital collections analyst, Kaesha Freyaldenhoven, who acted as our English-to-Spanish interpreter and later transcribed the interview, translating it into English. None of this would be possible without her enthusiastic assistance, and we very are lucky to have it.

An Interview with Manolo Gamboa Naon

PPCCCC - Manolo Gamboa Naon, June 4, 2018

Jason Bailey (JB): A lot of generative artists either start as artists first or programmers first and then build the other skillset. Can you tell us a little about your background? How did you first end up making generative art?

Manolo Gamboa Naon (M): I was young. I was thirteen. But, well, I think in that moment, I started making images but I didn’t know what I was doing. I did not realize that there were other artists out there doing the same things I was doing. Only after many years and finding other artists, did I say, 'Wow! There are people doing things with Flash that I now appreciate in this moment.' I later switched to Processing.

JB: How long have you been using Processing?

M: Seven years.

JB: How did you learn it?

M: I had an orange book - Schiffman - during this time. But I also started studying design as a career. They encouraged us to learn Processing for a year. We had to learn how to program in the course. But during this time, I was more interested in creating interactive things rather than design.

JB: I am often surprised how people misunderstand generative art. I had a professor who told me generative art would always be limited, as there is no such thing as an accident with a program. He believed accidents are where discovery happens. I disagreed. When I was making generative art, there were often surprises when I would run the code, and I would build and adjust the work based on those surprises. I am curious about your thoughts on the creative process in coding art. Is it a discovery process with trial and error and accidents and discovery like traditional art making? Or do you have the complete outcome in mind before you start? Or maybe neither?

M: Generally, one has an idea, makes a first draft of this idea, and then begins correcting. All of the time, when I come and create, the most beautiful parts of the work are born from the errors. After a certain point, I believe that the maturity of my style was formed by making small errors because I was discovering as I went along. From these errors, I take an idea and it stays. I learn how to manipulate from these errors. The error is central to the work of generative artists apart from, obviously, the rules, and the rules become text that converts into an image. It is impossible to have what you imagine become what you see. The beginning is errors, errors, errors, errors. They are beautiful errors.

Manolo works in series across themes. Below we look at pppp as a theme with several works that Manolo developed over time:

JB: For me, your sense of color and pattern are what stands out the most. I feel like your choice of color palettes is very smart, and you evoke strong feelings through this alone. For example, you have some recent works that makes me nostalgic for the '80s, with shapes and colors that were very popular in that decade. Where do you get the inspiration for your color palette?

NNN - Manolo Gamboa Naon, March 5, 2018

NNN - Manolo Gamboa Naon, March 5, 2018

NNN - Manolo Gamboa Naon, March 5, 2018

NNN - Manolo Gamboa Naon, March 5, 2018

M: Color is a problem in my life. Realistically, when I began making generative artwork, I realized that programmers - I mean, I don’t want to generalize - but they do not give color a lot of importance. They do not have an intention. But in the past five or six years, I have been attempting to feel more comfortable using colors. Because it matters - a lot. And now, sometimes I spend more time forming a color palette than programming. My inspiration comes from looking around all the time. I look at a lot of things from design. Instagram, Twitter, all the time searching for references. A movie, an old newspaper. Inspiration comes from many places. In my work, I intend to evoke something - from a time or of a certain quality.

JB: What are the biggest changes you have seen in the last decade in Processing and generative art?

M: During the Flash epoch, people were generating compelling visual art. Since then there have been changes, but I am not sure if the changes have been progressive. I want to learn English so that I can start getting to know the world. I mean, there are many people who are interested in generative art on Twitter. Sometimes on the forums I do not know what people are saying, but I do understand the code.

MMGGK2 - Manolo Gamboa Naon, August 23, 2018

JB: What are the new trends? How do you think things like AI, machine learning, and deep learning will impact the future of generative art?

M: I think there are many artists working in deep learning and artificial intelligence right now. There is a lot of great progress. I prefer to work with the geometry, not so much on the side of AI or machine learning. It does not interest me that much. Maybe one day I will start getting into it. But from my perspective, they are two separate paths. Maybe I’m just old. I am very impressed by the work. But I do not know if this is something that I have a desire to pursue.

JB: I know many generative artists, particularly in the Processing community, make the code for their projects open source for others to learn from. Is this something you do as well? Why or why not?

M: A few weeks ago I published all of the code for everything I have created since 2007. Absolutely there are some that don’t work, but everything I have created on Processing is online. For me, the code of others were huge learning tools, and it seems like it is a good thing to share these sorts of things. A few people have asked me for my code and it would always take me a long time to respond individually, but in this form, I can pass along the information. Although I speak Spanish, the good thing about code is that I can read it in any language. Code transcends language, and to me, that is beautiful.

LLLLPP - Manolo Gamboa Naon, February 26, 2018

JB: How have you shown your work in the past? Do you only show it online because it is digital? Or have you shown it in galleries as well?

M: Principally, I share all of my work online. I really like the idea of people sharing online. My works have never been for printing. Really, I prefer to post them online and share the digital images in that way. I consume art through the internet, and I prefer that it stays there. That the works are viewed online is very important to me. I like the movement and allowing the work itself to live. Although there have been some artists in Buenos Aires who have printed their works and shared them in that way, this is not the route that I would like to take. I prefer to keep my works digital.

JB: Where do you get your inspiration?

M: Only after learning about the Argentinian scene of generative art did I become familiar with artists from the world. Artists who inspire me include:

• Raven Kwok
• Ben Fry
• Casey Reas
• Joshua Davis
• Nicholas Felton
• Ivan Ivanoff

JB: Is there anything else you would like to share with the Artnome audience?

M: I feel that images are dying, they are disposable. Their lifetimes are very short, considering the quantity of production of images. But I also think that there is a moment of contemporary art on the rise. Art is becoming a more central part of the culture. It has always been for music, but now, the visual arts - design, for example - are occupying more important positions in the lives of the people. I love what is happening. 

There is also the destruction of the idea of an artistic genius. Well, sure there are people that are doing really good things, but it is not like it was before. Many different and talented artists are gaining recognition for their work. I think it is important to see the destruction of the artistic genius to understand that there are many people who are capable of doing what they did. 

Communication between artists is also very important, with the help of the internet. Through the internet, I have been able to meet people who understand and appreciate what I am doing.

Conclusion

gggggggg - Manolo Gamboa Naon, July 28, 2018

One of the great joys of having a platform like Artnome to share my thoughts on the intersection of art and tech is the opportunity to introduce people to deserving artists whom they may not know yet. Manolo may not be a fan of the idea of the artist as "genius," but he certainly fits all of my personal criteria for the distinction. His sensitivity to color and composition, the speed at which he explores new concepts, and the volume of compelling work he produces puts him into a class of his own. I feel lucky that Manolo agreed to let us interview him for Artnome so we can all have a little more insight into his remarkable work. I'd encourage you all to follow him on Twitter @manoloide and to check out the rest of his amazing work on Behance. 

I'd like to again thank Kaesha Freyoldenhoven for her amazing job as interpreter and translator for this interview. As always, if you have questions or ideas for a post, feel free to reach out to jason@artnome.com. If you have not already, I recommend you sign up for our newsletter to keep up with news and new articles.

Why Love Generative Art?

Over the last 50 years, our world has turned digital at breakneck speed. No art form has captured this transitional time period - our time period - better than generative art. Generative art takes full advantage of everything that computing has to offer, producing elegant and compelling artworks that extend the same principles and goals artists have pursued from the inception of modern art.

Geometry, abstraction, and chance are important themes not just for generative art, but for all art of 20th Century. As an art historian and an amateur generative artist, I see a clear line of influence on generative art starting from Cézanne and shooting straight through to the:

• Fracturing of geometry in Analytical Cubism

• Emphasis on technology, machine aesthetic, and mechanized production from Futurism, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus

• Introduction of autonomy and chance in Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism

• Anti-figurative aesthetic, bold geometry, and intense color of Neoplasticism, Suprematism, Hard-edged Abstraction, and OpArt

• Use of algorithms by Sol Lewitt and others
   

Group IV, No. 3. The Ten Largest, Youth - Hilma af Klint, 1907

Suprematist Composition - Kasimir Malevich, 1916

Circles in a Circle - Wassily Kandinsky, 1923

Highway and Byways - Paul Klee, 1928

Rotorelief 1 (Optical Disks) - Marcel Duchamp, 1935

Concentric Squares - Josef Albers, 1941

Study for Meschers - Ellsworth Kelley, 1951

Red Meander - Annie Albers, 1954

Burn - Bridget Riley, 1964

Wall Drawing 11 - Sol Lewitt, 1969

To my eyes, all of these influences and more are tied directly into early generative art through to its modern day practitioners. So I cringe when I hear the majority of my art-loving friends dismiss generative art as being irrelevant, not of interest to them, or even unworthy of being called art.

Every generation claims art is dead, questioning why it has no Michelangelos, no Picassos, only to have their grandchildren point out generations later that the geniuses were among us the whole time. We have a unique opportunity to embrace some of the most important artists of our generation while most of them are still living (and working). I hope to do my part in facilitating this through this article. Here we will explore why people so often struggle with generative art and:

• Offer a simplified definition of generative art

• Abolish ideas that credit machines for making generative art and not the artists themselves

• Give some non-technical examples of how generative art works

• Explore some of the history of generative art going back to the early 1960s

• Highlight my favorite generative artists and share some of their work

• Examine the world of generative AI art that is just now starting to get mainstream attention  

Hopefully by the end of this post you will either share my love for generative art or you will at least be able to intelligently communicate your distaste for the genre.

What is Generative Art?

Path - Casey Reas, 2001

One overly simple but useful definition is that generative art is art programmed using a computer that intentionally introduces randomness as part of its creation process. This often brings up two common but misguided viewpoints that hold people back from appreciating the beauty and nuance of generative art.

Myth One: The artist has complete control and the code is always executed exactly as written. Therefore, generative art lacks the elements of chance, accident, discovery, and spontaneity that often makes art great, if not at least human and approachable.

Myth Two: The artist has zero control and the autonomous machine is randomly generating the designs. The computer is making the art and the human deserves no credit, as it is not really art.

The truth is that generative artists skillfully control both the magnitude and the locations of randomness introduced into the artwork.  

Controlled randomness may sound contradictory, but if you are an artist or an art historian, you know that artists have always sought ways to introduce randomness into their work to stimulate their creativity. Thinking about the process of coding generative art as being similar to painting or sketching is actually spot on. In fact, we will see that the tool favored by most generative artists refers to the individual artworks produced as "sketches.”

Let's Look at Some Early Examples of Generative Art  

Let’s look at Georg Nees' 1968 work Schotter (Gravel), one of the earliest and best-known pieces of generative art. Schotter starts with a standard row of 12 squares and gradually increases the magnitude of randomness in the rotation and location of the squares as you move down the rows.

Schotter (Gravel) - Georg Nees ,1968

Imagine for a second that you drew the image above yourself using a pen and a piece of paper and it took you one hour to produce. It would then take you ten hours if you wanted to add ten times the number of squares, right? A very cool and important characteristic of generative art is that Georg Nees could have added thousands more boxes, and it would only require a few small changes to the code.

Unlike analog art, where complexity and scale require exponentially more effort and time, computers excel at repeating processes near endlessly without exhaustion. As we will see, the ease with which computers can generate complex images contributes greatly to the aesthetic of generative art.

As with many innovations, there were several pioneers exploring the potential for generative art in its first few years. Frieder Nake and Michael Noll, along with Georg Nees, were all exploring the use of computers to generate art. Back then, computers typically had no monitors, and the work was shared by printing the art on plotters, large printers designed for vector graphics. 

Hommage à Paul Klee - Frieder Nake, 1965

Pioneering Women of Generative Art

It was hard for anyone to be a generative artist in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Computers were primitive, filled entire rooms, and access to them was extremely limited. Today most people grew up with computers in their homes and now carry them in their pockets. The majority of people in those early decades of computing had little to no contact with computers or frame of reference outside of science fiction. Against this backdrop and in a time where women faced tremendous sexism in the workplace, a large number of female generative artists emerged, making key contributions to the craft and the community.

Vera Molnár is one of the more prolific generative artists (a personal favorite of mine), and her work spans several decades. Below we see Molnár’s works from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.

Interruptions - Vera Molnár, 1968/69

(Dés)Ordres - Vera Molnár, 1974

Untitled - Vera Molnár, 1985

Aware of the general perception of computers as cold, logical machines, Molnár spoke of the creative and humanistic gains it presented to her as an artist:

Without the aid of a computer, it would not be possible to materialize quite so faithfully an image that previously existed only in the artist's mind. This may sound paradoxical, but the machine, which is thought to be cold and inhuman, can help to realize what is most subjective, unattainable, and profound in a human being.

Generative artist and art researcher Lillian Schwartz worked as artist-in-residence at Bell Labs starting in 1968 for over 34 years. Her credentials are impressive. She was the first to have generative art acquired by the MoMA and is often credited, along with her collaborator Ken Knowlton, with being the first to exhibit animated digital work as fine art. In a 1982 interview in the Los Angeles Times, Lillian described the cool reception she received from her art world peers when she introduced the computer into her art making practice:

I had a reputation in the arts before I got involved in these areas, but when I started using computers, my fellow artists began to look on me as a prostitute. I haven’t been able to find an artistic circle where I can discuss the aesthetics of my work. I've had to replace my artist friends with computer scientist friends.

Aside from her generative artwork, Lilian is one of my personal heroes for pioneering the use of computer databases in the analysis of art history (my life's passion).  She shocked the world in 1984 when she used a computer to prove that Da Vinci himself was in fact the model for the Mona Lisa.

Pixillation, photographic film stills - Lillian Schwartz, 1970

Other key female generative artists from the early days of generative art who made enormous contributions in popularizing the genre include Sonia Landy Sheridan, who founded the first generative systems department at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1970, and Grace Hertlein, who helped to popularize the first annual generative art competition when she became arts editor for Computers and Automation Magazine in 1974.

MIT summer sessions poster - Muriel Cooper, 1958

Though not known to be a programmer, Muriel Cooper had as much influence as anyone in establishing the aesthetics of the computing revolution. Cooper was trained in the design principles of the Bauhaus and influenced by her friend, master designer Paul Rand. Cooper imbued these principles at MIT, where she served as a long-time director of the MIT Press. She then founded MIT's Visual Language Workshop (VLW) in 1975, which moved to the MIT Media Lab in 1985 as "one of its founding sources." As we will see, the Media Lab went on to be more important to the evolution of generative art than any other singular institution. 

A visionary who saw the need to reinvent design in the face of a shifting world, Cooper believed:

The shift from a mechanical to an information society demands new communication processes, new visual and verbal languages, and new relationships of education, practice, and production.

John Maeda and the MIT Media Lab

AI Infinity - John Maeda, 1994

Many people may know John Maeda as the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) or as the author of the book The Laws of Simplicity. They may not know that Maeda started as an engineering student at MIT where he was fascinated by the work of Murial Cooper and the VLW. After completing both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering at MIT, Maeda earned a Ph.D. in design at Tsukuba University's School of Art and Design in Japan.

Florada - John Maeda, 1990s

Maeda returned to MIT and created the Aesthetics and Computation Group (ACG) within the Media Lab. As a group, ACG were heavily influenced by the prior work done by Murial Cooper's VLW group. Though Maeda is an accomplished generative artist with works in major museums, his greatest contribution to generative art was his invention of a platform for artists and designers to explore programing called "Design By Numbers."

In the late '90s Maeda recruited several brilliant and like-minded artists/technologists into the Media Lab to help work on “Design by Numbers,” including Ben Fry and Casey Reas. Fry and Reas took Maeda's “Design by Numbers” into classrooms around the world and eventually built their own free platform that could be shared outside of universities and used by anyone with an interest learning to sketch with code. They called this platform “Processing.”

Ben Fry, Casey Reas & The Birth of Processing

Processing made generative art accessible to anyone in the world with a computer. You no longer needed expensive hardware, and more importantly, you did not need to be a computer scientist to program sketches and create art. The language, the environment, and the community were all carefully crafted from the beginning make Processing accessible to as broad an audience as possible.

Processing is the key turning point in the production and proliferation of generative art. The massive growth is clear in the graph below.

Number of times the Processing software is opened on unique computers each month from 2005 to early 2018. This graph was originally published in Fry and Reas' excellent article on the history of Processing, "A Modern Prometheus." The peaks and valleys are correlated with the academic year with the highest points in the fall and the lowest during the summer. This data doesn’t account for shared computer use or when people turn this reporting off in the software preferences.

Fry and Reas have worked on Processing over the last 17 years, and and it has long been the preferred platform for the best known generative artists. In 2012 they created the Processing Foundation to “expand our reach and to support the software development,” and have added Daniel Shiffman and Lauren McCarthy as members of the foundation board. They have written an excellent post that details the evolution of the history of Processing that I highly recommend you read. Processing’s impact on an entire generation of artists and programers is nearly impossible to overstate - revolutionizing data visualization, pop culture, and fine generative art.

All Streets - Ben Fry, 2006

As an artist trained in traditional painting and drawing, I was a slow convert to appreciating digital art. I was reluctantly working with computers to make a living in the early 2000s, and it was my personal opinion for a long time that generative art was too hard-edged, lacked nuance, and was generally inferior to analog art. Then around 2006, I discovered Processing and the work of Jared Tarbell, and everything changed.

Jared Tarbell was creating what I still consider to be the most cutting edge, aesthetically pleasing, and engaging generative art way back in 2003 using a relatively early version of Processing. Tarbell, who went on to co-found the wildly popular handmade goods site Etsy,  studied computer science at New Mexico State University. He describes himself as “one part Magical Mystery Tour (Lennon/McCartney), one part Brandenburg Concerto (J.S. Bach), and one part Somnium (Robert Rich)”.  

Substrate - Jared Tarbell, 2003

For me, Tarbell's work is the perfect generative art. It is the poster child for the duality of chaos and control, and has an intense level of visual complexity that slowly emerges from simplicity, making it feel more like it grew out of the soil than coming from algorithms. 

Intersection Aggregate - Jared Tarbell, 2004

Tarbell's code-driven artworks have a pulse. He makes the digital feel as organic as any analog art I know of, but it is created through code and is comprised of pixels. His work was a step change for me in terms of believing computers can produce art at the highest level.

Bubble Chamber - Jared Tarbell, 2003

Tarbell's explanation of his process reinforces the concepts of controlled randomness in generative art that we have been discussing.

When you write a program, it’s going to be executed the same way every single time. So if you define a system like this where things can happen at random, as the creator, you can be surprised by your own program, which is really great.

Before Processing, Tarbell was part of a group of generative artists developing work on the Flash platform from Macromedia (now owned by Adobe). His site Levitated.net served as an educational resource for a generation of artists seeking to better understand how to code in Flash. You can still access his open source code on the site.

Joshua Davis, Flash, and Praystation

One of the artists Jared Tarbell cites as a major influence on his work is Joshua Davis.  Since 1995 Davis has been using programming to produce art. He is among the first and best known artists to use Flash to create generative art.  

You likely remember Flash. We all had a plugin for it in the early 2000s that added animation and interaction to the web. Though Davis attended Pratt first for painting and then for design, his style is largely self-taught. He emerged from a life of hard partying to lead a movement of Flash artists through a "shit-load of hard work" and continues to create impressive work.  As he describes it:

Around 1998 I bought my first domain, called praystation.com. I was stoked! I slowly progressed and became more aware of design; I sort of realized who I was and what I was doing, without even knowing I was doing it. There was just a moment when I thought, “I’m a computer artist now! When did that happen?” I had finally found the new form of expression I had been looking for: I was going to use technology to make art.

ps3-praystation-v1 - Joshua Davis, 2001

Shapeshifter|Sonic Architecture - Joshua Davis, 2001

ps3-praystation-v1 - Joshua Davis, 2001

Davis’ unusual blend of hard work and extreme generosity was critical in spreading Flash as a platform to other artists for generative art. He was one of the first generative artists to make it a point to share his code by going “open source” so others could learn from him.

I love giving stuff away. I like it because that’s just what DIY culture tells us. It’s about freedom of knowledge: I truly believe that, as humans, we have more to gain by sharing what we know than trying to profit and hoard it.

In 2001 Davis's "Praystation" won the Ars Prize Technica, and his work is now in the Cooper Hewitt museum.

Artificial Intelligence & Generative Art

AI Generated Landscape #6 - Robbie Barrat, 2018

Though you may notice that the fluid organic imagery is a departure from the geometric abstraction we have seen so far, AI art is a subgroup of generative art. Much of the new work in AI art is being created by GANs (generative adversarial networks). GANs are a concept based on neural networks that computer scientist Ian Goodfellow came up with back in 2014. If it sounds complicated, don’t worry, we’ll simplify it a bit.

First off, GANs are comprised of two neural networks, which are essentially programs designed to think like a human brain. In our case we can think of these neural networks as being like two people: first, a "generator," whom we will think of as an art forger, and second, as a "discriminator," whom we will think of as the art critic. Now imagine that we gave the art forger a book with 1,000 paintings by Picasso as training material that he could use to create a forgery to fool the critic. If the forger looked at only three or four of those Picasso paintings, he may not be very good at making a forgery, and the critic would likely figure it out pretty quickly. But after looking at enough of the material and trying over and over again, he may actually start producing paintings good enough to fool the critic, right?

This is precisely what happens with GANs in AI art. Artists like Robbie Barrat have been exploring the creative potential of these systems for image-making for several years.

Nude Portrait - Robbie Barrat, 2018

Barrat did an excellent job of explaining this process to me in more detail (and his role as the artist within it) during our interview back in April, 2018.

But what happens is there is this thing called latent space that emerges after you train the GAN. All the possible paintings that are possible are laid out in highly dimensional space you are feeding into the generator. But the way they are laid out isn't random, it truly makes sense. So if you want to get a similar painting to your previous painting, you can pick a point that's very close to the point for your first picture. But some of the dimensions actually mean things like color scheme. So if I had a generation that I wanted to make more colorful, I could adjust one of the dimensions. So I do have some control, but only after the fact. I can't tell the GAN to produce a specific painting, but if I find a painting I like, I can then make adjustments to it.

This may sound a bit technical, but it should be clear that artists have a great deal of control over the process - in fact, that is where the artistry comes in.  I would encourage you to read my full interview with Robbie Barrat, as I feel he does a great job of explaining the foundational information needed to understand GANs as part of appreciating AI art.

For his latest project, Robbie gathered images from the Balenciaga online fashion catalog and used them to train his AI model. The GANs have been producing radical new fashions and styles unlike anything a traditionally trained human fashion designer would ever come up with. Barrat particularly likes the absence of symmetry, the random placement of pockets, and the addition of non-functional adornments like handheld tassels.

AI Fashion - Robbie Barrat, 2018

AI Fashion - Robbie Barrat, 2018

Barrat explained to me that he is using Pix2Pix technology in combination with DensePose to map the new AI outfits to the models. DensePose tries to estimate human poses and "...aims at mapping all human pixels of an RGB image to the 3D surface of the human body." A simpler explanation of this is that Robbie is training the AI to not only recognize the clothing in the Balenciaga catalog of clothing, but also the poses of the fashion models, and is then mapping the new fashions on to AI-generated fashion models and postures. Barrat explained:

pix2pix is the same thing as GANs, except instead of taking in noise, the generator takes in one picture and tries to output another that goes along with it, and then the discriminator looks at both pictures and its task is no longer figuring out if the images are generated or not, but rather if they make up a good pair.

Example showing use of DensePose and Pix2Pix

Based on the proliferation of news stories of late, there is no doubt that the use of AI in art is a topic of interst to the general public. A separate and maybe more important question is, "Is the art itself very interesting?" Robbie Barrat's art was the first to cross that bar for me. As AI art, it has that timeless quality found in much of the great art we find in our museums. A good test of high quality AI art is that you should be able to appreciate the end result even if you did not know it was created with AI (though the tools are fascinating, as well). Mario Klingemann is another artist who passes this test with flying colors.

Their styles are completely unique and distinct, but it does not surprise me that Barrat frequently credits Klingemann as inspiring his own techniques. Barrat recently said on Twitter:

I owe a lot of credit to @quasimondo for coming up with the DensePose + Pix2Pix method that I'm using for all this fashion stuff. Check out his work - he's got very compelling results from using this process with actual portraits as training data.

Barrat is spot on. Klingemann's recent Pix2Pix/DensePose works are aesthetically fresh and refined in a way that more hastily produced AI portraits that have been generated with AI are not. Klingemann's works are like revisionist art histories: they boil everything creepy about old paintings down into digital-surrealist masterpieces - you can almost smell the dust on the surface. They make me feel like I am a six year old on acid, lost in the “Art of the Americas” wing of the Boston MFA. Those scornful patriarchal, puritanical stares are made that much creepier by the melting abnormalities and deformations Klingemann introduces with his neural networks.  

DensePose vs. Pix2Pix - Mario Klingemann, 2018

DensePose vs. Pix2Pix - Mario Klingemann, 2018

DensePose vs. Pix2Pix - Mario Klingemann, 2018

Klingemann knows his work is creepy, and that is how he (and I) like it. When the question of whether or not AI art is "attractive" recently came up on Twitter, Klingemann tellingly responded:

My goal is to make interesting images. Not sure if you know my work, but the average feedback is "nightmare fuel," "creepy," or "uncanny"... I personally prefer ugly over boring, conventional, normal, non-challenging or derivative.

To that I say amen. I engaged in the Twitter chat and asked Klingman his thoughts on who owns the artwork - the human or the machine - a question an art reporter friend of mine had asked me in an interview that morning. Klingemann responded:

Like with any other machine, the owner or the operator of the machine owns it. Ask any photographer or pianist.

I was not surprised by his reply, as it echoes that of so many other generative artists in this post who have had to answer the questions about what role, if any, they play in the work they create.

I am excited to see AI technology made more accessible to artists.  Cristóbal Valenzuela has been designing tools that do just that, first, with his "Text 2 Image" tool that lets you type in words which the AI then tries to draw (with varying results). For example, I typed in "a man snorts bananas in a spaceship," pressed enter, and it produced the following image:

When you can produce an image or an effect with the push of a button, it usually gets old quick. So it is not hard to imagine that we will see something akin to the tsunami of images with Photoshop filters we were inundated with in the early ‘90s. In fact, Valenzuela is building a tool suite not unlike Photoshop, but leveraging AI to democratize the new tools for artists and designers. I'm not going to lie, I want to be first in line to play with it.

As AI technology becomes increasingly available, artistry and technical advancement will only become more important in separating the remarkable AI artists from those repurposing old tools built by others or simply pushing a button to achieve an overused visual paradigm. I remain fascinated by the space and will continue to watch artists like Robbie Barrat, Mario Klingeman, Tom White, Helena Sarin, Memo Atken, Gene Kogan, and others closely as their work evolves.  I should also note at the time of this writing the traditional art world has started to take notice.  

Summary and Conclusion

This post stems from me hearing too many people say they "do not like digital art.” Saying this is like saying "I do not like paintings," as digital art is so broad a field with generative art just being one part of it. I thought surely if people better understood the genre, they would have a better appreciation for the skill of the artists and the art they produce.

My goal was to help you fall in love with generative art - or at least give you a better understanding of it - without having to talk about code and math. Your appreciation of this genre will only improve if you explore the algorithms and programming behind the work. But same as you do not need to know how to paint to appreciate paintings, I believe you can appreciate generative art without understanding programming.

Though it became quite lengthy, this post was also not intended as a comprehensive history of generative art. Many amazing artists and key practitioners were not included. This article is simply one path through the history of generative art that highlights many of the artists I admire. I'd be thrilled to write the full story if given a book advance (hint, hint).

In summary, let’s take a look back at what we have learned:

• Generative art is an extension of central themes from 20th Century art

• The artists play a major role in the outcome of the work

• The process is very similar to traditional artmaking

• Generative art has its own rich history going back to 1960

• Women have played and continue to play major roles in this genre

• MIT has been an incubator for brilliant generative artists

• In the last two decades the genre has exploded as a result of the open source movement, improved tools like Processing, and a supportive community

• AI art using GANs, Pix to Pix, and DensePose is a subgenre of generative art

• As with all generative art, AI art is largely driven by human guidance

I studied art history in undergrad and earned an MFA in digital media, so I feel I have some qualifications to write a blog post like this. But in many ways it is not my story to tell. There is a strong chance I have made mistakes, and if I have referenced your work here and have gotten anything wrong, please know that I included your work in this post out of great appreciation and respect for what you do. Feel free to email me any corrections at Jason@artnome.com.

Finally, some of you may have noticed that the feature image for this article is by artist Manolo (Manuel Gamboa Naon), but I did not mention him in the text. This was intentional, and his work is included as a teaser. Along with Jared Tarbell, Robbie Barrat, and Mario Klingemann, Manolo is one of my favorite generative artists. I was lucky enough to interview him a few months back for feature piece that is now available. I could not limit myself to just a few paragraphs and one or two of his works - I'm hope you enjoy the interview!

Art World, Meet Blockchain

The blockchain revolution is largely about taking money and power away from large, established, centralized institutions and moving towards a more decentralized model. Bitcoin, the best-known use case for blockchain, cuts out banks and credit card agencies by decentralizing trust and making direct peer-to-peer payment possible.

Like banks, auction houses act as trusted intermediaries between buyers and sellers.  So I was pleasantly surprised when Christie’s, a 250-year-old auction house fitting the profile of the institutions who stand to be disrupted by blockchain, invited me to London to moderate two panels at their Art+Tech Summit: “Exploring Blockchain — Is the Art World Ready For Consensus?”

Anne Bracegirdle giving her keynote presentation The Blockchain Landscape in the Art World at Christie's Art+Tech Summit: Exploring Blockchain — Is the Art World Ready For Consensus? in London

Having worked at large institutions, I know that it takes a visionary willing to take risks and to act as a catalyst for an event like this to even happen. For Christie’s, that visionary is Associate Vice President and Specialist in the Photographs Department, Anne Bracegirdle. In her keynote, Anne concisely outlined the key benefits of blockchain for the art world:

• Simplified transactions

• Increased transparency

• Increased trust

• Increased security

• Sharable, immutable data

• Empowered users

Anne then argued that, “Even on this ideological level, these concepts are inherent to some of our market’s most established obstacles. The technology is a natural fit.” I agree with Anne, but does this mean that Christie’s and others in the art world are ready for blockchain? I don’t think so.  

The Art World’s Many Concerns Surrounding Blockchain

Despite Anne brilliantly making a one-to-one connection from the art world’s thorniest problems to blockchain technology’s clearest benefits, much of the conference felt like people looking for reasons to avoid introducing blockchain into the traditional art world. I don’t blame them. Understanding blockchain is really difficult, and Anne’s presentation aside, the tone of the day skewed towards blockchain as boogeyman. Change, uncertainty, complexity, and risk are the perfect cocktail for producing anxiety, leaving many with a sense that blockchain is a scary, untested, disruptive technology that could threaten their jobs, or worse, their positions in the art world. I would rank the concerns raised throughout the day in this order:

• GDPR: The new “General Data Protection Regulation,” or GDPR, as it is known, was implemented on May 25th, 2018. GDPR includes a “Right to Erasure,” mandating that institutions be able to permanently delete personal information for EU customers upon their request. Penalties for failing to do so can be as high as €20 million or up to 4% of the annual worldwide turnover. The concern here, warranted or not, is that the blockchain is an immutable record, so there is no way to comply with GDPR to delete data from artists, buyers, or sellers without mass collusion. Several folks at the conference suggested this makes blockchain a non-starter for many of its more obvious uses in the art world.  

• Scalability: Crytpocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are limited in the number of transactions they can handle in a given time frame. As the number of transactions increases, it can create a transactional traffic jam. For example, when CryptoKitties first came out, Etherscan reported a sixfold increase in the activity on the Ethereum blockchain. The thinking goes, if CryptoKitties can gum up the transaction speed of a popular blockchain like Ethereum, how can it be relied on for the world’s art-and-collectibles market?

• User Experience (UX)/User Interface (UI): Though touted as a means for a faster, frictionless buying and selling of goods, the truth is creating, buying, and selling goods on the blockchain is complicated at best and painful at worst. It requires connecting your bank account to currency exchanges to acquire cryptocurrencies, downloading third-party wallets like Metamask, and understanding public keys and protecting private keys.

• Decentralization: A core premise of blockchain is that no single entity owns the platform. However, it has been shown that 1,000 people own roughly 40% of the Bitcoin in existence. If this small number of people, whom are often referred to as “whales” in the blockchain community, start selling off a large portion of their currency at the same time, they can quickly devalue the currency - or worse, intentionally collude to engage in price manipulation. Essentially, a small number of people have the ability to dramatically alter the Bitcoin blockchain for everyone, which causes many to question how decentralized it actually is.

• Blockchain Literacy: Another problem is blockchain literacy for end users. Understanding smart contracts and whitepapers is beyond the skills of the average person. As a result, many believe projects built on blockchain to be decentralized as a matter of “faith.” Those able to read the smart contracts are starting to point out that many them have pause buttons built into them that empower a single person or group of people to stop the application and rewrite its code after launching. While the developers often argue this is to identify and fix bugs, it is worrisome to many seeking truly decentralized solutions.

• Evolving Regulations: Governments are still catching up with how they want to treat blockchain-based tokens and currencies. The crux of this debate is whether to treat a token like a security or as a commodity. As long as the regulation from institutions like the SEC are still in flux, there is added risk for institutions in adopting blockchain-based solutions.

• ICO Scams: 2017 was the year of the ICO (initial coin offering), and we saw many companies like Bitconnect (hey, hey, hey) raise enormous sums of money on ideas or products with no real merit. Many other companies simply added “blockchain” to their names to drive up their stock price, a practice that is actively being shut down.

• Energy Consumption: Blockchains that leverage “proof of work” consensus mechanisms like Bitcoin and the current configuration of Ethereum are notorious for massive power consumption. While many are exploring moving to “proof of stake” as an alternative, this approach has its own critics.

Given all these problems, why are folks like Anne and I so bullish about the opportunities for blockchain in the art world? Because all of the problems listed above represent enormous opportunities for artists, creative technologists, and scrappy startups. Unlike large enterprises, lawyers, and financial institutions, whom all are wired to enumerate problems and mitigate risk, startups and creative technologists see risk as opportunity and are wired to embrace it to build new solutions.

Digital Art Leads the Way in Blockchain Innovation

Panel on blockchain and digital art at Christie's Art + Tech Summit in London. From left to right: Jason Bailey, Artnome - Masha McConaghy, Ascribe - John Zettler, R.A.R.E. Digital Art Network - Matt Hall, CryptoPunks - Judy Mam, Dada.nyc

Having grown up in a family of engineers, I prefer to get my knowledge of new tech trends like blockchain from people who are actually building things. Inevitably, these folks speak of tech in much more realistic terms, skipping the sermons about blockchain as either the “second coming” or the “antichrist.” Instead, they see it as a database with some unique properties and prefer building things to prophesying. Lots of cool projects have been built in the digital art space over the last five years, so I believe it is the best place to get away from navel-gazing theory and fiery fear mongering and to actually see what can be built.

In the last few weeks I have been lucky enough to grab dinner with both Joe Looney, the creator of the Rare Pepe Wallet, and Matt Hall and John Watkinson, creators of CryptoPunks and Choon. Rare Pepe Wallet and CryptoPunks are the first two important use cases for art on the blockchain for Bitcoin and Ethereum, respectively. What struck me was how similar these two conversations were. Both Rare Pepe Wallet and CryptoPunks were experimental projects that grew organically and brought little to no profit to their creators, but formed the foundation for what is now a thriving digital art-and-collectibles space.

Artnome’s Jason Bailey with Joe Looney, creator of Rare Pepe Wallet

In my conversations with Joe, Matt, and John, a common theme was the need for more folks to try new things and explore for the sake of exploring. When Joe started Rare Pepe Wallet, he didn’t know people would spend $1.2M on tokens associated with drawings of green frogs. If you had done a survey with a focus group of 100,000 people, I am certain none of them could have predicted that collecting frog memes using real money would become a thing - but it did. As he recently said in a Telegram chat:

“...it’s better to build a product people want to congregate around rather than try and build a community to use a product. I just write applications that people like to use.”

Similarly, Matt and John told me they had no idea if people would even claim all 10k CryptoPunks when they were free, never mind the emergence of a secondary market. CryptoPunks was initially just a creative experiment that ended up taking off and proving out a use case for collecting digital art on the Ethereum blockchain (a model later popularized further by CryptoKitties).

From left to right: Matt Hall, CryptoPunks - John Zettler, R.A.R.E Digital Art Network - Judy Mam, Dada.nyc - John Crain, SuperRare - Charles Crain, SuperRare - John Perkins, SuperRare - Bea Ramos, Dada.nyc.

As a direct result of the experiments that Joe, Matt, and John did with tokenizing art and developing markets, we now have half a dozen marketplaces for digital art, including RARE Digital Art Network, SuperRare, and Dada.nyc, who were all at the blockchain event at Christie’s.

What If We Could Build an Auction House Starting From Scratch - Using Blockchain?

A recent article from Evan Beard does a phenomenal job of outlining the trends in art collecting among the fastest growing group of art collectors: millennials. According to Beard’s research, more than any generation prior, millennials are treating art as a financial asset. You may be surprised to hear that the generation famous for coining the phrase HODL (holding on to your cryptocurrency) are “three times more likely than boomers to sell works they’ve collected (85% to 24%), and more comfortable using art as loan collateral.” This amounts to a fast-growing and underserved segment of collectors with a desire for a more liquid art market.  

Data from U.S. Trust

I believe there is a tremendous opportunity to construct a blockchain-based solution for auctioning art from scratch, building from the ground up to serve this growing segment of young artists and collectors. Without the overhead of decades of legacy technology and centuries of institutional dogma, the right entrepreneurs could accomplish in the auction space what Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber/Lyft have accomplished in their respective fields by embracing technology and being data-driven from their inception. I believe in this so strongly that I am excited to announce that I have agreed to join Portion as an official advisor.

Screen shot from the gorgeous new website for Portion

Portion is being built to provide everything needed to auction both digital and physical artworks and collectibles using cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Led by blockchain technologist Jason Rosenstein and fresh off of $5.5M in funding, I believe Portion could do for the luxury art-and-collectible space what eBay did for more affordable collectibles in the late ‘90s. They are pitching themselves as the “Decentralized Auction House Built on Ethereum and IPFS.”

Fifteen years ago, most people would have thought you were crazy if you described the business model of Airbnb or Uber/Lyft. The hospitality and transportation industries both were well established with powerful incumbents who seemed poised to crush any competition. Besides, who would have predicted that everyday people would be willing to put their spare rooms up for rental or to drive around offering rides to complete strangers in their spare time? Like Airbnb and Uber/Lyft, Portion enables everyone to participate in a market that was once solely the domain of experts: Portion “allows anyone to be their own auction house.” This is not limited solely to auctioning of goods, as Portion is building all the services typically expected from an auction house, but with some nifty twists thanks to blockchain and other technologies.

These include:

• Ability to auction both digital and physical goods (Portion’s first platform will offer digital art from renowned artists)

• Better UX/UI to obfuscate the need to download and install third-party plugins like Metamask

• Transacting in Ethereum, but users who choose to use Portion’s proprietary “Porti” token will eliminate all third parties, intermediaries, and fees

• Blockchain-based smart contracts to validate proof of funds to avoid situations where bidders default after submitting winning bids that exceed their actual funds

• Validation of identity through distributed technologies

• A full suite of financial services

The goal here is not to recreate existing auction systems, but to create a more equitable system for buyers and sellers. As Portion’s Jason Rosenstein stated in a recent article:

“Blockchain technology allows for artists to distribute their work in a decentralized way, and to receive rewards without major entities taking them away. By taking away the intermediaries, artists will begin to feel more empowered and connected to their creations… We are approaching a creative economy where artists and buyers alike will participate in a mutually beneficial ecosystem of creative content.”

The promise of a decentralized and fully transparent auction process with built-in protection against fraud is, of course, very compelling to artists and collectors alike. Needless to say, I am excited to work with Portion on defining what the auction process of the future could look like when you are able to build it from scratch.

Innovation in Blockchain and Art Provenance

Panel discussion: Blockchain in the Art World – Art Market at Christie's Art + Tech Summit in London. From left to right: Jason Bailey, Artnome - Nanne Dekking, Artory - Jess Houlgrave, Codex Protocol - Ram Nadella, Paddle8

The history of our most important cultural treasures - our art - has been deeply compromised due to the lack of a singular registry or database crossing the works of all major artists. Estimates range from 10 to 20 percent of all art either being forged or misattributed. Appalled by this, I spent the better part of my discretionary income and time for the last three years building the world's largest analytical database of known works by our most important artists and conscripting a small army of art nerds to help me grow it. I've always known this problem is too large to solve alone, so I am overjoyed by the number of solutions spinning out of the recent blockchain frenzy.

Codex Protocol has made great progress in building a better system for tracking the provenance of art since I first wrote about them back in January. As I am writing this post in late July, they have launched on the mainnet of Ethereum. I have been impressed by the energy and pace with which co-founder and COO Jess Houlgrave and her team have been tackling this problem. I reached out to Jess to ask how she felt things were going. She stated:

“Codex has just launched to the Ethereum mainnet after taking great care in collaborating with our community through several engaging programmes that included quests, bounties, and earndrops. It was wonderful to see community members sharing their first Codex Records during the beta, and we've enjoyed seeing blockchain technologies become a topic of high interest within the arts and collectibles market over the past year. With the Codex Viewer, managing identities for unique assets with our decentralized registry is an easy way to protect provenance and take care of your most prized possessions.”

Another key player in the blockchain provenance space is Artory, founded by TEFAF Chairman Nanne Dekking. I was lucky enough to have both Nanne and Jess as experts on blockchain provenance for the panel I hosted at Christie’s Art+Tech Summit. In our panel we had a spirited discussion with Nanne, making it a point to emphasize that Artory believes it is critical that only experts are able to update the information on artworks. This is in contrast to Codex, who are taking a more decentralized approach. Using me as an example, Jess explained that some people may believe I am an expert in digital art and others may not - but having a single person decide who the experts are may defeat the purpose of a decentralized registry. Nanne is strongly against this approach and voiced his concerns that only established experts should have access to updating the database, or else quality and credibility suffer.

My instincts are that we need something in between Nanne’s and Jess’ approaches. I envision a system where anyone can make additions, but their credibility is tracked in a manner similar to Reddit or Wikipedia. This leaves the door open for new experts to emerge while respecting the skills and knowledge of existing experts.

I also think it is healthy that there is passionate disagreement and multiple players in the blockchain provenance space (others include VerisArt and ArtChain). The problem of improving our records for artists past and present is complicated enough (and important enough) to warrant several teams and approaches.

What About Institutions Like Christie’s?

What role can large, storied institutions like Christie’s play in helping the art world adopt new technology and to keep up with the times? While graciously hosting the conference on blockchain, there were only a few hints that they may leverage blockchain technology themselves in some capacity in the near future. As a centralized institution, this makes sense to me.

Panel Discussion: Key Take-aways & Reflections – Art Market at Christie's Art + Tech Summit in London. From left to right: Georgina Adam, Financial Times and The Art Newspaper - Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine - Sylvie Gleises, AXA Art - Kati Price, Victoria & Albert Museum - Richard Entrup, Christie’s

Richard Entrup, Christie’s CIO, mentioned they had recently spent ~$1M on preparing for GDPR compliance, and he did not sound eager about embarking on a new blockchain project of any real scope anytime soon. Despite Entrup’s reservations, Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti stated in his closing remarks at the conference that Christie’s is exploring blockchain and would be making an announcement about their use of blockchain in the near future, but was not specific.

I suspect they will announce something minor like accepting cryptocurrency for auction payments. I say this because in an interview with Cerutti in Forbes last October, he shared some insights to his online strategy that I find telling, first stating, “People don’t want to buy without the experience of talking to a specialist or seeing the piece in the flesh.” Rather than a primary sales driver, Cerutti sees the online channel as educational and a lead generation tool. He further explained:

“These new channels - the online sales - for auction houses and galleries have become more and more important because it is a way to recruit a new generation of clients who sometimes are intimidated by the auction rooms and the theatre around the auction, or could be intimidated by crossing the entrance of a gallery. They go directly on the Internet.”

I think this is a sound strategy on Christie’s part. They are in a fantastic position, having just announced a record £3bn first half sales for 2018 (eclipsing nearest competitor Sotheby’s). They are also adding new collectors at a rapid pace, with 27% of collectors during the record-breaking first half being new to Christie’s. Christie’s also has the dominant position in the online art market and are growing with online-only auction sales “up 40% to £27.7m.” Despite this growth online, the channel still represents just a small fraction of their total sales.

Christie’s business is healthy and growing, so no need to change course or take risks on an untested technology. They have made the exact right move, in my opinion, by hosting the conversation on blockchain and bringing leading thinkers from faster-moving, less risk-averse startups (from whom they can learn and benefit from in the long term) into their home to discuss paths forward. I could easily see Christie’s going a step further and making some strategic investments in blockchain-based startups. This has become increasingly popular in other verticals where large corporations with dominant market share have started their own strategic venture capital arms.

Summary

• Many of blockchain’s strengths align perfectly with problems in the art world.

• There are still too many problems with blockchain for large, risk-averse institutions to adopt it widely for much other than accepting cryptocurrency payments.

  • This is okay because scrappy entrepreneurs will continue to embrace the risk, explore the technology, solve the problems, and develop more mature solutions that will eventually go mainstream.

• Digital art is the obvious use case and is innovating rapidly.

• There is an opportunity to create a disruptive auction house built from scratch leveraging blockchain.

• Regardless of technology, we need to figure out who gets to add information to official records (provenance) for art. This information also needs to become more broadly available as part of a public record of our most important artworks.

• Large institutions like Christie’s should continue to support emerging technologies by hosting conversations and investing in smaller innovators in the art/tech space.

Thanks to artist Brian Romero for letting me use his artwork A Lambo Trip to the Moon as the feature image for this blog post. The art is available in a limited edition of 21, available on the R.A.R.E. Network. Brian's piece perfectly captures the emotional polarity in blockchain right now between extreme optimism and extreme pessimism and serves as an excellent depiction of the collision of the traditional art world with the volatile worlds of crypto and blockchain.

I hope this post was helpful in outlining both the problems that many are surfacing as well as some of the innovators who will help us move past those problems. I write too slow to compete with news, so hopefully this post will have some evergreen value beyond the light recap it provides on the Christie’s conference. If you are interested in reading more in-depth reporting on the conference, I recommend reading the excellent pieces below:

• “When Worlds Collide” - Judy Mam, Dada.nyc

• “How Financial Products Drive Today’s Art World” - Scott Reyburn, New York Times

• “Blockchain in the art world: the pros and cons” James Pickford, Financial Times

And finally, thanks to Anne Bracegirdle, Elliot Safra, and the rest of the Christie's team, as well as Bernadine Bröcker Wieder from Vastari, for inviting me to moderate the panels on digital art and provenance and for being such gracious hosts. Auction houses and the art world sometimes have a reputation for being snobbish or elitist, but I can tell that I was received warmly by everyone I met and had some great conversations. My roots are deeply blue collar and I am about as informal as it gets, so if I was made comfortable, then anyone can and should feel welcome in this environment. 

I will add the videos from those panels to this blog post once they become available. I’m hopeful that Christie’s will hold the conference again next year, and perhaps we can cover AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) for art, another great passion of mine.

How Can We 10x Global Creativity?

I just accepted an official advisory role with the drawing-based social platform Dada.nyc because I believe with our help they can 10x our global creativity. Here is why I believe this.

We have greater than 15x the world population than we had during the Renaissance. Modern medicine has extended our lifespans, and technology and innovation have introduced leisure to a much larger group of people. So why do we not have at least 10x the Michelangelos and Raphaels and Da Vincis?

Data from the Worldometer. Raw Data - http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/

Could it be we are failing to support the arts in a manner that allows for artistic geniuses to fully surface? If we took the $450M spent on a single Da Vinci painting, Salvator Mundi, and reallocated it to supporting and growing this generation’s artists, could we surface 10x the number of modern day Da Vincis? I actually don’t think we need $450M - it may be easier than that.

Unlocking Global Creativity

"El Token" by Cromomaníaco and Otro

I think the key to 10x-ing the world's artistic output is quite simple. Just as a fast-spreading forest fire can start with three small things - heat, fuel, and oxygen - I believe artists need only tools, audience, and acknowledgement to catch fire. Without those ingredients most artists give up. I know I did.

As an artist and a technologist, it has always been surprising to me that nobody has built a platform to meet these three basic artists’ needs. That was until I met my friends from Dada.nyc.  

I believe Dada is very far along in becoming the first platform to unlock global creativity. Where others might see a simple drawing tool, I see the opportunity to 10x the world's creativity and trigger a new global renaissance unlike anything we have seen before.

It's Already Happening - and Dada Started it

Drawing created by artists from around the world on the Dada platform.

Over the last four years Dada has brought over 150,000 people from all walks of life and geographies together to draw collaboratively. This is both remarkable and unprecedented. Yes, there have long been online artist communities and portfolio sharing sites on the web, but Dada is not that.

Dada is a community of artists drawing together, extending each others' work, exploring, experimenting, and making mistakes/discoveries together. Where other sites are designed to share finished results (we never see how the sausage is made), Dada is skewed towards the artistic process - the making and building of creative muscle.

Here is what you need to know about Dada to understand why I believe they have the potential to change the world.

• Founded in 2014 by experienced female founders with backgrounds in the arts

• Recently awarded funding from word-class VC Consensys Ventures

• Functions like a social network based on drawing rather than text

• This allows over 150k people from 50+ countries to communicate without a language barrier

• The tools for drawing are built into the site which levels the playing field

• The focus is on communicating through collaborative drawing rather than critiquing final results

• Despite the large community, there are no trolls, and little to no censorship has been needed

• The CEO and Founder, Beatriz Helena Ramos, is an artist who regularly travels the world to meet with Dada artists in person and is personally invested in the community

• One of their goals is to provide a guaranteed income to Dada artists

• They plan on doing this by selling art on the blockchain (they are among the early pioneers in using the blockchain for art)

Bea Ramos (front right) regularly travels the world to engage directly with the artists in the Dada community. She knows their families, their personal challenges, and their failures and successes. I don't think you will see Zuckerberg traveling halfway around the world to show up at your door to cook a meal with you anytime soon.

Building a platform and a community where strangers feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable and to create and share their work in all stages is remarkably tricky. The blank canvas is notoriously intimidating, and putting yourself out there to an audience you have never met only amplifies that. More than technological advancement, it requires extremely thoughtful and sensitive leadership to build this type of platform. Beatriz Helena Ramos, founder and CEO of Dada, is that leader.

A community where people speak to each other through drawings and create collaborative art is using Ethereum to create a new economy based on self expression, collaboration and solidarity.

Along with her amazing team, Bea has bootstrapped the entire Dada community and platform.  They provide all three of the key ingredients I believe are necessary to 10x global creativity:

• Tools (a simple online drawing interface)

• The audience (an actively engaged community of artists and collectors)

• Acknowledgement (likes and comments, and the ability to sell on the blockchain)

With their new funding from Consensys, they now have the potential to scale these elements and expand their reach and change even more lives for the better.

But isn't Dada.nyc Just Amateur Doodles?  

Boris Z. Simunich
Created on Dada using a computer mouse

A few of the people I have sent to Dada have come back to me suggesting the art on Dada are just doodles and sketches from amateurs. They are wrong. Considering how simple the tools are in Dada, the results can literally be mind blowing. For example, take the drawing above by Dada artist Boris Z. Simunich. Boris was inspired to draw this realistic portrait of a stray dog to encourage people to consider adoption… and he drew it with a computer mouse! I include his art here to show there is literally no ceiling for the quality of work that can be produced in Dada using very basic tools when they are put in the right hands.

However, the goal for Dada is not for just the most talented artists (like Boris) to produce highly polished digital masterpieces... rather the goal is for everyone to benefit from drawing and creating art together in a supportive community.

I believe that art appreciators/consumers have developed an unhealthy desire to quickly classify artists and the work they create as "good" or "bad." This boolean approach to art appreciation completely misses the boat, failing both appreciators and the artists who need their support. What artists know that others often don't is that doodles and sketches are actually the fuel of all artistic production.   

For every masterpiece, there are hundreds of sketches - From the Sketch 5 Grotesque Heads by Da Vinci

Da Vinci was known to sketch grotesque heads and other seemingly awkward, silly, or throwaway-type drawings. But these sketches are amazing in their own right, and the process of drawing regularly and freely has long been a staple of all great artists’ practice.

As an analogy, your daily morning jog is not the Boston Marathon, but without it, nobody ever gets "Marathon Ready." Art is exactly the same: it takes regular practice to improve. Practice is important for building technical skill and draftsmanship. More importantly, sketching, while less self-conscious, helps to free up the imagination.

Cadavre Exquis with Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, Man Ray

André Breton, Nusch Eluard, Valentine Hugo, Paul Eluard

The Surrealist artists knew how important sketching and doodling were to unlocking the creative ideas from the subconscious. They famously played a drawing game called the cadavres exquis, or exquisite corpse. In this game an artist would make a drawing and fold the paper such that the next artist only saw the very edge of the image so they were extending the previous drawing without knowing what they were adding to. Dada operates on a variation of this game where you can actually see the drawing from the previous artist and you are encouraged to extend it visually and through narrative. Dada is playing this game across the globe with artists from countries all over the world participating.

Exquisite corpse by Dada artists

The humble "sketch" or "study" is also the foundation for all of the greatest masterpieces. While we sometimes like to imagine that great artworks arrived through some sort of immaculate conception, appearing out of the ether through unparalleled artistic genius, this is never the case. The studies below are a good reminder that the most important works by our most celebrated artists where built up from sketches - in some cases dozens and dozens of sketches for a single painting.

Pablo Picasso's Guernica

Pablo Picasso
Composition Study 5 for Guernica
1937, oil and graphite on plywood

Pablo Picasso
Guernica
April 26, 1937–June 1937, mural-sized oil painting on canvas

Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night

Vincent van Gogh
Starry Night. Drawing. Saint-Remy
June, 1889.

Vincent van Gogh
The Starry Night
June 1889, oil on canvas

Munch's Scream

Edvard Munch
Study
c.1891-2. , pencil on paper.

Edvard Munch
The Scream
1893, oil, tempera, pastel and crayon cardboard

Beyond building artists’ skills, enhancing their creativity, and creating studies for future masterworks, developing a regular sketching habit can provide a much needed outlet for dealing with depression, anxiety, and the struggles of everyday life. It is important to recognize that 10xing global creativity, as ambitious as it sounds, is only the starting point for Dada in my opinion and far from its loftiest goal.  

Art's Higher Virtues

Hernán Cacciatore
Mustaches Rain
Argentina

Creating an Outlet for Those Most at Risk

I am passionate about art history and collecting art, but I recognize that the truly transformative power of art comes from “making” as a therapeutic and creative outlet. I know this because when I was a teenager, I struggled with anxiety and depression and often could find no purpose or value in life. Art gave me purpose and an outlet as it has for so many others.

It's no secret that many of our greatest artists suffered with mental illness. Art is a natural salve - as has been said "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comforted." I can think of no higher purpose for art than getting the tools for creation into the hands of the suffering. Add to that a community of supporters and what you have is nothing short of transformative.

Much of the horrible things we see in the world are the results of people feeling disconnected and lacking an outlet for their frustrations. Dada has opened its doors with a ready-made environment designed for creative outlet to everyone and anyone who needs it.  Art saves lives by making them rich, full, meaningful, and worth living.

Bringing People Together From Around the World

Excerpt from collaborative drawing with Otro (Chile), Serste (Italy), Massel (Peru)

It's hard to want to bomb a country or build a border wall when you've just collaborated on a drawing with someone who lives in that country. Creative collaboration is an incredibly powerful force for bringing people together, and it humanizes people who may otherwise seem too different or distant to care about.

Additionally, by bringing artists together from around the globe, we see styles and cultures visually influencing one another in real time to a degree we have seen nowhere else. Somehow Dada has opened its doors to everyone and there are no trolls. Whatever the formula, Dada should be looked to as a blueprint for healthy, global, collaborative engagement.

Training the World for a Future that Favors the Creative

Ruben Alexander
United States

Many of the world's most intelligent and successful entrepreneurs have warned that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will soon be able to take over many of our jobs. One area where most agree that AI will not be able to replace us is in creativity and the arts. But despite this realization, we regularly see the arts as the first programs cut in public schools and unenlightened leaders like Donald Trump cutting back on arts funding. Scalable platforms like Dada have an opportunity to educate a future workforce that will need to be able to think creatively and communicate globally to thrive in the new economy.

Do Your Part - Right Now

Current list of drawings available for sale on Dada for as little as $9

If Dada does not create an arts revolution on the order of 10xing our global creativity, it will not be because they fell short - it will be because we failed to support them. You don't get to have the world you want to live in unless you actively participate in making it happen. If you have ever wanted to...

- See more art in the world
- Support artists
- Support female founders
- Help bring peace by connecting people from across the world
- Invest in an outlet to help those with anxiety, depression, and other illnesses
- Start a digital art collection
- Better understand how blockchain works
- Support those in countries with weak economies
- Make friends with creative people from around the world
- Help build confidence in others
- Simply make someone's day

...you can now do all of them at once for as little as $9 by purchasing a drawing in Dada's gallery. If you consider yourself a supporter of the arts, or would like to be, this will be the best $9 you ever spent.

To purchase you will need to install Metamask and acquire some Ethereum. This may sound super overwhelming if you are new to it, but trust me, it is not and Dada have provided easy to follow instructions. You can learn more about blockchain and art in my earlier article here, and if you have questions on how to make a purchase the folks at Dada are happy to walk you through the process.

If you enjoy Artnome and have ever wanted to a way to say thanks, skip a few coffees at Starbucks and buy your first digital drawing on the blockchain at Dada. Can't afford to collect just yet? No worries, make a drawing or leave a positive comment or a like for one of the artists - it will make their day and yours, I promise you. 

 

Quantifying Abstraction in Art: Mondrian

Much has been written about Piet Mondrian's journey into abstraction, so rather than rehash what has already been written, we decided to quantify abstraction across Mondrian's career as an artist.

Thanks to Artnome’s Digital Collections Analyst, Kaesha Freyaldenhoven, the complete works of Piet Mondrian are available in our public database. After carefully examining each individual work throughout the process of adding images to the database, we both remarked that seeing Mondrian’s work in context has radically altered the manner in which we conceptualize Mondrian as an artist. His evolution into abstraction, through paintings and drawings, is incredible - watching this slow stylistic transition encouraged us to ask ourselves: how do we define an artwork as “abstract”?

What is actually happening to Mondrian's paintings over the course of his life as an artist?

With Mondrian, most people think of the simplified squares painted in vibrant primary colors with lots of intersecting black lines forming right angles.

Piet Mondrian
Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930
Oil on Canvas
86 x 66 cm
Abstraction Score: 0.2819313946

Because of the deceptive simplicity of abstract art, we often hear, "My five year old could make that." This frustration leads people to ask, "How can three colored squares with a few black lines on a canvas become famous? Or worse, a single white diamond shape canvas with two simple black lines?”

Piet Mondrian
Lozenge Composition with Two Lines, 1931
Oil Painting on Canvas
80 x 80 cm
Abstraction Score: 0.1000119845

What many may not understand is that prior to creating abstract paintings, Mondrian began his career as an incredibly talented realist painter. Works created from the 1880s to the early 1900s typically depict landscapes and pastoral settings of his native country featuring rivers, trees, and windmills in a naturalistic style.

Piet Mondrian
Farmstead and Irrigation Ditch with Prow of Rowboat, 1898
Oil on Canvas mounted on Panel
Abstraction Score: 0.4933406639

In the later 1900s and 1910s, Mondrian paints similar subject matter; however, he utilizes diverse stylistic techniques with vivid color palettes.

Piet Mondrian
Evening; Red Tree, 1908-1910
Oil on Canvas
70 cm × 99 cm
Abstraction Score: 0.4704731246

His break in representational painting comes during the late 1910s and early 1920s, in which he shifts in both subject matter and color choices.

Piet Mondrian
Composite 10 in Zwart Wit (Composition 10 in Black and White), 1915
Oil on Canvas
105.1 x 114.3 cm
Abstraction Score:0.3968693713

Piet Mondrian
No. VI /COMPOSITION No.II, 1920
Oil on Canvas
100.5 x 101 cm
Abstraction Score: 0.2121607466

Only when you look across his complete body of work, temporally, can you fully appreciate how he carried his draftsmanship across his entire career in his spiritual quest towards perfect balance and harmony. He was famously quoted as saying:

"To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual."

But how does one measure abstraction in the work of Mondrian? We were/are not sure it is really possible, but thought of it as an interesting exercise. This task was a bit outside our skill set, so we reached out to Artnome friend Alexander Koch, a postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University, where he is studying bioinformatics, to provide us with  some help.

As a preface, we are thinking of this as a work in progress. I know we have thousands of brilliant readers and we are hoping that folks will want to help think through what quantification of abstraction should look like.  

While not sufficient for measuring all abstraction, we felt like simplicity may be a reasonable surrogate for measuring abstraction in the work of Mondrian. By simplicity, we mean the reduction of the color palette and the presence of fewer and fewer lines. Alexander was able to capture these trends by creating a complexity score.

According to Alexander, our complexity score is calculated as follows:

complexity_score = (color_score + variance_score + edge_score)/3

In Alexander's words:

"The color_score is simply the number of colors (RGB values) in an image. The idea is that more colors = more complex image.

"The variance_score is the average of the per-row variance of the grayscale values of all pixels in an image (so per row of pixels, the variance is calculated and then the average is calculated of all these variances). The idea is that higher variance = more complex image.

"The edge_score represents the number of contours that are detected in an image and should give an idea of the number of “hard” edges there are in an image. The idea is that more edges = more complex image.

"These three values are then normalized to values between 0 and 1 (by dividing by the maximal value) and averaged."

Alexander created the excellent chart below. In it we see a sort of dip in complexity when Mondriaan shifted away from the more traditional paintings to his better-known abstract work. As a bonus you can click here or on the image below to access a version that allows you to interact by clicking the image to further explore Mondrian's journey. 

We did notice that we ran into some issues with image quality. There were some obvious outliers where less complex/abstract artworks ranked high as a result of grainy reproductions.

Obviously this is not a perfect method for quantifying abstraction. In addition to the variance in image quality, simplicity is just not an ideal surrogate for measuring abstraction. While it works reasonably well for Mondrian, artists like Jackson Pollock actually increased the visual complexity of their work as they become more abstract.

Jackson Pollock
Landscape With White Horse, c. 1934-1938
Oil on Canvas
24 x 30 in.

Jackson Pollok
No. 5, 1948
Oil on Fiberboard
8 × 4 ft

For part two in our series on “Quantifying Abstraction in Art,” we will look at using machine learning tools like Clarifai to train a model on artworks that are realistic and then artworks that are abstract. Our hope is that this may improve upon our Mondrian results, but more importantly, it may be able to account for artists like Pollock, as well.

Have ideas on how we should approach this? We are always open to new ideas and working with people interested in helping out. You can reach me at jason@artnome.com.

AI Art Just Got Awesome

As a self-styled digital art aficionado who works for a machine learning startup, I have been waiting for years for AI (artificial intelligence) to yield something miraculous in the field of art. But instead, all I have seen is generic style transfers that allow you to make a photo of your dog look like a poorly painted Van Gogh... more of a parlor trick than the next revolution in fine art.

Example of novelty neural network style transfer featuring my lovely fur baby Frida

But at last, our machine learning art miracle has finally come in the form of some crazy looking nude portraits generated by a recent high-school graduate from West Virginia named Robbie Barrat. The second I saw Robbie's images on his Twitter feed, I fell in love. I had one of those rare moments where you see something completely fresh and you know some very important corner has just been turned. 

In aesthetics there is a concept called the uncanny valley that I believe explains much of the emotional resonance in Robbie's Nudes. According to wikipedia:

The uncanny valley is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object's resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object. The concept of the uncanny valley suggests humanoid objects which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers.

Forget the valley, Robbie just tore open an "uncanny black hole." 

Robbie Barrat
AI Generated Nude Portrait #2

Robbie Barrat
AI Generated Nude Portrait #3

Robbie Barrat
AI Generated Nude Portrait #4

Art nerd that I am, I immediately tried to get Robbie on the phone. We eventually nailed down a time to chat and Robbie shared with me the details of his process. 

WARNING: We are about to get a little nerdy here, but don't worry, you got this! Neural networks are just a fancy name for computer programs designed to think like the human brain.  Robbie is going to talk about a specific type of neural networks called GANs (generated adversarial networks).

In Robbie's own words:

A paper just came out last December called Progressive Growing of GANs. A GAN is basically two neural networks that compete. There is the generator and the discriminator. The generator tries to make images to fool the discriminator, and the discriminator's whole job is to tell the difference between generated images and real images.

So the discriminator is always comparing the images the generator sends it with pictures in the data set, and it is trying to return a value of "fake" or "real". The generator gets feedback from the discriminator on how well it is performing. It uses that feedback to adapt and to try and generate more and more realistic images that will fool the discriminator into saying "this is real".

So I fed the GAN with 10,000 nude portraits and I let it have at it, and the two networks try to fool each other. And as they start off, they are terrible and their generations might as well just be noise. But as time goes on they get better and better at imitating what is inside the data set.

So what happened with the Nudes is the generator figured out a way to fool the discriminator without actually getting good at generating nude portraits. The discriminator is stupid enough that if I feed it these blobs, it can't figure out the difference between that and people. So the generator can just do that instead of generating realistic portraits, which is a harder job. It can fall into this local-minima where it isn't the ideal solution, but it works for the generator, and discriminator doesn't know any better so it gets stuck there. And that is what is happening in the nude portraits.

Pretty amazing, right? The fact that Robbie's Nudes are so surreal can be seen as a glitch or a limitation of the discriminator. But as with traditional art-making, happy accidents are often the most important roads to creative discovery. Had the discriminator been more "discriminating," the GANs may have output just a near perfect version of a traditional nude painting. For example, Robbie's landscapes leverage the same program as the Nudes, but yields images that are more convincing. I would argue the landscapes are also much less creative than the Nudes... but is that even possible with AI art? 

Robbie Barrat
AI Art Generated with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

Robbie Barrat
AI Art Generated with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

Robbie Barrat
AI Art Generated with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

Is it possible that the Nudes are more creative than the landscapes? Who is the artist here, Robbie or the AI/GAN? And if the AI is the artist, is a machine even capable of creativity?

I asked Robbie to help me understand his role in the process. He compared his role to the role of artist Sol Lewitt. Lewitt is best known for writing out instructions or rule sets for creating drawings and then having others execute the rules to create his artwork. In Robbie's words:

You know how Sol Lewitt would lay down the rules for his drawings? He'd start it off with the rules and then other people would interpret those rules and then assemble the art. With traditional generative art you establish the code and the computer will perfectly execute that code. There is no room for interpretation. With AI, I think I am doing similar things to what Sol Lewitt was doing with writing a rule card and then having someone else interpret the rules. I'm laying down the rules in the data set that I feed the GAN, but it's not up to me because the GAN is not going to perfectly interpret those rules; otherwise, we'd get perfect nude portraits back. But we aren't, because the GAN has interpreted the rules laid down, the data set I provided, incorrectly. So I feel like I have less control than with traditional generative art. Now that we are dealing with something intelligent there is room for interpretation.

Example of rule set by artist Sol Lewitt

I pushed a little harder on Robbie's Sol Lewitt analogy, pointing out that Sol Lewitt could watch people execute his instructions and then make adjustments to the rules based on what he saw. These adjustments would then change the next execution of the rule set, and in this way he had a fair amount of control and influence on the resulting art.  I asked Robbie specifically if he had any control or predictability over the outcome of his images. Was there anything he could do to enhance it in one direction or the other? 

Yes, absolutely. First, there is what I was experimenting with over the summer when I was doing the really low-resolution portraits and landscapes. I was using data-set swapping, which I haven't really seen anybody else do. When I was training my landscape model for the first time in low res, once it was done training, I showed the discriminator these abstract paintings just very, very briefly, like, probably 400 abstract paintings vs. 14k landscape paintings. It was a very small proportion of abstract art that this thing saw, but it totally changed the outcome. I was able to generate these really cool abstract landscapes.

Also what happens with a GAN is the input for the generator is just a random high dimensional vector. In the case for my program, there is a 512 dimensional vector, which is just a fancy way of saying it is a list with 512 numbers in it. But what happens is there is this thing called latent space that emerges after you train the GAN. All the possible paintings that are possible are laid out in highly dimensional space you are feeding into the generator. But the way they are laid out isn't random, it truly makes sense. So if you want to get a similar painting to your previous painting, you can pick a point that's very close to the point for your first picture. But some of the dimensions actually mean things like color scheme. So if I had a generation that I wanted to make more colorful, I could adjust one of the dimensions. So I do have some control, but only after the fact. I can't tell the GAN to produce a specific painting, but if I find a painting I like, I can then make adjustments to it.

I'm convinced that AI art challenges us to rethink what art is and how it is made to a degree we have not experienced since Duchamp created his readymade fountain sculpture. 

Marchel Duchamp
Fountain, 1917

As the father of conceptual art, Duchamp discounted the importance of the making process and aesthetic value of art and instead emphasized the artist's concept or idea as the key element. With Fountain, he took a urinal, turned it on its side, and "created a new thought for that object," forcing us to consider if it could be art.

Artificially intelligent art flips this, not just creating a new thought for an object, but creating an object capable of doing some of the thinking and creating for us. Granted it is early and AI is mostly augmenting human creativity at this stage, I think Robbie's Nudes stand out as a watershed moment. 

So what makes Robbie's work so different from previous attempts by other artists?  In part he credits access to rare, expensive supercomputers and exposure to new technological breakthroughs in GANs:

I work at Nvidia, and they have absolutely insane GPU cluster supercomputers. It actually took me two weeks to train this on their supercomputers. I tried to do this with both the portraits and the landscapes a while ago, but I wasn't able to get it past 128 x 128 pixels' resolution. That's, like, horrifically small. But the fact that I have access to these supercomputers now and this paper that just came out in December on progressively growing of GANs really helps. It works by starting out with a really small GAN and it will grow in layers as the generator and the discriminator get better and better. That lets it generate super high-resolution stuff, but it takes super long to do it I don't think anybody outside of Nvidia has been able to train the model.

Access to the right tools helps, but I'm convinced it was equally important that they landed in the right hands to yield these groundbreaking results. For me, there is no question of Barrat's creative genius. At 18 he is already breaking ground in neural networks. His previous projects include a rapping AI trained on Kanye West lyrics and a house plant that creates art through the harnessing of electrical signals.  If you are wondering what important artists of the next generation will look like, Robbie is the model, as far as I am concerned.

Many believe we are moving into a future where all aspects of our lives are transformed by AI. If so, I believe this series of Nudes will become increasingly important as early masterpieces of AI art. Barrat plans on making his code open source and putting the training models out so that other people can learn from them. He might wait a little bit, as he admits there is a nice little period where he is the only one generating these types of images. 

I applaud his decision to go open source, but as a zealous collector of digital art, I was eager to add some of his work to my collection. Robbie graciously agreed to sell me my favorite the series of four nudes featured in this article. For those not familiar, the blockchain art market now makes it possible to by and sell digital work the same as if it were physical work. 

My good friends at startup Pixura are just a few days from launching their "SuperRare" blockchain-based market for digital art. I reached out to see if Robbie and I could be their first customers and transact ahead of the launch. They were awesome and happily obliged us. Just a few clicks later and my ownership of Robbie's digital artworks is indelibly etched onto the Ethereum blockchain where they are provably rare as an artist's edition of one.

My Robbie Barrat Nudes collection in the SuperRare UI

Should I want to sell the works at any time, there will also be a marketplace (actually, many marketplaces are launching) where other collectors of rare digital art can participate. And if I do sell the works, the smart contract is set up so that Robbie will receive a 10% royalty every time the work is sold moving forward (in addition to 100% percent of the funds from my initial purchase).  I personally believe I now own a very important part of art history, so if you are waiting for me to sell, I wouldn't HODL your breath. 

How Blockchain Will Change Photography

The world will take over 1 trillion photographs in 2018. Almost all of them will remain digital and never be printed. Blockchain enables us to provably buy, sell, trade, and destroy those digital or "virtual" photographs as if they were all physically tangible photographic prints. A step further, you can now edition each virtual photograph, producing and selling  anywhere from one to one million+ copies of each virtual photo.  Our ability to track and prove the scarcity of these virtual photos will greatly eclipse our ability to prove and track scarcity and authenticity of physical photographs and artwork. This is not a prediction, it is already happening, and virtual photos are selling for as much as $1million.     

If you are new to blockchain you may want to read one of my earlier articles on the blockchain art market. In it, I outline the basics and explain that all of art will be changed from the creation process through to consumption by the introduction of blockchain technology. But “art” is an ambiguous all-encompassing term, and not all art will be impacted by the blockchain in the same way. For example, blockchain changes photography in different ways than sculpture, painting, and other inherently physical media. I am putting a few reasons why I believe this to be true upfront.

• Most photography already starts and ends digitally.

• Photography is generally a flat medium that lends itself to presentation on screens.

• New ultra high-resolution screens designed for sharing fine art are narrowing the fidelity gap between analog and digital representation.

• Tokenization of art on the blockchain yields “editions,” a concept already well understood within photography.

• Blockchain improves the existing tools for assuring the limited nature of editions by decentralizing the information and introducing digital scarcity.

• There is a high degree of familiarity with photography as an art form, as much of the world's population has taken a digital photo on a smartphone (70% of the world population is estimated to own a smart phone by 2020).

• Digital consumption of photography has become mainstream via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

In this article we take a closer look at what makes photography uniquely suited to benefit from blockchain technology. We speak with several professionals with diverse backgrounds in the professional photography trade, including the artist behind the world's most expensive CryptoArt ($1m Forever Rose), a specialist from Christies' Photographs department, the founder of a company changing how luxury goods (including fine-art photography) are consumed, and a lawyer with expertise in artists' rights management and blockchain smart contracts.

But first, let's look at the rapid change that has occurred in photography in the last 20 years and define the core concepts of "decentralization" and "digital scarcity" as they apply the blockchain and photography.

The Digitization and Explosive Growth of Photography

Photography has gone through dramatic change in the last two decades. First, shifting from almost entirely film based to almost entirely digital.

Second, since the year 2000 the number of photos taken annually has jumped  15x from 80 billion to 1.2 trillion, an astonishing increase of 1,400%.

The near complete digitization of photography combined with the explosion in the number of photographs taken means photography represents perhaps the largest opportunity for applying blockchain to art. This has not gone unnoticed by established corporations in the photography space. 

Blockchain Solutions for Photography: Centralized vs. Decentralized

Earlier this year I wrote a short article about Kodak’s announcement that they would be issuing a "Kodak Coin" on the blockchain as part of their solution for helping photographers to manage image rights. I don't believe they will be successful, as Kodak managing blockchain-based solutions for photography would be like Bank of America managing the Bitcoin blockchain. 

This brings us to another core concept of blockchain: centralization vs. decentralization. The blockchain itself is a decentralized ledger (or list of transactions). But beyond the structure of the technology, the crypto community embraces decentralization of application governance (DApps). I would consider Kodak to be on the centralized side of this spectrum for a few reasons: 

1. Kodak is, by design, a politically centralized entity (CEO has final say in decisions).

2. Kodak requires paid registration in their paid KodakOne platform in order to leverage their image-recognition software to enforce photographic copyright.

3. Kodak limited participation in their ICO to investors that “satisfy the investor qualification requirements” which is antithetical to the spirit of blockchain.

Let's look at the Archetype.mx model to better understand what a decentralized solution looks like (vs. Kodak's more centralized model). Archetype allows anyone to create their own cryptographic tokens representing memes, art, or any kind of information imaginable (photographs, in our case). Key elements that make Archetype a decentralized solution include:

1. Archetype has no CEO or executive team. The users invest in the protocol and reap the rewards if the value goes up through usage and network effect.

2. Archetype.mx does not charge users for any of the benefits of their platform

3. Archetype's IBO (Initial Burn Offering) is not restricted based on net worth. You can participate by investing as little as 0.0000000000000000001 ETH (fractions of a penny).

By leveraging Archetype's platform, any photographer will be able to tokenize their photographs into an essentially unlimited number of editions and have trackable proof of their digital scarcity.

But what does digital scarcity mean in relation to digital editions of photographs?    

Blockchain and Photographic Editions: Physically Rare vs. Digitally Rare

Henry Fox Talbot - August, 1835
Latticed Window at Lacock Abbey
A positive from what may be the oldest existing camera negative.

Now let’s examine a second key concept, digital scarcity and physical editions vs. digital editions.

Like CryptoArt and other emerging art on the blockchain, photography was not always accepted broadly as a fine art form. Editioning photographs by artists was actually not commonplace until about the 1980s.  It is now standard practice for contemporary photographers who wish to create markets for their work.

These "editions" are typically presented in one of two formats, "limited" and "open". Limited editions provide collectors a way to purchase a provably rare physical print. With limited edition prints, the artist agrees to stop making prints after a given number are produced and the negatives are often destroyed once the edition is complete. This protects against additional editions of the photograph being released which could negatively impact the investment of the collector. The second format, open editions, simply means the print can be produced in an unlimited number. 

Until the blockchain and digital scarcity, you could not produce digitally rare editions of photographs the way you could with physical limited editions of photographic prints. One of the most important innovations in blockchain for art is that you can now treat photographs that exist only digitally as if they were physical, and create provably rare, digitally scarce editions. Two popular non-photographic examples of digital scarcity you may be familiar with are Bitcoin and CryptoKitties.  In both cases, the owner has cryptographically verifiable ownership and control over the good until it is destroyed, lost, or purchased by another owner. The important thing to understand is that this provides a new paradigm for digital goods, once infinitely copyable, to be bought and sold as if they were rare physical goods. 

Perhaps this sounds like science fiction that only a small group of CryptoCurrency enthusiasts would ever pursue? Will this idea ever catch on with the mainstream art world? Based on my conversations with folks at the major auction houses (Sothebys and Christie's), I would say it already has. Anne Bracegirdle, Christie’s  Associate Vice President of Photographs, is a blockchain enthusiast (and CryptoArt supporter) and has an optimistic view of the blockchain's potential for the photography market.

We are frequently asked about the process of editioning photographs and how we know, with certainty, that editions will not be recreated. Blockchain provides immediate, inherent answers to these questions and appears to be a natural fit for editions. Providing transparency and guaranteed security with editions would dissolve any sense of related concern from potential buyers. If secured on blockchain, all new prints offered on the market would be recorded and accessible to, theoretically, the artist’s gallery, clients, and art market professionals. These changes would be instantly visible to all, creating an organic ‘regulation’ of sorts. This transparency benefits artists too, who generally do not wish to dilute their market or inadvertently deter potential buyers.

Not only would this transparency assure buyers, it would serve everyone interacting with a particular piece – an auction house representative, dealer, the artist and owner. The more available and secure this information, the easier the piece will be to research and catalogue correctly. There will be less room for human error and uncertainty regarding the numbering process; we would also know if a particular edition is sold out. Removing doubt or confusion surrounding a potential purchase is beneficial for all parties involved and often necessary for a successful transaction. We want to empower and educate clients, to help them feel more comfortable with an inherently complicated medium and market. This is one of myriad ways blockchain can foster that empowerment within the art market, resulting in more – and more seamless – transactions.

But what does purchasing a “Digitally Rare Photograph" look like? Let's look at one of the best known examples.

Kevin Abosch's $1m "Forever Rose"

The Forever Rose by artist Kevin Abosch sold on Valentines Day for $1 million. The sale captured the headline "...The World's Most Expensive Virtual Art".

I had a chance to interview Kevin about his thoughts on the Forever Rose and the potential for blockchain and art. Kevin explained how the Forever Rose project came about, but wanted to start with his I Am A Coin project to provide the proper background. The overview of I Am A Coin according to his website:

World-renowned visual artist Kevin Abosch has created 100 physical artworks and a limited edition of 10 million virtual artworks entitled "IAMA Coin"

The physical works are stamped (using the artist's own blood) with the contract address on the Ethereum blockchain corresponding to the creation of the the 10 million virtual works (ERC-20 tokens)

In my interview with Kevin, he provided more background and detail on both the I Am A Coin project and his Forever Rose. In his words:

My I Am A Coin project really is the culmination of everything I am about: Identity, existence, value, human currency. And it's just a function of me being an artist with a bit of success and feeling a bit commodified... as I have said in the press already. And I started to imagine myself as a coin. In fact, I started looking at of all of us as coins, and wondered what that would look like, all of us as coins in the hands of the masses, and wanted to do that in some kind of elegant way. So naturally I started to look at the blockchain. And this was on the heels of months of friends of mine in tech asking, "Hey, should I do an ICO?" and I was like, "Fuck ICOs" for a number of reasons. Aside from that, there is clearly a lot of regulatory stuff happening and you do not want to be on the wrong side of that.

But still I was thinking, "I'm an artist, I'm not trying to raise money for a company, so I will tokenize myself..." and you saw how I did that - the blood, the physical work, and the virtual work of my I Am A Coin project. It has been a bit of a challenge for some people as to how an ERC20 token itself can be a piece of virtual art, or it is a placeholder for art, whichever you prefer. I think when it comes to blockchain plus art, this would be a rather extreme position.

Now that I had the background on Kevin's I Am I Coin project, I asked him to share a bit more about his Forever Rose.

So I thought about a symbol of love, and I gave in to my worst desire, which is one of my kind of exercises I do from time to time. I never thought about photographing a rose, nor did I, upon thinking about it, think that I wanted to, but that sort of negativity associated with it made me think, "Okay, I should probably do it as an exercise anyway." And then when I did it, I kind of liked it.

No photograph was ever sold. There was a token called Rose, or Forever Rose, and that token represents my picture. That token is a proxy for my picture. The same way that my photograph is a proxy for the real rose, this is a proxy of a proxy. So no photograph was sold, okay? It was a single ERC20 token that was divisible to one decimal place, in other words, ten parts. So it's ten people owning a fraction of the single token. And those tokens cannot be divisible any more because the contract says they can only be divisible by one decimal place.

After hearing this, I was no longer sure if it made sense to include the Forever Rose in an article about photography. My takeaway was that the Forever Rose was about the conceptual act of selling ten shares of a single token and not the photograph. Kevin corrected me, saying: 

Well, it is and it isn't. If you have seen the photo... first off, anyone can just download it onto their phone or their computer and look at it. It's there for them to see it if they want to. If you you've seen it once, maybe you never want to see it again, maybe it left an impression, maybe it didn't. I think it's very healthy to back off the materialism of having to posses a physical artwork -- not for everything, but at some point it is rather refreshing and healthy to untether yourself from the physical.

Kevin pointed out that he was ultimately driven to participate in the Forever Rose project as it was an opportunity to raise money for charity. The $1m went to the Coder Dojo. Coder Dojo is a charity which teaches children around the world to learn to code.  

While I like the photo of the rose just fine, I personally think the Forever Rose project is best enjoyed as a conceptual exercise. I had a great conversation with Kevin that went much deeper than the excerpt above and plan on publishing it in full. He was extremely generous with his time, and I really enjoyed his line of thinking. And in case you are wondering, Kevin still has the photograph and is considering whether he may want to sell that at some point.

Why Would a Photographer be Interested in the Blockchain?

Kate Shifman
Fog Gowanis
2014

Fine art photographer Kate Shifman reached out to me after reading one of my early articles on art and the blockchain. I liked her work, so rather than speculate on what is drawing photographers to the blockchain, I asked Kate what got her interested in blockchain and what she hoped to get out of it: 

As a photographer, the blockchain is compelling to me for the opportunities it presents in both art and commerce. The most direct benefit is, of course, access to the vast and open marketplace not subject to the artificial limitations imposed by the art world establishment and the ability for the work to be authenticated and editioned.

The idea of the artist continuing to own a part of their work post-sale is a very interesting one, as it empowers the artist like never before while shifting the bulk of the responsibility for the lifetime value of the work from the dealer to the artist. I can't tell yet whether this is a way to liberate talent or create a "hit-making machine."

In a bigger sense, blockchain enables communities to appear and thrive organically, unsanctioned by authority. This is uncharted territory for us as a society, but one thing is clear to me: as technology and politics converge in what seems to be the perfect storm of worldwide dissent and rejection of centralized power, the individual and the community rise to the forefront of social consciousness. In this new framework, photographic and other artifacts can be created and live simultaneously in the physical and digital realms being co-created/modified/sourced by engaged communities on the blockchain, presenting never-before imagined opportunities for creation, collaboration, and distribution.

Others may have different reasons, but I think Kate's response does an excellent job of elegantly encapsulating the reasons blockchain is capturing the interest and imaginations of the photographers and artists I have spoken with.

Will People Still Buy Physical Photographic Prints? 

Men on a Rooftop
René Burri, taken in San Paulo, Bra1960

Yes. In fact, we may see even more people collecting physical fine art photography prints than ever before. However, how they collect and what "ownership" means might change as a direct result of the blockchain. 

Switzerland-based company Tend provide "co-ownership of precious, special objects and unique assets," including photographs. They have recently negotiated a contract to sell several photographs by internationally renowned Magnum photographer René Burri.

I recently spoke with Tend CEO Marco Abele about Tend's model. Marco explained:

My thinking was for Tend, can we not democratize the luxury goods investment world and give it access to a much broader audience? Especially the emerging young generation who's aspiring to have something more meaningful and emotional to invest in. That's how Tend started, and we found a model where we combine having co-ownership in a certain beautiful, precious investment, but also allowing you to experience it from time to time.

It combines the two worlds of investing into something purposeful and at the same time leting you experience a bit joy out of it pretty early.

That all is managed on a new platform, which is our technology that leverages blockchain technology in the sense of personal ownership, of transparency provided by the transaction history. Of course, there is also the decentralization and lack of counter-party risk that comes along with the long-standing proposition of the blockchain. Combining the thinking of shared economy with the blockchain is, in my opinion, a very big use case. Tokenizing the assets of the world is just matching so much with what blockchain stands for and for what the consumer is driving at in terms of sharing the resources in the world.

Marco believes that the concept of ownership should be updated for a new generation of collectors who care more about experiences than in owning things (I agree with him). However, he does not believe that physical prints should always go away in the new model, as living with a beautiful print is an important part of experiencing art. So instead, Tend allows for small groups (five to 25) who are geographically co-located to invest in luxury items as a group.

For their first series, they are making four physical prints by the artist René Burri available. Tend's chief customer officer Caroline Bauden explained to me that the choice of the Swiss photographer René Burri was highly intentional.

We didn't take Burri completely by chance. Part of the reasoning was that he was Swiss and because he had recently passed away. That was in keeping with our brand and our client identity. And we have been lucky to find in our network an art advisor in Zurich, and she introduced me to the art of this photographer. I feel that it would be something very interesting for our customers.

It is important to note that tokenizing physical assets and digital assets are two entirely different things. In this case, there are four physical prints being sold to a group of co-owners that Tend plans to cap at about five people.  As Caroline explained it to me, "If you will open that to five hundred people, you have no chance to have a decent and really interesting experience for the co-owners."

Summary and Conclusion

In this article we covered several topics including:

• Summary of reasons photography is an ideal art form for blockchain

• The digitization and explosive growth of photography in the last 20 years

• The difference between centralized and decentralized solutions

• Comparison of physically rare editions vs. digitally rare editions

• Why a photographers would even be interested in the blockchain

• New ways of collecting and tokenizing physical photographic prints

What are some areas we may see additional innovation with blockchain and photography in the future? Perhaps some of the most exciting advances for photography on the blockchain will come from the blockchain side and not the photography side. Smart contracts include legal rules and repercussions for contractual agreements, but also enforce those rules and repercussions automatically with coding and cryptography.

I spoke with Cynthia Gayton, who is perfectly positioned to discuss smart contracts in relation to art. Cynthia is an attorney who teaches IP law to engineers, and once owned an art gallery. She is also a long-time blockchain enthusiast and cohosts the podcast Art on The Block Chain. Cynthia is surprised that we have not seen more innovation around smart contracts. In her words:

The contract terms haven't changed. They are pulling the old models from the industrial era into this new environment. The sky is the limit with what you can draft with a smart contract. Why are people using ideas that are obviously not beneficial to artists? This is what perplexes me. You could be doing something completely different. You could create a joint contract with an artist and the developer meeting together as equals instead of the developer dictating what the artist is doing. That is my issue with it. It's like when people write fiction. You could be writing anything, but instead you recreate facts instead of making everything brand new. Part of me thinks it is a rush to production, often with the sole goal of making money.

Part of the appeal of blockchain to me is the variety of skills required to leverage its full potential. Luckily, people like Cynthia who have legal, technical, and artistic knowledge are actively engaged and can help us to fully explore the expansive potential of blockchain for photography and all of art.

Have an interesting use of blockchain for photography that you think I should know about? Hit me up at jason@artnome.com. 

Hacking China's Most Prestigious Art Competition

The National Exhibition of Fine Arts (CNEFA) is the most prestigious government backed art competition in China. Designer Xiang Fan and computer scientist Shunshan Zhu believe they have come up with a data-driven formula to help artists hack their way into winning the contest: “Paint a young woman sitting in front of a window with a cow, enjoying a patch of sunshine.”

The formula may sound ridiculous, but the research was a very serious look at a contest run by a government with a history of keeping a tight handle on media, including artists and artwork. Of course, any art contest will be driven by the biases of the judges, but without being able to examine all of the winning work as a whole, those biases typically remain hidden. In this case, the biases reflect not just a single contest and a handful of judges, but the biases of a government that has dictated the artistic production of 20% of the world's population for the last 70 years. Many have speculated that the tight control of the Chinese government may be leading to increasingly homogeneous and formulaic submissions to the contest. The impact of this goes well beyond the contest, as the winners of the contest are instantly "canonized" and typically given high profile academic positions where they further influence the production of art in China.  As Fan described it:

When I was a child in the 1980s, my Dad hung out with some artist friends who had won this contest. I know he admires them a lot and is proud of their accomplishment. He would take me to the exhibitions with him, though he never had the intention to push me into art. Having grown up attending the exhibition with my father, I saw how prestigious the National Fine Art Exhibition is. Thirty-five years later, I visited this exhibition in 2014, and surprisingly I found that some of awarded works looked the same as the paintings I saw as a child. It was hard for me to comprehend how little things had changed, as I knew this award could mean a lot in tenure-tracking in education and pricing in the art market.

Rather than just speculate or take sides, Fan and Sam (Shunshan) took a scientific approach and let the data speak for itself.  

Fan and Sam looked at the 2,276 winning paintings from the competitions ranging from 1984 to 2014. The first contest was held in 1949, the year that communist China was founded. The 2nd through 5th contests were held in 1955, 1962, 1964, and 1980, respectively. Starting from the 6th contest, which was held in 1984, the contest is held every five years. Sam explained: 

We focused on the awarded works from 1984 (6th) to 2014 (12th). The reason is that from the 1st to the 5th, either there is lack of information for the paintings, or we could only find catalogues in black and white, or the awarded works could not even be called art.

There was no list online of winning submissions, so the duo resorted to the arduous task of locating printed material in university libraries to track down the winning entries.

Once the source material was gathered, they manually tagged all the works to create a database that includes the artist, the name of the work, the dimensions, location created, color, and subject matter. Subject matter tags included things like “woman,” “soldier,” “landscape,” “still life,” etc.

Though many suspected that the winning artworks in the contest were becoming increasingly homogeneous, the scale of the contest made it difficult for anyone to know for sure. For example, there were over 500 winning artworks in the 2014 contest alone. In order to really find any visual trends, Fan and Sam needed to develop a custom tool that would let them see all the works at once and filter those works using different criteria. Inspired by media theorist Lev Manovich and his project imageplot, the team set about building their own custom tool for analysis.

Sam, a computer scientist, developed the interface they later named "AwardPuzzle" using Processing 2.2.1. "We used its Java mode to build the standalone versions for Windows and MAC boxes, and used the JavaScript mode to build the web versions for browsers running on desktops or mobile devices. Basically, the programming language was Java, JavaScript, and HTML."

Sam explained that before they started the project,  they were thinking about questions like: "Will artworks with brighter colors be more likely to win?"
"Do larger works have a better shot at winning?" "Does certain subject matter improve odds of winning?" While the tool helped them explore those questions, it also unlocked many new questions. 

"We found new questions like 'How can some artists win multiple times for artwork that looks very similar to their previous submissions?'"  Fan, a highly talented information designer, was not surprised by the discovery of new questions through visualization and quoted designer Ben Schneiderman, saying “visualizations give you answers to questions you didn't know you had.” 

Below are some of the artworks Fan and Sam discovered that won multiple prizes (in some cases in the same year) despite being remarkably similar.

Zhanfeng Wei
In Front of Exam Hall - My Chinese Dream, 12th, 2014

Zhanfeng Wei
In Front of Exam Hall #1 - My Chinese Dream, 12th, 2014

The two nearly identical paintings above were both painted by the artist Zhanfeng Wei and both won a prize in the same year of the contest, 2014. All Artists are of course known for repeating themes in their work, but getting two awards in the same year for nearly identical subject matter seems a little strange.

Yue Liao
Noon, 9th, 1999

Yue Liao
Newborn Calf, 10th, 2004

Artist Yue Liao won for the painting Noon in 1999 and then again for a nearly identical painting titled Newborn Calf, submitted just five years later. I suppose if Damien Hirst can have over 1,000 spot paintings and Richard Prince has his Nurse series, why shouldn't Yue Liao be allowed a Calf  series? In all seriousness, this feels more like an oversight by the judges to me than the artistic exploration of a theme; in this case, a cow. If it were the only oversight, it might be comical, but many pairs like this pop up throughout the contest results.

Looking across the winning entries through Fan and Sam's interface also makes it apparent that the subject matter across all the entries rarely departs from realist paintings of farming, military, and domestic scenes. These themes played heavily in the Socialist Realism period of Chinese art, when artists were told what they could and could not paint. Apparently the themes have stuck.  Fan points out the irony of the farming theme given China's rapid urbanization starting in 1985. 

Yaoyi Shen
Zunyi Conference, 9th, 1999

Yaoyi Shen
Zunyi Conference, 11th, 2009

With artist Yaoyi Shen, we see two paintings that share the same theme, some of the same figures in the same poses, and in this case even the same title, Zunyi Conference.  These two winning entries are particularly bold as they are two of the largest paintings to win the contest. One would assume that someone could recall the 1999 version ten years later in 2009 when the second painting won. But then again, perhaps due to the large number of similar paintings submitted each year, they all start to blend together. It would appear that Fan's casual observation that not much has changed in 30 years of the contest is supported by the data and information made available by the team's clever interface.

Their are a great many more insights that can be found via Fan and Sam's AwardPuzzle interface, from geographic trends to a propensity to lighter colors and use of reds and yellows.

Winning Entries seperated by brightness and hue

Winning entries sorted by geography of submission

Sorting artists by number of times they won the contest

Fan and Sam ultimately decided the best way to share their insights was to make the tool publicly available so that others could make these connections on their own and see for themselves what drives the winning entries. You can also watch a demo video they created to explain the interface below. If you are able to identify other trends using their tool, let us know, we'd love to hear them. 

Interview With Artist Moxarra Gonzalez

Last summer when Artnome was featured in Oliver Roeder's excellent article in FiveThirtyEight, I briefly received a cavalcade of email inquiries. One stood out among them all. The email had the subject line "An Email From Your Next Artnome Intern" from Kaesha Freyaldenhoven. I was drawn in by her chutzpah, and I was rewarded for my instincts.

I explained to her on our first call that I had no money to pay an intern. Undeterred, she applied for a grant, and won her own funding to subsidize her support of Artnome and the Artnome database. As a third-year student at University of Chicago, Kaesha did a summer internship with Goldman Sachs as a  "private wealth management global summer analyst" where she excelled. Yet she chose to follow her heart and pursue art history. 

I couldn't be more proud to have her on my team. When it came time to interview my favorite "crypto" artist, Moxarra Gonzalez,  who lives in Mexico City and speaks Spanish as his first language, I reached out without hesitation to Kaesha, who speaks fluent Spanish, to run the interview. This is just one of many contributions from Kaesha to date and hopefully just one of many more to come! 

One last note, Moxarra works in a wide variety of materials and subject matter. In this interview, we primarily focus on his work done in the Dada.nyc platform. Be sure to check out the rest of his work by following him on Twitter @moxarra, Instagram, and Facebook. And now for the interview:

K: Hi Moxarra, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me! Jason and I have been very excited to do this interview with you!

M: Oh, thank you. And likewise.

K: We are looking forward to learning more about you, your practice, and how blockchain plays into your day-to-day as an artist. So first thing’s first -- is Moxarra your real name?

M: No, it isn’t! Moxarra (pronounced “Mo - ha - ra”) is my nickname. Mojarra is a kind of tuna fish in Spanish. My brother gave me this nickname. He is Moxarra, Sr., while I am now Moxarra, Jr. He lives in San Luis Potosí and I see him and my family when I'm on vacation. My name is Carlos González, but I really only go by Moxarra. I am 37 years old and from San Luis Potosí, but currently living in Mexico City. I studied visual arts at the UANL (Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León).

Moxarra
Artists Deserve More
NFS
Created at Dada.nyc

K: Ah, okay, that makes much more sense. Moxarra it is! We are so grateful to Dada.nyc because through the platform, we were able to access your work! How did you first get involved with Dada.nyc?

M: Well, one day I was on Facebook and there was an ad. I never pay attention to those Facebook ads, but it was just what I was looking for!  So I clicked. It was the only time I have ever made a “let’s see what this is all about” click. It was an opportunity for me to draw collaboratively and immediately! I liked the idea. I have now been on Dada for around three years. We all have to thank Bea Ramos and her crew for making the site possible. It’s a really, really cool place to draw with so many different and creative people.

Moxarra
Creeps & Weirdos #83489
1 of 150
Created at Dada.nyc

K: Three years is quite a long time! Could you tell us more about what is it like to be affiliated with such a community of artists?

M: Yes. Everyone on the platform is very creative! We often congratulate each other on the works. I have not met any of the artists in person yet; however, we communicate via Hangouts, Twitter, or email quite frequently. There are many artists from South America, too. We have spoken with Bea on Hangouts calls to have discussions and give her feedback on the page. We talk about how we perceive the page and what we would change. Then, changes are made.

K: Got it. How neat.! Now, blockchain seems to be quite an important part of Dada.nyc. Is there a word for blockchain in Spanish?

M: Hahaha, nope! No word - we just say blockchain also.

K: Okay, okay. So let’s talk blockchain. How does the blockchain aspect of Dada.nyc affect you as an artist?

M:  The blockchain part of Dada.nyc affects us all in a very positive way! It promotes us and helps us to understand how the crypto market is going to be hopefully the next big thing. It is great. Blockchain allows for artists to get their art out there and get an income.

K: Definitely. I feel very excited to hear that, especially considering there was not really a market for digital art from a traditional standpoint. What are your thoughts as an early innovator on the the potential of platforms like Dada.nyc to help artists like you get paid for their work?

M: Well, we all hope that blockchain continues to explode and that this market will continue to create opportunities for new artists. In New York there was a conference called RARE AF. There were very important people at this conference discussing the artistic establishment and the crypto movement. They are the innovators. While I am super hyped about this digital art market, I couldn’t call myself an innovator. I'm just a player in the game. I like this game a lot! The work of Dada.nyc is opening the public's eyes to the digital art scene and Dada must take credit! I hope that blockchain will allow the price of digital works to continue going up and up and up…

K: Oh yeah, I really couldn’t agree more!  We are definitely on the same page about promoting digital art. Jason is a huge fan of your work and was excited to feature it in several of the Artnome articles. Have you had any people reach out as a result of the exposure you have received from either Dada.nyc or Artnome?

Moxarra
Creeps & Weirdos #89553
44 out of 200
Created at Dada.nyc

M: I think they have given me good publicity! I have seen the results in my social media followers. A lot of crypto-related people have been adding me. I think this is due to the collaboration we have had this last month.

K: How great to hear! What advice do you have for digital artists who are just starting out and would like to get their work out in front of more people?

M: My advice to all emerging artists is to draw, draw, draw and never lose faith in what you do. The Dada.nyc platform is a great way to start showing the world what you can and love to do.

K: You hear that, artists? Continue drawing! Speaking on behalf of Artnome, we hope that artists will read these articles and feel inspired by your story. Do you have any predictions on where the digital art market is going?

M: My predictions are aligned with the rest. We hope that the market goes up and finds its stability, as any other market. I hope that it continues to become more mainstream. But ultimately it is the collectors who are the "holy cows" of the art market. They will dictate what is valuable and what is not. So, let’s just wait and see!

K: Hint, hint, art collectors! If you were to describe the new aesthetic around “CryptoArt" or “digital art” in a few words, what words would you use?

M: About the aesthetic of cryptoart… I think it’s a new aesthetic that will have an impact in a lot of art circles… Images are flat and direct with non-gradient colors. It is a very in-your-face type of art. I think the most exciting aspect is that the works are connected to memes. I would have never expected that there would be art around memes! And I had no idea that I would ever be a part of that! Memes are used daily, in all of the chats. Now that the consumer market exists, we are thrilled. I think the whole world is hoping for this!

Moxarra
Untitled
NFS
Created at Dada.nyc

K: Could you tell me a little bit about how you first became exposed to the arts?

M: Sure. Growing up, I always spent my free time drawing. My mom was always drawing and painting. She also had a huge collection of art books, encyclopedias, and biographies at home. I knew very early that I wanted to pursue the arts in higher education, so I studied at UANL to get a broad understanding of visual arts. This was when I really began to love painting with oil and acrylic. Now, my techniques vary. In my physical works, I use whatever I want to throw in: oil, acrylic, pencil, pen, markers, watercolor, textures, even coffee on paper, wood, canvas… or sometimes just doodles in my notebook. Paper and pencil will always be the easiest; however, I have also become more interested in digital drawing. Sometimes I also create things physically, take pictures, and integrate these works with digital media. I am really new to digital art - I was introduced to digital techniques in 2007 or 2008 while working as an illustrator with a newspaper in San Luis. Now I have a career as a freelance designer.

K: From pencil and paper to digital media, you have really kept up with the trends within the art world! And with bitcoin and Dada.nyc, your projects are cutting edge. Jason and I have perused your online portfolio. We are really interested in your artistic practice. How do you go about first starting a piece?

M: Ah, I don’t know. About the conceptualization of my figures… I don’t think about them much. They just come off my head to my hand as if they were my doodles. If I am making a portrait or a realistic scene, well, sometimes I use a photo as a reference and then add or subtract elements in the background. I just play a little bit with the forms until I am happy with the outcome! My goal is always aesthetic.

K: How interesting. We have noticed that your colors are very bright. Where do these color choices come from?

Moxarra
Creeps & Weirdos #87586
192 out of 200
Created at Dada.nyc

M: The palette is centered around a few key themes. I love using vibrant colors. Sometimes I will create using the previous palette to follow the exquisite corpse technique, which is how we create images on Dada.nyc.

K: I don’t know much about this technique. What is it?

M: The exquisite corpse is a way to build on the works of other artists. This technique can be used when one artist draws a picture and then the next artist continues, passing on the picture to another artist. This leads to a string of creation. Sometimes I will take the palette from another artist and continue in that fashion. I also studied prints in Mexico. Then I had to work with the CMYK color model. These primary colors resonated with me.

K: What a neat technique. I just did a quick Google search and I’m seeing that quite a few Surrealist artists used this technique. In addition to the Surrealist practices, do you feel as though other art movements have strongly influenced CryptoArt or your art particularly?

Moxarra
Jackson Pollock
NFS
Created at Dada.nyc

M: Well, I like all the Renaissance artists, but especially Leonardo da Vinci. Also, Joel Peter Witkin, Marcel Duchamp, Velázquez, Matthew Barney, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Warhol, Basquiat, Lichtenstein, Sylvia Ji, Natalia Fabia... I really loved the combo of Aiana Udesen, Matt Furie, and Albert Reyes…. I like figurative artists as well as more modern artists. Warhol once mentioned that he could create a screen print each day. So at one point, I decided I would make my own oil paint daily! But now… I don’t think so. That was exhausting!

I think that my time working for the newspaper in Mexico strongly influenced the dark imagery in my work. With the newspaper, I was exposed to a lot of violent crime, robberies, and murders. Daily news stories were quite gruesome. Organized crime also has a very strong presence in our country. Hearing about these things impacted my work. Have you seen Breaking Bad?

Moxarra
Creeps & Weirdos #81908
137 of 200
Created at Dada.nyc

K: No, I haven’t!

M: Okay. Well, it is kind of like Breaking Bad, but not that intense. I do not want to color your perception so that you view Mexico negatively… Of course, not all of Mexico is like this. But interesting stories definitely happen, as in any other country.

The culture of the dead is also very important here in Mexico. From candy skulls to colors, I really like this theme, so I integrate it into my art.

K: Oh, just like Dia de los Muertos?

M: Exactly!

K: I went to a dual-immersion English/Spanish school where we celebrated Día de los Muertos every year. I thought I recognized those themes in your work! 

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share your stories and experiences with us. We greatly appreciate your time.

M: Thanks to you, too.

Blockchain Artists Wanted

*The article below is still relevant but a little out of date. Read this newer article if you want to learn how to tokenize your art and launch your own blockchain marketplace.

I created the GIF below in less than an hour. I then uploaded it to the Rare Pepe Wallet for review by the Rare Pepe Scientists (who publicly disavow the alt-right) and forgot about it for a week. When I checked back less than a week later, I had made $800 in sales by selling 25 copies. If I sell all 100 copies at that same price, I will make $3,200 dollars on a single meme. That’s more money than I have made selling art in 40 years.

Anyone can submit work to the Rare Pepe Wallet. The organization will take zero commission from you, the artist. There are opportunities for literally every artist of every skill level (creating pretty much any subject matter) to earn money on the blockchain. I know it sounds like a load of ridiculousness, but I’d suggest you read the rest of the article before dismissing this as "too good to be true."

Curio Cards Wants to Sell Your Art and Give You 100% of the Proceeds. Yes, YOU.

Cryptograffiti
BTC
Edition of 2000

Daniel Friedman
Edition of 300

Travis Uhrig is the founder of Curio Cards and he organizes the Bitcoin meetup group in San Francisco, which boasts over 6,000 members. He has a background in science and business and has worked as a system administrator at an environmental non-profit: "Nothing to do with crypto at all," as Travis says. Then in May, he quit his job altogether to become full-time crypto. This is around the same time that he launched the first set of Curio Cards. Curio Card's mission is to create a platform for artists and collectors that finally benefits artists. As it states on their website: "Until now it's not been possible to sell digital artwork without massive fees, theft, or restrictive DRM." Curio Cards is changing that. The project is doing phenomenally well, with over a thousand cards sold and artists making on average $300 - $900, according to Uhrig. Any artist can submit their work for free to be voted on at community.curio.cards. So why do this? According to Travis:

"Crypto needs artists, is my sense. Everyone always says that bitcoin is too complicated to explain to people, but you'll look at subcultures -- hip hop, hipster -- all these different groups, they have very complex rules of engagement, very complex rules of etiquette, and not everyone understands them -- and it's just fine because musicians and artists and writers and reporters have explained them to us. I think that's what Bitcoin needs. It needs artists to help explain the culture and help define it. So I really liked the idea of creating a project that can get people that don't have any Bitcoin, don't have Ethereum, don't know anything about it, but they're really talented, and it’s a way for them to get involved."

Travis’ long term goal is for the entire project to be decentralized so that the community selects the art and moderates itself. Travis’ biggest problem right now? He needs more artists.

"I want to open up the selection. I don't want to be curating anymore. I want to let the community decide which artists are included, which is why it is very important to me that we get the word out because I want to get as many artists as possible to submit their work.

"I don’t think that you should have to have crypto. That’s a big part with what we do. That's why we don’t charge the artist, because I can say, 'Hey, we'll create cards for you,' but it costs -- say it costs me $60 in Ethereum fees to make the cards. It would make sense for me to tell the artist to pay me $60 in Ethereum and pay your fees, right? But we don't do that. We just cover the fees for them because I want to have artists that don't even have Ethereum, who don’t know how to do that – this is how they get their Ethereum, by selling their cards

"I think once the word gets out, they’ll start to understand, because artists are willing to experiment and try new things in pretty much any other field. So once they’re aware of it, I'm offering them a free way to get their stuff turned into an Ethereum asset. That's how we can get some cool submissions. We need to get the word out to artists."

Travis and Curio Cards are not the only people who want to sell your art for you and give you all the proceeds. 

Archetype.mx Will Tokenize Your Memes in Five Minutes or Less. Join Their Bounty Program.

Sapan
Hodling Memes Together
2018

Archetype will allow anyone to create their own cryptographic tokens representing memes or any kind of information imaginable -- in five minutes or less.  Co-founder Jason Rosenstein explained to me that:

"We take nothing. The power is totally in the artist's hands. They simply drag and drop their digital art, they name it something, they write their own description, and they issue out whatever quantity they want. It could be one trillion copies, one trillion prints if they wanted to, and they send it directly to their decentralized address.

Sapan
Pro MGE
https://www.reddit.com/r/Archetype_mx/comments/7mhnai/pro_meme_generation_engine/

Marissa Roer
Arch to Triumph
https://www.reddit.com/r/Archetype_mx/comments/7k09mp/arch_to_triumph/

I am really excited about Archetype's technology and its potential for artists, as it seems to be one of the most decentralized platforms at the moment. They are focusing on memes as their primary vertical for launch, but will move quickly to art, and eventually even tokenizing ideas. At the time of this writing, Archetype.mx was still 19 days away from their IBO (initial burn offering). But in the meantime, anyone can take part in their bounty program. They are rewarding meme creators who make dank memes about Archetype and share them on social media. "1,000 ARX for making a meme with baseline dankness. Bonuses available if it goes viral." 

I asked Jason to share more about the bounty program.

"So we're doing some brainstorming, and we had a pretty cool idea to start the network effect by asking people in Telegram to make memes about Archetype; to make rare digital art about Archetype. And we started issuing out, at the very beginning, the equivalent of $40 worth of ARX tokens for every single piece made, no questions asked. That quickly exploded and we were getting hundreds of submissions in, and we had to put it down to 5,000 ARX bounty which was equivalent to $20, and the submissions kept coming in to the point where today we are offering 1,000 ARX, which is $4, and we've gotten almost 500 submissions now.

No Talent? No Problem! Slothicorn is Universal Basic Income for People that Make Shitty GIFs.

"I will upvote you one dollar for that shitty GIF you made, because you made it. We can’t all be geniuses, we can’t all be Picasso and shit. Most of us suck, I mean, let’s get real.

- Stellabelle

Stellabelle from Slothicorn champions artists at a level that I aspire to someday reach. She is a former starving artist who, like me, has lots of starving artist friends. Stellabelle was able to escape the 9:00 to 5:00 primarily by becoming a writer on Steamit, a social media platform where "everyone gets paid for creating and curating content." The Steemit platform "leverages a robust digital points system (Steem) for digital rewards." Stellabelle's goal? To make cryptocurrency go mainstream through art that is creative commons while helping to build a UBI (universal basic income).  Why shitty memes? Because Stellabelle wants Slothicorn to have an on-ramp allowing people to start with no skills and grow their skills over time. We all start somewhere, and most of us kinda stink in the beginning. Stella outlined her goals in a recent interview with David Pakman this way: 

First: "People don't understand cryptocurrency. They get a little afraid when they hear the word 'crypto'... ...so I thought, 'Let's create cryptogames and let's create CryptoArt that soften the edge behind 'CryptoCurrency.'

Second: "I am a real firm, big believer in open-source technology and creative commons. I feel like it holds us back when we are all like, 'My copyright, my copyright, you can't use that.' I'm a creator, other people who are creators, we want to create. That's the number one thing. I don't mind sharing my work.

Third: "There are tons of starving artists. I used to be one of them. A lot of my friends are starving artists. They can't do other work -- they are creative, they are weird, and some of them are really messed up. They are just messed up because they have been forced to do other 9:00-to-5:00 job because they can't make ends meet. This has to end.

Fourth: "I also understand there are a lot of people that are not the best artists. There are new people that are exploring their creativity. We have a solution for them, as well. It's called "Universal Basic Income for People Who Make Shitty GIFs"... ...I want to at least give people a dollar for making a GIF and using their creativity instead of just being a consumer of information and thinking of themselves as not creative.

What is the Mission of Slothicorn?
By Stellabelle

You can connect with Slothicorn on their Dischord channel @slothicorn and you can start earning Steem today. There are two rules: first, you must put a creative commons license at the end of your post, and second, the topic of the meme has to be related to cryptocurrency. Stellabelle hopes to extend this to writing in the near future.

No Art Supplies or Fancy Design Software? Dada.nyc Has You Covered! 

My less-than-awesome drawing of my puppy Frida

Dada.nyc is a social network for artists where conversations happen visually. Thousands of artists have participated in creating tens of thousands of drawings. Founder Beatriz Helena Ramos (Bea) and her team believe everyone is an artist, and they supply the tools on their site to create digital art for free. They have now made some of that art available for sale via the blockchain, which helps keep the project going and supports the artists.

The tools are quite simple -- but lest you think they are too limited to create what most people would consider academic or traditionally modeled drawings, check out Raul Avila's rendering below. My dad is a big John Singer Sargent fan, so I grew up looking at a lot of his work. My subconscious made the connection when I saw Raul's study, which I believe to be inspired by John Singer Sargent's 1900 Portrait of Dorothy Williamson, but I have not confirmed.

Raul Avila
Study
Pixels on screen
Created using free tools on Dada.nyc

John Singer Sargent
Portrait of Dorothy Williamson
1900
Oil on canvas

The fact that it was rendered with a simple set of digital tools makes it that much more impressive. But no need to be intimidated by the most traditionally talented artists on the site -- it is a large and welcoming community that focuses on expression. Bea believes that it is important for everyone to draw and be creative -- we are all artists. The video below is Bea's presentation from The Rare Digital Art festival (thanks to Artnome friend Tommy Nicholas and Rare Art Labs for making the video publicly available). 

Is Blockchain Creating an Art Renaissance, or Perhaps the World's First Artist Shortage?

I do think there is something amazing happening here that is quite unprecidented. When was the last time you saw a large group of savvy technologists leaving jobs with healthy salaries to compete with each other for the attention and skills of artists? I am not sure it has ever happened. My hope is that this will be a renaissance, or more likely, a period akin to the WPA (Works Progress Administration) of the late 1930s early 1940s. The WPA hired hundreds of artists who created tens of thousands of paintings, murals, and sculptures. Many of the 20th century's most important artists were employed by the WPA including Berenice Abbot, Mark Rothko, Thomas Hart Benson, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Ben Shan and many others. Perhaps the blockchain will be our WPA, with so many thoughtful people tackling different approaches to helping artists of all abilities to get recognition and payment for their work.

I am highly optimistic. Maybe I sound a bit too naive and altruistic, but I am not the only one who believes artists will become increasingly valuable and high in demand. Jack Ma, Chinese business magnate and Founder and CEO of Alibaba warns that we cannot compete with machines and robots based on knowledge. Instead, he suggests that we focus on, among other things, painting and art -- areas that we will always have an advantage over machines. 

If Jack is right and we need to train an army of artists to compete with the machines and robots in the future, the training could very well start on the blockchain-based platforms discussed in this blog post and the many others popping up every day.

I will conclude by saying I actually think the blockchain technology behind many of these projects will not be the primary driver of success; it will be the popularity amongst artists and the speed of adoption. The platforms that already have thriving creative communities have a head start and are likely to perform well in the long run. If you are an artist, my advice to you would be to pick one or a few and give them a shot! 

If you are interested in learning more about art on the blockchain check out my podcast, "Dank Rares" where I interview the pioneers in the blockchain art world. You can find it here on Soundcloud and you can also subscribe on iTunes here.

Jess Houlgrave and the Codex Protocol

Just a few short months ago there were quite literally just a handful of people with experience and knowledge of both blockchain and the traditional art market. Jess Houlgrave, Co-founder & COO at Codex Protocol, was so far ahead of the curve on this front that the curve did not exist yet when she began her exploration.  

I met Jess briefly at the Rare Digital Art Festival in NYC a few weeks ago, but had been following her research for a few months. I caught up with her for an interview to learn more about her unique background and the roadmap for the Codex Protocol. Codex is a blockchain based decentralized title registry for Art & Collectibles. 

This interview goes deep into the details of the Codex Protocol and Houlgrave's thoughts on blockchain and the art market. I like including longer form interviews like this on Artnome as more space is sometimes required to go deeper into a subject and to avoid repeatedly covering the same intro-level territory. That said, if you are short on time, you can read a short high-level overview of Codex Protocol in my post titled "Why Use Blockchain for Provenance". If you are completely new to the topic of blockchain I'd recommend starting with the article "The Blockchain Art Market is Here".

Jason: Hi, this is Jason.

Jess: Hi Jason. It's Jess here. How are you?

Jason: Good. How are you doing?

Jess: I'm good. Thank you.

Jason: I'm excited to continue our conversation. I did a little research on Codex Protocol before our call, it looks like you've been around in a quasi-stealth mode since about November of last year? Is that right?

Jess: Yes. So we've really been working on this full time since September. So yeah, kind of quasi in stealth mode. We haven't been hiding it particularly, but we haven't been publicizing it. We really wanted to make sure that we have everything in place and ready to go. We thought that at the beginning of this year there were some great events and things were really picking up, so we felt it was a good time to make that announcement and go out.

Jason: That's great. So I'd like to start a little bit with your personal background. I've been researching the intersection of data, technology, and art for a couple of years now. You seem to be one of the few people I've run into that has a solid footing in both the art market and blockchain, and with a finance background as well? To me, it looks like you were maybe a year or so ahead on the blockchain thing when you were going to school at Sotheby's. Not as many people were talking about it -- so maybe share a little bit of your pre-Sotheby's background, what led you to go to school at the Sotheby's Institute, and then how you brought blockchain into the mix?  

Jess: Sure. So you're right. My early background was really in finance. I did an MA in economics and management at Oxford for my undergraduate degree. Then I joined Credit Suisse in the investment banking team, and then I spent three years managing a portfolio for a Canadian pension fund. In kind of early 2016, I really wanted to do something a little bit different. I wanted a break from working in finance, and art has been a very long-standing passion of mine. I like collecting works. I like producing works. I work with a charity in London which provides creative opportunities for young people in disadvantaged areas. And so art has always been very important to me.

I have a lot of friends who are artists or gallerists or involved in the arts in some way, and so my desire to do something a bit more entrepreneurial led me to going to Sotheby's Institute to do another master’s degree. And I really wanted to expand from just having general interest in art to thinking about moving in that direction from a career perspective. At the same time, a really good friend of mine -- an old friend from university -- was heavily involved in blockchain and crypto. He was running a fund and investing, and he's a developer, as well, so I was spending a lot of time discussing blockchain. Through that, really, and through trying to just learn more about the fundamentals of the technology, I noticed that actually there was a huge opportunity within the art world for blockchain, and so I decided that that was what I would write about for my thesis.

You're right. It was very early and we had the competition of like who can supervise this because no one had really written about art and blockchain. There were -- what I thought when I started the research -- just maybe like five or six projects happening, and so I went ahead and actually found that there were a lot more than five or six that were -- there were a whole load. And so I spent the best part of a year really just researching and writing about the various applications of blockchain for art.

Jason: Very cool. That's an interesting background. I've only discovered blockchain fairly recently and I sort of stumbled in at a time when the world seems really hungry for information on it. So I think you've timed it well in terms of being on the cutting edge of something that there's a lot of interest and hunger for more knowledge around.

Jess: Yes, it's definitely growing at the moment and a lot of people seem really excited about it, which I think is great as the the first step to really making things happen.

Jason: Yeah, for sure. So I took a look at the website and read up a little bit on the LinkedIn page about Codex Protocol. It looks to me like you're solving several problems, and starting with two out of the many that can be solved. It'd be helpful if you gave maybe just a high-level elevator pitch and a little bit of a high-level overview of the problems that you're solving and the technology that you're introducing.

Jess: Sure. So essentially Codex Protocol is designed as industry infrastructure for art and collectibles. So it's fine wine, classic cars, jewelry, fine art, anything else that sort of fits into that category of items. And the really distinct thing about this category is the primary value driver is provenance information. It's the ownership, the identity of the object, the authenticity of the object, where it's been shown, all of those things that kind of contribute to the identity is a really big important value driver. And at the moment in the industry, a lot of that information isn't really held in any one place. It's very hard to access, it's very hard to research. And without it, that makes doing a whole load of other things, like insuring items or lending against items, very difficult.

So what we want to build is really the infrastructure that the entire ecosystem can use. So Codex becomes a decentralized kind of title registry and store of provenance information for objects. And it's designed to be open source so that anybody will be up to build on it. We are building the first couple of applications and we have ideas for lots more, but we really want to do this in conjunction with the industry to make sure that what we're building is useful to them, and also, if there’s other people who want to build things on top of the Codex, it will help them and encourage them to do so. And as part of our fundraising, we're trying to make sure that we have enough funding that we can not only build the applications that we want to build, but actually support people financially to build on top of this, as well.

Jason: That's fascinating. So the model, then, is to build out a technology, and then anybody from an auction house to a gallery to a collector could use the platform to identify provenance for their given collectible or artwork. Would they also be contributing? So when it comes to the blockchain, obviously you and I share a great love and passion for blockchain technology, but without data, it's not particularly interesting, right? So does the model that Codex Protocol will be supplying provide a lot of the provenance information? Or by keeping it open, will others be contributing with Codex Protocol as sort of a central repository? Or will people sort of have their own equivalent to like a private cloud but on the blockchain? I'm curious to hear a little bit more about that.

Jess: So the technology itself is decentralized, which means that the information isn't held by any one third party. That's one of the great things about blockchain, and that's why it's really exciting for Codex Protocol, because for the first time we can store information without the need to trust a third party. Collectors for a long time haven't been willing to trust a centralized third party with information about the works that they hold, but knowing that it's decentralized and that there’s privacy involved, you can have your provenance of your works stored on the blockchain without having to disclose your identity to anybody. It's really exciting and that's really the key development here in terms of blockchain.

So we create a non-fungible token -- an ERC721 token -- which represents the item, and then to the item we can store metadata. The data itself isn't stored on the blockchain -- that will be stored off-chain, but there will be a link so that any provenance information that's attached can be uploaded and linked to the token that represents the item. So Codex itself isn't designed to provide that provenance information. The ecosystem as a whole already has great ways of finding out provenance and of checking and verifying provenance, but the problem is that research is done sometimes for one piece of art and then the next time it sells, that provenance hasn't stayed with the art. So you can imagine a piece that goes through an auction house and people spend a lot of time researching it, they spend a lot of time collecting data -- a lot of that data is just things like paper receipts and old catalog exhibition notes which then sometimes get lost from the item, and two or three sales down the line, you don't have any of that provenance to back it up. And as a collector, having that would actually help you preserve value. So all of those pieces of information, those receipts, can actually now be stored in a digital way so that they are stored on the blockchain.

Jason: Great. That's really helpful. So to me that sounds like it's assisting them from here forward, right? So you'll create an inventory of artworks and wine and collectibles which will all have their own token, and then as those works have a life moving forward, all of the provenance documentation associated with them can be centrally stored and trusted because it's decentralized. Are you looking to tap into historical information to add, as well?

Jess: Sure. Firstly, nothing is centrally stored. Everything is stored decentrally, which is really important because the art market is hundreds of years old and will continue to go for hundreds of years, and in the absence of me and my co-founders, if something is centralized, who's who and who runs this and who keeps this information, and so it's really important that it is just decentralized. Nothing is held centrally, and in the absence of us, Codex would still continue to exist.

And to the second point, which is around historical information, we would really like people to put historical information on the blockchain, and that's not in a way that we're trying to verify that information, but we're just trying to make sure that it's there. At the moment, as a buyer of a work, if you're doing research, you have to go and find those pieces of paper and you make a judgment call over what information those pieces of paper provide you and whether or not you're satisfied by them. We can't go back in time and verify provenance information historically, but we can still make sure that that information is in the data, so that as a buyer or as an owner of an object, you can still have that data. You need make a call on the value that you attribute to it, but there’s no reason we can't include that in the metadata. It's just, it's there for people to use rather than being a sort of a stamp of authentication or a verified historical record, if that makes sense.

Jason: No, it makes perfect sense. So I've spent the last three years trying to gather catalogue raisonné and trying to digitize them to build this sort of mammoth singular analytical catalogue raisonné database. So I talked to a lot of folks in the catalogue raisonné space, and I know that there is a problem where, let's say, there are certain galleries that put out catalogues raisonné for artists whose work they're selling. Maybe a conflict of interest, or there could be five catalogues raisonné that are conflicting for the same artist. So I see that as a problem of having a single authority or a handful of authorities that are deciding officially what artworks are in and which ones are out. So by decentralizing it, it seems like you would open it up so that everybody has the ability to look and see when things are changed. But how, if at all, do you limit or decide who can change the information on the blockchain? 

Jess: So it's open source, which means that in practice, anybody can make a change. You wouldn't be able to change a token that you didn't own. As the owner of a token, you will be able to give the ability to make an amendment to somebody else. We have an advisor, Abe Othman, who's a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon. He specializes in reputation systems and incentive systems. So at the moment, the status quo is that most collectors are really happy buying from well-known galleries. Collectors make a judgment call over what they're willing to buy, what they're willing to trust, especially when dealing with the ones that are less well known. We don't see that really changing because that's sort of the nature of the market, and we're not trying to dictate who can and cannot do things. This is designed for everybody to be able to use.

But what we are trying to do is to look at reputation as a tool that could be really helpful in the way that it can then help buyers evaluate the kind of the entity or the intermediary. So it's actually just providing you with more information to help collectors make judgment calls.

Jason: Got it. Okay. So here's an overly simplified question -- and sorry if I don't have this part down -- so who would own the token? Let's say I bought a print by Picasso or something like that and there’s a token out there that exists for it and I want to update the provenance. Do you then identify and recognize me as the owner and issue me access to the token? Or anyone can claim access to the token? Because it sounds like you would need ownership of the token in order to update the provenance, but I'm not really clear on that point.

Jess: Right. So at the moment, we think that most of the tokens, which represent works -- the non-tangible tokens -- will be created through our auction house partners. That's "Biddable," the first application, and we think that most things in the short term will be created by them. That may well follow with a lot of other applications. We'll have galleries or artists or anybody else to create titles. But if you just imagine a single piece, when it goes through one of the auction houses in our consortium, they create a token which represents that work. They can then transfer that token to the person who owns the artwork. That doesn't mean, though, that your identity has to be revealed because essentially you just hold that token in a wallet and you don't need to disclose that that would belongs to you, if that makes sense.

Jason: It does, and I see that as a huge part of the value. There are a lot of people that perhaps wouldn't mind sharing that information about the whereabouts and buying and selling of artworks for art historical purposes, but they want to protect their personal identity. So I see that in the CryptoArt world where maybe people are making some artwork that's a little over the top and they don't necessarily want to tie it back to who they are in real life, but they want to be able to monetize it. So it's a similar process and it seems like a great opportunity.

So if I look at something like Ascribe or Verisart, my understanding of those business models is that they're really trying to work at the ground level with artists who are producing works now to create tokens. Would it be fair to say that your focus, it sounds like, is more at the auction house level? So existing goods that are going in and out of auctions, you're using the auction houses as sort of a proxy for the authority on when a work should be tied to a given token, given that they have a lot of provenance research and intelligence on hand. And through that daily -- I'm sure thousands of works and collectibles get sold everyday across the dozens of auction houses -- that'll generate continuously and ever-expanding provenance of works, kind of built on the authority of the auction houses versus starting just with artists? Is that sort of a differentiator for Codex Protocol?

Jess: It's certainly not wrong. I would slightly nuance that by saying we're not building for the auction houses. The underlying tech is designed to be used by anybody. So we actually really hope that a lot of the projects that are out there will work with us and we would love to see more applications for galleries or artists themselves built on the Codex, because the title registry works best when it's used by the whole industry. Having lots and lots of different registries for art and collectibles doesn't actually really benefit the industry as a whole.

And so we would like to work with as many different industry stakeholders as possible, and we've already had lots of discussions with different people who do different things in the market, whether that's insurance, whether that's in the gallery space, whether that's in the storage and logistics space. We want to build that infrastructure for everybody to be able to use. What the auction piece does is really drive fast-adoption of the Codex Protocol because in the consortium, through our software providers, just over 10 million items per year go through them, and so you can imagine that it becomes a really efficient way of populating the title and driving adoption. And hopefully once it becomes the standard, I guess, more and more people are incentivized to build on it, more and more people are incentivized to use it and that becomes really useful for the whole ecosystem.

So you're right. There is a differentiation between the Biddable application and what other people are doing, but actually this is infrastructure that anybody can use and it's really designed to support all those applications. It's just that we don't have the capacity to build all of them at once, and so we're just starting with the ones which we think are going to help drive adoption, and then over time, we really want to see a lot of those other things built on the same protocol. And whether that's a third party doing it themselves or whether people would like to partner with us, we'd really like to expand the consortium and to encourage more and more people to start using the underlying technology.

Jason: Great. That sounds cool. So you're saying that the long-term goal is to help everyone or be open and available to everyone, but capacity-wise, you have to start somewhere.

The world of collectibles, art, and wine is pretty vast. Is there a particular area you're focusing on within the world of art and collectibles and wine, or a fairly broad focus to start with?

Jess: I think it's going to be fairly broad. A lot of that decision will actually be made by the ecosystem -- that will be people who think that this is really exciting and really want to embrace it, and there will be those who see less value in it. The important thing for us is that firstly, we build the underlying consortium because we think it's important and most of the people that we speak to think it's important. And I've been amazed this week at how many inbound emails and messages I've had from people saying, I've been thinking of a project that’s like this and I'd really like to build on your infrastructure.' And that's really exciting because that collaboration is really what's going to help the ecosystem more generally.

So that's what's really exciting for us is this can be used by anybody. We've had a lot of excitement from the auction space because for them, this is really exciting. We're giving them tools to accept cryptocurrency at auctions, which is great for them and great for their collectors. So there are different benefits to a whole group of stakeholders that the applications could bring, and we will work with people to make sure those applications come about.  

Jason: Great. So will we see people paying in Bitcoin and Etherium at Sotheby's or Christie's or the other major auction houses this year? Is that a reasonable assumption in your opinion?

Jess: Yeah. I think by the end of the year, we'll certainly be able to use cryptocurrency to buy a lot of items at some major auction houses.  

Jason: Very good. Can you share a little bit about how you are financing Codex Protocol? I know for a lot of folks we're seeing more and more ICOs pop up, right? And I don’t make the assumption that my readership necessarily know what an ICO is. So can you talk a little bit about your financing? It looks like you've got some traditional venture capital investment but are looking to do an ICO offering, as well. Can you help explain what that looks like and the thinking behind your structure for financing?

Jess: Sure. We are supported by Bessemer Venture Partners and FJ Labs, both of which are traditional venture capital funds, both of whom have supported my co-founder before in previous projects, both of whom know the auction market space very well, and whom are really excited by this. We are now doing a token-generation event, or what some people would call an ICO. That happens in two stages. The first one is to raise money from accredited investors, which is the process that we've just started. The second process will take place once the infrastructure is actually built out and can be used, and that would be later in the year where the tokens will be able to be purchased by anyone.

And essentially what the tokens do in the Codex ecosystem is allow you to change titles, to transfer them, to add information to them. So the tokens themselves have a functionality within the ecosystem, and we really hope that people who are interested in the ecosystem will want to buy and hold tokens because holding the tokens do two things -- they encourage the overall ecosystem to use the protocol, which makes it more and more successful; and they also encourage individuals to make sure that they're keeping their records up to date, which sort of strengthens the protocol, as well. 

Jason: Great. And who are some of the early adopters of the technology or folks that you're working with within the consortium or partners or anyone you can share on that front that folks should know about?

Jess: Yeah. So the two main partners in the consortium at the moment are Live Auctioneers and Auction Mobility. Live Auctioneers provides software to auction houses, and they have an online auction site. Auction Mobility is also based in the US and offers solutions for auction houses. So both of those companies are very strong in producing technology, and our technology will just plug directly into theirs. It's pretty seamless because we're working already with those partners to make sure that what we're building is useful and it's going to be used and is helpful and exciting for the industry.

Jason: And then, is the Biddable Dapp available already? Is that something that folks can get now?

Jess: No, so that will be ready in the second half of 2018. We are building that at the moment. We're testing it with our partners and making sure that it's all up and running, and it'll be out later this year.

Jason: Okay. I do want to ask you a little bit about your thoughts around the new CryptoArt, crypto-collectible space. But before I get to that question, is there anything else that Artnome readers should know about the Codex Protocol?

Jess: Let me just double check if there's anything I'm missing. I guess the only other thing I'd say is we are really excited about the Biddable piece in terms of improving accessibility for people. At the moment, even to participate in auctions, people have to make a lot of financial disclosures, they have to send bank statements, they have to be approved 36 hours before an auction, and that can be particularly difficult for buyers who are participating, for example, in a western auction but don't have bank statements written in English or in the right language, and it becomes very hard to verify their financial status, and therefore, they often get excluded from participating at auctions, which is really unfair. Biddable will help solve that because we'll just use a cryptocurrency deposit mechanism to make sure that the auction house has comfort that if somebody wins an item, they will actually pay for it. That means that for buyers who traditionally found it hard to access auctions, this hopefully makes it easier too.  

Jason: So if I were to play it back -- I think that this is an oversimplification -- but the parts that are exciting to me are that you can protect and retain your anonymity and protect your identity and participate more fluidly in the market. What Codex Protocol is helping with is increasing the ease of participating in the market and protecting your identity. It's actually making it also dramatically easier to gain information on the works themselves. So getting information on the works themselves goes up, but not at the risk of people having to disclose personal information that they don't necessarily want to share, which is a long-standing concern in the art world.

Jess: Exactly. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And once you have that, then it makes other things easier. So it makes insuring things easier, it makes the concept of shared ownership easier, it makes it easier for artists to preserve sort of resale royalties. So it kind of opens up a whole load of possibilities for the art world which I think is pretty exciting. It will help artists themselves to monetize their work more effectively and to make sure that they can participate in the value that they are creating, which for me, is kind of one of the most exciting things, as well.

Jason: I agree with you on that. That's a lot of where my interests are at actually. As a transition point from that, I know you have a really good understanding of what I refer to as the traditional art market -- which maybe isn't a fair term, but it's just the way that I'm separating it from a lot of the new stuff going on around blockchain -- but then, you're also pretty tuned in to all the CryptoKitty, CryptoPunk, Dada.NYC, Rare Pepe kind of stuff. You even shared the stage with DJ Pepe last weekend. I'm curious, I don't think I have quite as in-depth the knowledge as you do on the more traditional art market, but I do see that there's potential for sort of a bottom up/top down approach where a lot of this CryptoArt and these CryptoArtists could become pretty important. I see them as really reflecting a lot of what's going in this generation. It's fairly traditional that artists that people don't fully understand at first can eventually move up and become more accepted by more traditional collectors. I'm curious what your thoughts are about the potential for what we would call, I guess, CryptoArt or rare digital art to move into more of the art collecting mainstream.  

Jess: I think you're right. I think for a long time, artists have played a really important role in society and a really important role in how can you explain new technology and how culture changes as a result of new technology. And we saw that with some of the early web artists, for example -- and we're seeing it now with artists who are exploring the blockchain -- and that's both artists who come from a blockchain world and who are excited about cryptocurrencies and the technology themselves and are exploring that concept through their art. And there are also artists who are coming from sort of the more traditional background who have noticed that blockchain is a real phenomenon and is increasing in its importance in the world at the moment, and who are therefore beginning to explore it.

And I think both of those groups are going to become really interesting artists to follow, going forward, because they are artists who at the moment are kind of a little bit on the edge and a kind of not in the mainstream, but actually they're exploring a really important topic. And as blockchain becomes more mainstream, more people will get involved in it. People will start looking at the art world for explanation and for insight into what blockchain is. I think these artists have a really important role to play there.

Jason: Great. And are you a collector? Do you have any CryptoPunks or CryptoKitties or crypto-anything?

Jess: I do. I do. I'm really excited by some of the work that's being produced. I think it's fun, it makes blockchain accessible to people. It also encourages people who are not traditionally from a blockchain world to take an interest, which is really important.

I think in any technology, it's really important to have diversity in the people who are building it and thinking about it and working on it because that way, the technology is the best that we can build. And so for me, I think blockchain and art can be kind of mutually reinforced in one another. And so I'm a big fan of it, and I have a CryptoPunk, I have some Kitties, I have one or two of the other bits and pieces.

And yeah, there's some really cool work that's been produced by these artists and I think in the long run, just like any new kind of art movement or medium that will kind of become absorbed into the canon.

Jason: And then I guess, to conclude, any predictions on 2018 vis-à-vis blockchain and the creation of art or blockchain and the art market? Just kind of open field in terms of as an expert in both areas, where do you think it'll get to within 2018?

Jess: I'm really excited about 2018 for a lot of reasons, I think. The Biddable application that we're doing is really going to change the auction market. Being able to buy with crypto at auction, I think, is very exciting for a lot of people. I really hope that some of the technology we're building, as well, encourages other people to collaborate, and people who've been working on blockchain art projects which have kind of been maybe a little under the radar or they haven't been able to develop as fast as they want, we are really hoping to kind of help them and bring people together and support the whole ecosystem. I'm really excited for that. I'm really excited to collaborate with lots of people in this space to try and affect change. And I think from the art market perspective, I think we're seeing some of the prices that some of the blockchain art has been going for, it's certainly hitting the radar of more and more people who are in the mainstream art world. I frequently have contact from galleries, from well-known artists who want to learn more and I think that's really exciting too. 

Jason: Awesome. Well, thanks Jess, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.

Jess: Thanks, Jason. Have a nice day.

Jason: Take care. You as well.

Jess: Bye.

Jason: Bye.   

Why Use Blockchain Provenance for Art?

In recent Artnome articles we covered the arrival of the "blockchain art market" and offered a definition of "CryptoArt." In this article we look into blockchain's potential to improve provenance, a record of ownership and proof of authenticity of an artwork. The blockchain, like provenance, is a ledger, a list of transactions. However, unlike traditional provenance records and databases, blockchain information is decentralized. Why does that matter?

1. It stores information without the need to trust a third party

2. It’s a low-friction, no-cost method for working artists to register work as it is produced

3. It enables the sharing of data on transactions while retaining anonymity for collectors

4. It’s open source - anyone can build on it

5. It creates a single point of access for currently disparate provenance documentation

6. Its storage of provenance makes it tamper-proof

7. It provides worldwide, real-time access to provenance documentation

8. Easy access to provenance speeds up art transactions such as insuring and borrowing against works

9. It reduces transaction costs for art-market transactions by removing the middleman

10. It includes hashes of related documents such as photographs, past appraisals, receipts, and restoration records that can be stored as metadata off-chain

Why care about blockchain Provenance?

Three years ago I read the book "Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art." As both an art nerd and a data nerd, my takeaway from the book was that the lack of a single database of our most important artworks has lead not only to forgery of artworks, but also forgery of the supporting documentation, aka the provenance. If you are not an artist, collector, or dealer, perhaps you are thinking, ‘Who cares?’ But this goes far beyond just impacting artists, collectors, and dealers.

The history of our most important cultural treasures - our art - has been deeply compromised due to the lack of a singular registry or database crossing the works of all major artists. Estimates range from 10 to 20 percent of all art either being forged or misattributed. Appalled by this, I spent the better part of my discretionary income and time for the last three years building the world's largest analytical database of known works by our most important artists and conscripting a small army of art nerds to help me grow it. I've always known this problem is too large to solve alone, so I am overjoyed by the number of solutions spinning out of the recent blockchain frenzy.  

The Codex Protocol for Blockchain Provenance

One of the newer and more innovative groups is the Codex Protocol, a blockchain-based, decentralized title registry for art and collectibles. Protocols are essentially systems or sets of procedures and are like social-media platforms in that they only work if they can achieve escape velocity through early adoption. Codex is coming out of the gate with a strong industry consortium including Lofty, Auction Mobility, and Live Auctioneers. They are also backed by well-known investors Bessemer Venture Partners and have Brook Hazelton, president Christie’s America, on their advisory board.

Codex has an interesting roadmap for a diverse set of blockchain-based tools for the art market. I recently spoke with Codex Co-founder & COO Jess Houlgrave about Codex Protocol's suite of blockchain solutions. Jess explains:

“Codex Protocol is designed as industry infrastructure for art and collectibles. So it's fine wine, classic cars, jewelry, fine art, anything else that sort of fits into that category of items. And the really distinct thing about this category is the primary value driver is provenance information - it's the ownership, the identity of the object, the authenticity of the object, where it's been shown, all of those things that kind of contribute to the identity is a really big important value driver. And at the moment in the industry, a lot of that information isn't really held in any one place. It's very hard to access, it's very hard to research. And without it, that makes doing a whole load of other things, like insuring items or lending against items, very difficult. So what we want to build is really the infrastructure that the entire ecosystem can use. So Codex becomes a decentralized kind of title registry and store of provenance information for objects. And it's designed to be open source so that anybody will be up to build on it.”

As Houlgrave explained it, "Codex itself isn't designed to provide that provenance information.”  Codex believes that the art market ecosystem already has great ways of finding and verifying provenance. They believe the real problem is that the the provenance research and documentation is often disconnected from the art object itself. In that way, future buyers and sellers are often starting from scratch in provenance research rather than building on previous research and documentation.

Houlgrave and Codex aim to solve this by issuing a non-tangible ERC721 token which represents the item, to which important metadata can be linked. The data itself will be stored off-chain, but there will be a link so that any provenance information that's attached can be uploaded and linked to the token that represents the item.

I believe the open-source nature of the Codex Protocol should really help with adoption and growth, but "fine wine, classic cars, jewelry, fine art" is a lot of territory to cover. Without data, blockchain is just a blank distributed ledger. The Codex team are open to several methods of provenance data being added to the blockchain through their protocol.  One major source will be auction house transactions. Codex envisions the majority of tokens being issued by auction house partners. Each time a sale is made and provenance research is conducted, that documentation can be paired with a token on a public, decentralized blockchain. This way the provenance travels on with the artwork serving as a store of value for future owners of the work.

Of course, there have been provenance databases for a long time, so you may be wondering what makes this different?  Decentralization. Codex acknowledges that the art trade has been around for hundreds of years and will continue to be around for hundreds more. In that time span, the Codex team could dissolve, but the really important part is that the provenance would still be available since it would still exist decentralized on the blockchain.

Verisart and Blockchain Provenance

The Codex Protocol team are not the first to look at the use of blockchain to help solve the art world's provenance problem.  Verisart has been offering free and permanent certificates of authenticity to artists, enabling them to list their work on the blockchain since 2015. Verisart is a "platform to certify and verify artworks and collectibles using the Bitcoin blockchain." Their service is free and makes it easy to generate permanent certificates of authenticity for artists. The solution combines museum certification standards, distributed ledger technology, and image recognition to improve provenance and guard against fraud.

The founder of Verisart, Robert Norton, brings an impressive list of past accomplishments, including having served as CEO for both Saatchi Online and Sedition. I connected with Robert and asked him what he thought makes Verisart unique:

We (Verisart) were the first to provide blockchain certification for physical artworks and we work with some of the world’s best-known artists. We have a product that has been up and running for almost three years. And we have a partner program which has just launched and that's really getting traction. The partner program is really driven by people who are selling editions and multiples online, which is a growth area for ecommerce, and it’s an area that we believe is helped by digital certification using distributed ledger technology.

Amanda & Shepard Fairey are early adopters of Verisart's blockchain certification

Verisart is still invite-only and have yet to have their "official launch," but they already have thousands of artists using their service. Notably, Shepard Fairey is an early adopter and supporter of Verisart. In a statement on Verisart the Faireys said,

We’re excited to see Verisart develop and meet artist and gallery requirements for trusted digital certification. As artists move away from paper-based certificates of authenticity to digital ones, Verisart continues to add to and improve its service.

In addition to art stars like Shepard Fairey, Verisart has found traction with up-and-coming artists like CryptoGraffiti. CryptoGraffiti is an artist who was one of the first to make a name for himself by creating art focused on cryptocurrency and cryptoculture. He chose Verisart to certify his piece entitled "Nakamoto", a mixed-media portrait created from discarded credit cards. The Nakamoto pictured in CryptoGraffiti's portrait is Dorian Nakamoto, who was falsely outed by Newsweek in 2014 as "Satoshi," the man who started Bitcoin.     

Dorian Nakamotot with his portrait by Cryptograffiti

I asked CryptoGraffiti what attracted him to use Verisart.  

Verisart was one of the first companies to address artwork provenance via the blockchain. I was pleased to learn that they were collaborating with one of my influences, Shepard Fairey. In May of 2016, I organized an exhibit in San Francisco with other cryptoartists and invited CEO Robert Norton to speak. I like the simplicity of their UX and have registered several works via Verisart and plan on registering many more.

Blockchain provenance from Verisart for "Nakamoto" by the artist Cryptograffiti

I asked Robert Norton how artists can work with Verisart to certify their work (a question I am getting asked a lot these days). Norton explained, "We'd be happy to facilitate those artists, they can just drop us a note at Verisart, mention Artnome, and we will get them signed up straightaway." It's worth noting that it is currently free for artists - I'd recommend participating.

Is the Art Market Ready for Blockchain Provenance?

As I have mentioned in the past, blockchain is not a magic potion that solves all problems. I spoke with art-market expert Marion Maneker of Art Market Monitor to get his thoughts on the use of the blockchain to improve provenance. He shared some of his reservations with me.

I've said on a number of occasions that the promise of the blockchain solves a different problem from the one that bedevils the art market. If tomorrow we all started using a blockchain platform to secure art titles, we would not solve the retrospective art title issues that have been a major impediment to art trading in the wake of the restitution crisis, as well as some of the other title issues surrounding loans and stolen works.

Where the blockchain has a great deal of promise is to help create the asset infrastructure that other assets have. But you don't need to employ the blockchain to do that. So building the art asset infrastructure on the blockchain is a bit like building a telephone network today using cell towers instead of landlines. That's great. And it's smart. But it doesn't change the fact in the art market when it comes to the asset infrastructure, no one has a telephone, and we don't really have a good explanation as to why they don't seem to want to get one.

The art market has other tech-like databases, and the information has not been centralized for a bunch of good reasons. Anyone wanting to build a blockchain service needs to solve the question of what prevents that centralization first. At least, that's my current thinking. I hope to learn more in the future about what I'm missing. I say that sincerely.

Maneker makes great points about the fact that not all of the art market’s opacity issues are a byproduct of insufficient technology. Regardless, it is my opinion that it can only be a positive thing that blockchain technology has caught the imagination of dozens of companies now interested in helping to improve provenance in the art world. This is a huge, thorny, and important problem - and I believe no one company or approach can solve it. It will take collaboration and trial and error.

Have an application of blockchain provenance you think I should know about? Hit me up at jason@artnome.com and lets chat.

Rare Pepe Wallet & The Birth of CryptoArt

Rare Pepe Wallet is a tool created by developer Joe Looney that makes it possible to buy, sell, trade, edition, gift, and destroy digital artworks. At least one company, Spells of Genesis, explored the creation of digital trading cards tied to the blockchain before the invention of Rare Pepe Wallet. However, Joe and the Rare Pepe Wallet community are the first to explore a long and important list of innovations that will set the course for the blockchain art market for years to come. These include:

• First blockchain community where anyone can submit artwork to be bought, sold, traded, or destroyed on the blockchain;

• First to offer the above service while taking zero commission;

• First to create a gift card system that allows for gifting artwork to people who do not own any cryptocurrency (a major innovation for improving adoption);

• First to conceive of VIP content like songs and games tied to the token in addition to the artwork;

• First to move a digitally scare artwork to a physical piece of hardware (opendime). This proves to naysayers that digitally rare art can, in fact, exist in a physical form;

• First to create a digital artwork tied to the blockchain that changes its representation based on what machine it is displayed on.

You can read my full interview with Joe Looney below. If you are a little unclear on what blockchain is or what is has to do with art, you may want to read these introductory articles first:

• The blockchain Art Market is Here

• What is CryptoArt?

Is Pepe the Frog an Alt-Right Hate Symbol?

Jason: I know it can be difficult to explain blockchain to someone who doesn't understand it - it is a difficult starting point to begin with. But then to get through that and then explain Rare Pepe and Pepe the Frog vis-à-vis some of his more negative history, it's a lot to try to deal with up front, right? I'm curious when you're asked about that, how you describe the Rare Pepe community vis-à-vis the negative press.

PEPEISPEACE
Series 12, Card 50
143

WEAREALLPEPE
Series 2, Card 10
100

Joe: It's almost like how when I explain Bitcoin to people now. If they are just going to dismiss it, then I'm not that bothered, but if someone's actually interested, then I'll take the time to try to pass some knowledge on to them of what I've learned. I mean, there's obviously some Pepes that are pretty horrible, but it's like, you can make Pepe whatever you want. So people that are horrible are going to make horrible Pepes. But yeah, it's funny because Rare Pepe actually started right around the time that -- it almost happened like right after early September, 2016, when Mike, who is the guy who created the first Pepe in  counterparty added it to the Telegram chat. I think Hillary Clinton coming out and saying Pepe is a hate symbol was like three days later; like, it was right afterwards. So it was almost like, here's this awesome thing, let's do it! And then it's like, aww, someone ruined Pepe! But I don't think they ruined it totally - just in the public eye in that time, but really, I think it's kind of fading away. I think that thought process is fading, it's like old news now.

Was Rare Pepe Wallet the First Blockchain CryptoArt Application?

Joe Looney presenting at the Rare Digital Art Festival
Photo Credit: Kieran Farr @kfarr

Jason: From talking to people at the Rare Digital Art Festival, I get the impression in the CryptoArt world or the blockchain art world that Rare Pepe was really the first. Is that right?

Joe: The first one was actually Spells of Genesis. I think the main difference between Spells of Genesis and Rare Pepe Wallet was you couldn't make your own card in Spells of Genesis. It was just that company making them. So I think it's probably fair to say that Rare Pepe was the second. I can't think of any other project that was prior to Rare Pepe and after Spells of Genesis. We changed it a little bit so you could make your own. That got people excited right away. We have a Telegram chat which is where it started. So there's kind of like a communal area where everybody can go, hang out and post memes and talk about Rare Pepes, and then the Wallet. So there is an easy way to collect your Pepes - they look like trading cards, you can flip them around, you can trade them really easily on the Counterparty Decentralized Exchange (or the Dex). All those things together made it take off, and that group grew really fast, that Telegram group. I think there were over a thousand people within a couple of months, and it's just grown since then.

Jason: So it was the first platform that allowed for user-submitted artworks, or trading cards, on the blockchain?

Joe: Yeah, that's the way I explain it to people. Like, the quick, one-sentence description is they are just digital trading cards. And then you can expand on that; you can talk about Bitcoin, you can talk about all sorts of stuff, but you just start with digital trading cards and everyone can understand that.

What are Some Major Innovations Attributable to Rare Pepe Wallet?

Jason: The big thing that jumped out for me from your presentation was when you started demoing the video game and the song that were tied to specific Rare Pepe cards. Is that something that a lot of people are doing already and you sort of brought it to Rare Pepe? How did this idea that you can have one-of-a-kind content beyond just the visual card going into games and music and whatnot evolve?

Joe: The idea of an access token has been around in the Counterparty community, which is the platform that Rare Pepe is built on top of. For a while, there have been people trying to come up with ideas of applications using an access token. To be honest, I don't know if I heard someone talk about it or something or if I came up with it. I don't know. I don't remember.

But this idea that you can have this token and you can prove that you own it, and so you can actually prove digitally that you own it, and through an API. So the first thing that comes to mind is extra-bonus content, an extra area you can get into -- kind of like a VIP pass that lets you in somewhere. I've never charged artists to put bonus content in the wallet. It's always just like, "hey guys, if you want to put something in there let me know and I can link to it or mask it." But with the SoundCloud links, the way we set up is to mask it a little bit so that you can't share that link because it's actually -- actually, I have it set up where it bounces off... I can get into technically how it works, if you want? I don't know how technical you want me to get, but essentially, you couldn't share that link because it's kind of tied to your computer.

Rare Pepe Gift Card Sent to me by Joe Looney containing SCHROEPEPE.

SCHROEPEPE - The Schroepepe is simultaneously alive and dead. It appears differently based on which device it is displayed on.

Another feature that I have that you probably don't know about is you can create Rare Pepe gift cards. It's a feature that isn't really used a lot now since the Bitcoin transaction fees have skyrocketed in the last couple of months. But when the fee was a dollar or two, what you could do is you could create these gift cards and they actually look like gift cards -- it's kind of a Pepe in the middle and a nice border. I made a happy holidays one and handed it out before Christmas, 2016. When you create a gift card, you send the Pepe to another address that you just create at that moment and the private key is encoded as the gift card's secret code. And it costs two transaction fees, because what you do is you send the Pepe to the gift card with another transaction fee so that whoever you give the gift card to can redeem it within the Wallet, and when they redeem it, it basically just uses that private key -- that's the secret code on the gift card -- to send the Pepe to them, and there’s already enough Bitcoin to do that. So the whole idea was the way you could get new people into Pepe is you literally just give them this gift card, they go to the website, type in a code, and it sends them to Pepe, and they have it. They don't need to get Bitcoin, they don't need to do anything. So it was kind of a way to spread the word of Rare Pepe and give this gift card and the person that gets it. Literally all they need to be able to do is go to a website and type in the code on the card, like you would do with any gift card.

How do I submit a Rare Pepe to the Rare Pepe Wallet?

Rare Pepe Template is offered but not required. Instructions note: "It doesn't have to look like a trading card at all".

Jason: When people submit artwork or Pepe cards, do they pay a fee and then you or Mike or someone kind of reviews them and accepts them? What’s that process looks like?

Joe: So they don't pay us a fee, they burn their fee. So that's another interesting thing with cryptocurrencies which then applies to these digital assets, is that you can provably destroy them. And the way that works is you can create an address or you create the public key without a private key and it's -- I don't know if you've ever seen a burn address, but it basically looks like a Bitcoin address, but it'll be a number one and then it'll be, like, words that are recognizable, like "Number one, this is a burn address, and then a bunch of X’s after it", so you know that address wasn't randomly created.  So it is as secure as your Bitcoin address is, it is as secure as that thing is destroyed.

Jason: Got it. And the purpose of destroying the token versus -- so if I want to submit my Pepe trading card art to you. Instead of giving you money, I destroy a token? Why?

Joe: It's interesting because the Rare Pepe Foundation is really just a group of seven of us that have been around basically since the beginning, and we realized really quickly that we needed to curate and have very basic rules or it was just going to get out of hand really quickly. So that's what we did is create the “Rare Pepe Foundation,” but there's no real “Rare Pepe Foundation.” Like, there's no actual legal entity, we just call it that. It's just a small group of us. Rare Pepe Directory, which is a site that Mike put together, has a list of rules if you wanted to look at them. They're really basic. It's just a spam filter. We're not trying to judge people's art and say we think this is good art and this is bad art. It's just really kind of basic rule set and it is very subjective, but we try to stick to the rules so that we can be less subjective.

Rare Pepe Foundation. Also Known as the "Scientists".

Jason: Safe to say you don't filter for artistic content like quality or skill or whatever, right? I'm just looking through the rules. I see there is a NSFW [not-safe-for-work] rule?

Joe: Yeah, so one of the rules is no NSFW content. So the idea is we didn’t want to scare people away. It's really just no not-safe-for-work content. Some of them can get a little borderline. At the end of the day, I have to run this Wallet, so if I don't like it for whatever reason, it's not going to be in there. But we're not trying to judge people’s art. The idea was, we have a small enough group, we're all on the same page, and we keep out the ones that are very questionable.

And then we have gotten some where it's like somebody literally took five seconds, went into Microsoft Paint, and drew a Pepe. So we'll say that low-effort Pepes are not going to be accepted. We do some curation there, but I have to say that if you go through and start from series one and go all the way to series 30, you'll see the quality -- we definitely attracted real artists, and the quality of Pepes has gotten really good. There's some really, really good ones that people definitely spent a lot of time and are very talented artists.

Who are Some Important Rare Pepe Artists?

Jason: Who are some of the Rare Pepe artists I should check out?

Joe: I do have my favorites. DaVinci -- which was actually one of the auctions at the festival -- those Japanese ones that were like little cartoon Pepe guy in all different situations. Those are some of my favorites. DaVinci, the artist, he's Japanese and he has a little shop. He sells drones and random stuff with his little characters on them. So I bought a Pepe keychain and -- let's see who else I like -- DaVinci is probably one of my favorites.

PEEKABOO PEPE
Da Vinci
Series 6
100 Issued

ZZZZPEPE
Da Vinci
Series 7
109 Issued

Scrilla has really good Pepes. He's done a lot. You can tell his style, like, if you're going through the Pepes and you've seen one that he's done, you'll notice him as you click through after that.

DJ Pepe
Scrilla
Series 4, Card 29
169 Issued

PEPEDOTCOM
Scrilla
Series 10, Card 27
9904 Issued

What are the advantages of collecting digital blockchain art vs traditional physical art?

Jason: Is it fair to say what you are doing with Rare Pepe Wallet could translate to the traditional “non-digital” art world?

Joe: Yeah. Well, I think there was a big distinction between trying to pair physical art with a token and then having that token be the art. I try to really harp on that with Rare Pepe stuff because, in my opinion, the token is part of the art in that the image is just what it looks like -- that thing you're collecting. But imagine if -- and this is even more interesting, with Rare Pepe, especially -- if 10 to 15 years from now, say Rare Pepe Wallet is not around anymore, Rare Pepe Directory is not around anymore; as long as Bitcoin is around, your Rare Pepe is still around, and maybe there's some that the image gets lost and now it's a really rare Pepe because no one even has the image for it.

Jason: No one knows what it looks like.

Joe: Yeah, no one knows what it looks like. In my opinion, it's really the token that you're collecting and the kind of legend behind the token. Like, when I see Rare Pepe, it's kind of like, this is a moment in time in internet history where we first discovered that you can kind of use these digital assets and collect them. And they can be this collectible, fun thing, this whole ecosystem built around it. So I think you run into trouble when you try to pair that digital thing with a physical thing, but in the case of Rare Pepe, it exists digitally only. Any physical manifestation of it is just -- it's just an additional thing, like the six-foot tall DJ Pepe cardboard cut out at the conference. That cutout went to the highest bidder on the DJ Pepe cards.

Six foot tall DJ Pepe Sharing the stage at the Rare Digital Art Festival

Jason: That's almost like the song or the video game example you gave where it's an auxiliary to the core part which is the coin or the token, right?

Joe: Yeah, exactly. So I think that's one thing that has been demonstrated -- there's a game called Sarotubi where you basically link your address to your player profile, your CounterParty address, or Rare Pepe address that holds your assets -- and then you have the ability to create these monsters from your Rare Pepes, and it kind of uses the card image and makes these monster things and stuff. There's so many things you can do because it's like, what can you do with a physical piece of art or collectible or trading card. It's very minimal to what you can do with a digital one because you have so many options now with how you can interact with it.

Another thing that I demonstrated during my demo was the OpenDime Pepes, which was the physical Pepe. I thought it was a pretty funny example because it's, like, here I'm taking this digital thing and making it physical. A lot of people have tried pairing the blockchain with provenance for a piece of art. They are essentially saying “you have to have this token that goes with this art piece” because they're trying to take that physical art and make it digital; whereas Pepe kind of switched that whole thing on its head. We said, “here I have this digital art and I made it physical”. And what's really interesting with those OpenDime USB sticks is that you really can trade these digital Pepes, these digital items, physically because the whole idea is that the private key only exists on that USB stick and because you can actually see it by looking at it that it's not damaged in a way that would have revealed the private key, that it's secure and that you can basically trade it and feel good knowing that it's on there and the person can't steal it back once they give it to you.

Jason: It kind of puts to rest the questions people have about there being no physical manifestation. Now it lives somewhere.

Joe: Exactly. You can create that.

Were you surprised that Homer Pepe sold for $39K?

Jason: So the Rare Homer Pepe sold for $39k (350,000 Pepe Cash) at the live auction at the Rare Digital Art Festival, is that right? Were you surprised by that?

Homer Pepe
Series 2
Issued 1

Honestly, I think that's probably a fair price for it, which is ridiculous. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but that was probably a fair price. I think that the person buying it, they didn't get a steal, but I don't think they got ripped off. I think they got it for about what it should have gone for because I know the -- I remember Pepe Pizza which had been auctioned off a week before on an online auction, I think that went for like 320k or 330k Pepe Cash. And I remember thinking, ‘Man! I think that's about right. I think that's probably about what I would expect that that would have gone for.’

Who is Buying the Most Expensive Rare Pepes?

Jason: People want to tell the story that it is the newly CryptoRich buying this rare digital CryptoArt. Is that right or just a good story?

Joe: Did you read that article that just came out recently? I thought that was interesting. I read that one, too, and it's interesting. People have all this money now and they aren't really sure what to do with themselves.

Jason: Do you think that's accurate or do you think that's sort of like the better story for reporters to tell so they're like, "Oh, yeah, there's all these young rich young people, they don't know what to do with themselves because they made money so quick." Because it's already in crypto, it's just easy for them to buy other CryptoCollectibles. Do you think that's accurate?

Joe: I think if you look at it from the fact that there’s huge barriers to entry -- you got to get the Bitcoin, you got to get the Ethereum -- so probably the people buying these things are the ones that are already into it because they know how to use it. I think it's probably entirely accurate that people like those guys in that article are the reason why some CryptoKitties have sold for over $100,000. It's like people in the art world in these smaller kinds of communities that buy art are kind of trying to impress each other. So now you've got that same thing, but in the digital world. So now you've got these guys that have gotten rich on Bitcoin, Ethereum, what have you, and they want to impress each other. I really think that that's probably pretty accurate and why you see these markets going the way they're going.

And I don't see any reason why as long as Bitcoin and cryptocurrency keeps going the way it's going, gets more adoption -- I think that would just kind of be the new segment of the art world. And here's these other rich people that all got rich in this type of thing and they buy this kind of art. I think that's probably accurate. I think those guys in that article are probably the ones spending $40,000 for a Rare Pepe.

I thought that article was pretty interesting because it's like it made sense a little more after reading that. I always knew, even within the Rare Pepe community, there's people within that community that are, like, crypto-retired. And I know people that are crypto-retired, and it's usually people who don't have families to support so they can retire and they don't have to worry about paying --

Jason: Putting their kids through college and stuff.

Joe: Exactly. So I'm not crypto-retired because I have to be responsible because I'm a parent. But that could change if I had tens of millions of dollars. But it's interesting that -- I think that's pretty accurate. It's just, people are crypto-rich. They definitely are. Something doesn't go up 1,000 times, but there's some people getting really rich.

Jason: And since they're already part of this community and using Telegram and talking to each other, they know about Pepe and whatnot. Why wouldn't you buy within the community that made you rich, arguably, right?

Peter Kell
Winning Bidder for $39K record breaking "Homer Pepe"

Joe: And you understand it and it's not a bad investment. Whoever bought Homer Pepe six months ago probably made money on their sale, like, last weekend. So you see these things go for -- like, I remember the Jong Pepe, for example. When I sold one for 50 XCP, which was like $150 at the time, I was like, “That's a lot of money to spend on a Pepe” because no one knew. It was price discovery, right? And then one sold for just under $8,000 in July. And that's way more -- in terms of XCP, it was eight times, so not even just in terms of dollars. So, it's like some people invest in art. I'm sure you know, so it's like not only are these guys trying to impress each other; it's kind of not a bad place to park some of your money, either.

Jason: Yeah, I love it. I kind of thought that but I wasn't sure. I hung out with a bunch of people at the conference and I'm like, “I don't feel like I'm necessarily hanging out with a bunch of super crypto-rich,” but I don't know if I would recognize them if I saw them. I do know that most people that I know and hang out with couldn't drop $40k on a Rare Pepe at the moment. So someone has some money.

And I was surprised that the rate at which they were selling. It seems like maybe in half an hour to an hour of the auction, and I heard it cleared about $100,000 in Pepe total, I think.

Joe: I don't remember, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's what it was.

Jason: Awesome, thanks for your time Joe! We should grab a beer some time given you live not too far from me.

Joe: My pleasure, yes let's do that.

Update:

After a brief hiatus, the Rare Pepe Wallet is back open for submissions. My first Rare Pepe, HODLERPEPE was accepted on 01/27/18.
 

HODLERPEPE
Jason Bailey
Series 31 - Card 22
100 Issued

What Is CryptoArt?

What is CryptoArt?

In my first post on the blockchain and art I declared that "The Blockchain Art Market is Here." In this new article, I make the argument that art native to the blockchain has its own aesthetic and represents a new and important movement within art. I call this movement/aesthetic CryptoArt.     

CryptoArt are rare digital artworks, sometimes described as digital trading cards or "rares", associated with unique and provably rare tokens that exist on the blockchain. The concept is based on the idea of digital scarcity, which allows you to buy, sell, and trade digital goods as if they were physical goods. This system works due to the fact that, like Bitcoins and other cryptocurrency, CryptoArt exist in limited quantity. Popular early examples include CryptoKitties, CryptoPunks, Rare Pepe, CurioCards, and Dada.nyc.

While no single CryptoArtist or CryptoArtwork adheres to a single definition, I believe it is helpful to look at a series of common factors that have shaped the aesthetic and community thus far.

1. Digitally Native: For the first time, artwork can be created, editioned, bought, and sold digitally.
2. Geographically Agnostic: Empowered by the internet, artists participate from all over the world. CryptoArt is the first truly global art movement.
3. Democratic/Permissionless: Everyone is encouraged to participate regardless of skills, training, class, gender, race, age, creed, etc.
4. Decentralized: Tools and guidelines are designed to reduce the power of gatekeepers and middlemen and increase the autonomy of artists.
5. Anonymous: Use of pseudonyms allows artists to create and sell art while staying anonymous (if preferred), freeing them from social judgment.
6. Memetic: CryptoArt are often literally memes valued for their ability to spread quickly.  The difference? The "Meme Economy" is now a reality.
7. Self-Referential: CryptoArtists often play with references to key events and personalities within cryptocurrency and blockchain culture.
8. CryptoPatrons: CryptoArt is collected by the CryptoRich: a group of savvy technologists and investors who got into cryptocurrency early. 
9. Pro-Artist: Blockchain platforms often take little to no commission from artists. Artists are often remunerated for every future sale of a single work.
10. Dankness: Because CryptoArt is open to everyone, judging it by traditional artistic standards kills what is great about it. Instead, it is best to judge CryptoArt by "dankness" or potency of expression and creativity.  

Who Are The CryptoArtists? 

I categorize CryptoArtists into two main categories: tech-savvy artists and self-trained artists.

Tech-savvy:  These are the artists who were tech-savvy enough on their own (or worked with tech-savvy partners) to launch their own controlled, limited, rare digital art. These include artists like Guile Gaspar from CryptoKitties and John Watkinson, the artist behind CryptoPunks.

Jason Bailey
Animated .gif self portrait using two CryptoPunks.
Valued at 0.54 ETH ($439.44 USD)

Self-trained: These are artists who are typically untrained, or more appropriately, self-trained. On a personal level, I am most bullish on the long-term potential and impact of the second category of CryptoArtists. These artists have been empowered through democratic platforms designed to empower anyone to function as an artist. The platforms typically provide the CrytpoArtists with the tools needed for creating, buying, and selling their work on the blockchain in a real marketplace with little to no commission taken out by a third party. Key to this new breed of CryptoArtists is a group of creative technologists building the platforms for them to use. Let's take a look a few of the most important CryptoArt platforms and the artwork and artists associated with them.

What is Dada.nyc

Beatriz Helena Ramos or "Bea" is a professionally trained artist and the founder of Dada.nyc. Bea is literally overflowing with positive creative energy. It's easy to root for her and her team at Dada.nyc because there is no question that they are in it for the art and the artists. Bea believes that everyone is an artist, so when I say she is in it for the artists, she is quite literally in it for everyone.

Dada.nyc got its start as a collaborative drawing application. The drawing tools are built into the application, and anyone can create and share artwork on the platform. They have created a large and vibrant community of self-taught artists and recently added the ability to purchase artwork by this community via the blockchain. 

Bea explained to me that:

We are building a self-sustaining community. Therefore, we'll use our 30% share of the profits to keep funding development of the platform, as well as funding art projects for our community. I think is important for people to know that is not a cut for profits, rather is a 30% that goes back into the community.

There are many talented realist artists in the community, but when measuring art in a new democratic and decentralized platform, I don't think realism is the best criteria to judge the work. I favor raw expression and truth to materials - in this case, pixels.

I thought about writing a few paragraphs trying to place this art in the context of graffiti art or artists like Kenny Scharf, Jean Michel Basquiat, Kieth Haring, etc., but the work does not need me to speak for it - it speaks loudly for itself.

Norma Xelda Jara

Norma Xelda Jara  - Buenos Aires , Argentina
Creeps and Weirdos ##85841
Edition of 200
0.0168730806870718 eth ($14.304)
Dada.nyc

Norma Xelda Jara  - Buenos Aires , Argentina
Untitled -NFS
Dada.nyc

Norma Xelda Jara  - Buenos Aires , Argentina
Untitled - NFS
Dada.nyc

Moxarra

Moxarra - San Luis Potosí, S.L.P., Mexico
Creeps and Weirdos #87586
Edition of 200
0.0168730806870718 eth ($14.152)
Dada.nyc

Moxarra - San Luis Potosí, S.L.P., Mexico
Creeps and Weirdos #89553
Edition of 200
0.0168730806870718 eth ($14.443)
Dada.nyc

Moxarra - San Luis Potosí, S.L.P., Mexico
Creeps and Weirdos #89553
Edition of 100
0.253096210306078 eth ($214.823)
Dada.nyc

Maria Garcia

Maria Garcia - Venezuela
Untitled - NFS
Dada.nyc

Maria Garcia - Venezuela
Untitled - NFS
Dada.nyc

Maria Garcia - Venezuela
Untitled - NFS
Dada.nyc

Maria Garcia - Venezuela
Untitled - NFS
Dada.nyc

Maria Garcia - Venezuela
Untitled - NFS
Dada.nyc

You can see from the three artists above that there is quite a range of work but what I like about these three is that they have a distinct style that works within the restrictions of the tool. Each of these artists and many more at Dada.nyc deserve more space than I can give them in a single post. I strongly encourage to check out the site and to support the artists - they will personally thank you.

What are Rare Pepes

Pepe Pizza
Series 2 - Card 44
1 issued
Sold for ~$35 and previous record holder prior to the Homer Pepe selling for $39K at the Rare Digital Art Festival.

You can't talk about CryptoArt without talking about Rare Pepes. The Rare Pepe meme is the real origin of much of CryptoArt's culture, aesthetic, and technology. But until recently, I only knew of Pepe the Frog as a meme co-opted by the alt-right as a hate symbol. Before I could feel comfortable writing about Rare Pepe, I needed to understand what role he played in this diverse, accepting, community of Rare Pepe enthusiasts. Jason Rosenstein of Archetype.mx ran the first live Rare Pepe Auction which was held at the inaugaral Rare Digital Art Festival. He described it to me this way:

"...the community that's formed in Telegram with over 1,500 members... in that chat we never speak about there being the alt-right association because we have always associated it with creativity. Before it was used for negativity in media, it was just a method to express anything. It started with Happy Pepe, and from there it took leaps in derivations from Happy Pepe to Sad Pepe to Smug Pepe to Angry Pepe. I think it is at that point where the alt-right started using him to express their hatred towards certain things. In our community, we don't tolerate that at all. It has happened that someone has jumped into the chat room and said something, but it's immediately deleted and that user is banned from ever being able to use the chat again. 

Convinced the Rare Pepe communities goals were far from hate-based and rooted in creativity, I felt comfortable digging in further. 

I reached out to Joe Looney, innovative technologist and creator of the Rare Pepe Wallet to help me better understand Rare Pepe. As the developer behind the Rare Pepe Wallet, there is a strong argument to be made for Joe as the father of the CryptoArt movement. 

Joe explained to me that Rare Pepes are the perfect meme for the rare digital art application because the whole inside joke behind Rare Pepe is that "there where these rare digital Pepes, and in some cases, you couldn't show them because they were too rare." But with blockchain, digital scarcity, and Joe's invention of the Rare Pepe Wallet, Pepes really are provably rare, sellable artworks.

According to Joe the community started when a guy who goes only by the name "Mike" (@nola1978) created the first Rare Pepe by pairing a Rare Pepe image with a counterparty asset. A Telegram chat group was soon created as a result of others wanting to pair their Rare Pepes with counterparty assets. The breakthrough came when Joe used a technology called CounterParty to make it possible to buy and sell Rare Pepes on the Decentralized Exchange (or the DEX) to make it possible to buy, sell, and trade them. 

Joe explained that the easiest way to think of Rare Pepes is like Garbage Pail Kids trading cards from the '80s, but instead of having a handful of artists, everyone is welcome to submit Rare Pepe artwork to be bought and sold. Once submitted, the artwork is reviewed by the Rare Pepe Foundation, frequently referred to as the "Scientists," to make sure it meets their set of nine rules: 

1) Pepes must be 400 x 560 pixels.   They can look like trading cards, but it is not required.
2) Cards can be animated GIFs, but keep them to 1. 5 MB or less in size. Use compression.
2) Issuance must be LOCKED so your Pepe cannot be inflated.
3) Your Pepe must not be divisible.  <— make sure!!
4) Make sure your artwork at least has something to do with Pepe.
5) No NSFW content please.  Trying to be keep it light for now. (Pepe has a lot of bad press).  If in doubt, message @nola1978 on Telegram before creating your asset.
6) When making your token it must have at least 100 shares and max 100k shares.
7) No websites or QR codes.
8) Only one submission per day per artist.  We want to have variety.
9) Please allow 24 to 48 hours before bothering our experts about your submission.

They think of these rules as a spam filter.  They are not trying to tell people what is good art and bad art. 

The really groundbreaking and important thing to understand here is that Joe does not take a commission from the artist. Anyone can create a Rare Pepe, submit it for inclusion, and offer as many copies as they want for sale and at any price they want to sell it. And they are now selling for tens of thousands of dollars. At the Rare Digital Art festival in NYC last weekend, Homer Pepe, a one-of-one Rare Pepe CryptoArtwork broke a record in a live auction selling for $39k USD (350k in Pepe Cash). In less than an hour the auction cleared ~$100k in CryptoArt.

Joe continues to innovate in the CryptoArt space and push the envelope. By pairing the concept of an access token (an application from counterparty) to Rare Pepe and CryptoArt in general, Joe has made it possible to tie a song or a video game back to a Rare Pepe. Joe thinks of this as bonus content, or a VIP pass tied to a particular Rare Pepe card. It's a non-sharable link, masked and tied to a particular computer, that makes this extra content exclusively available to the owner of that specific piece of CryptoArt. This expands the art from being image-based to being multimedia-based. As Joe put it, you can't really do much with traditional art - but with CryptoArt, the sky is the limit. It can include music, video games, and goods that are useable in other games. By comparison, traditional art materials start to look limited in nature.

Another feature Joe pioneered is the Rare Pepe gift card. This allows you to create a Rare Pepe gift card that you use to send a Pepe to someone who currently does not have a account. All the recipient needs to do is go to the site and type in the code on the card, with no need to get Bitcoins.

Joe mentioned that one of his favorite artists is DaVinci. Davinci lives in Japan and owns a drone shop. A few examples of his work below:

Drone Pepe
Series 9
999999 Issued

Some of the Rare Pepe insiders were nice enough to let me tag along for dinner and drinks after the Rare Digital Art Festival. I asked Rare Pepe artist ICQ, the Jeff Koons of Rare Pepe, if he was concerned about the perception of Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol. He put it to me this way: 

“I am a black man from Texas. Do you really think I would be this involved with Rare Pepe if he was alt-right? He is a meme, he was co-opted. The swasticka was an ancient symbol co-opted by Hitler. It’s the same thing. The difference is this time we are taking Pepe back.”

Like Koons, ICQ conceives of ideas for Rare Pepes and pays artists to execute on them. This may be an important spot to point out that for the uninitiated, it is difficult, if not impossible, to tell which artists made which Pepes.

(Thought to be by ICQ)
BLAINEPEPE
Series 10
100 Issued

I know that the BLAINPEPE above is was commissioned by ICQ and Executed by Mr. Hansel, as he also has some of his work on Saatchi Art. But part of what is unique about the CryptArt aesthetic is that the work is often bought and sold completely anonymously. Yes, this can lead to offensive submissions, but NSFW Rare Pepes are rejected per rule number 5.

"No NSFW content please.  Trying to be keep it light for now. (Pepe has alot of bad press).  If in doubt message @nola1978 on telegram before creating your asset."  

I believe that anonymity also drives positive creativity within the Rare Pepe community, as well.  Most people think of some weird and interesting thoughts that we tend to hold back for fear of judgment - with Rare Pepe, those thoughts find a home. 

As with the Dada.nyc artists, my preference when judging the artistic merit of Rare Pepe as CryptoArt is less about technical merit and more about expression and creativity. I do, though, find myself drawn to the animated GIF Rare Pepe. Here are a few of my favorites.

INNOCOINBOT
Series 6 - Card 7
10000 Issued

MODERNPEPE
Series 17  - Card 43
100 Issued

UFOPEPE
Series 1 - Card 37
800 Issued
 

Based on the ~$100k in Rare Pepe sold in the live Rare Digital Art Festival, it looks like the business of creating, buying, and selling Rare Pepes is booming. 

A reasonable question to ask is if these artists will find their way into the more traditional art market. I asked Jess Houlgrave, cofounder and COO at Codex Protocol, her thoughts. Jess recently finished a Masters at Sotheby's Institute of Art where she wrote her dissertation "Blockchain: A Critical Assessment Of Use Within The Art Ecosystem." You can and should read excerpts of Jess's research here. Jess is uniquely positioned to weigh in on the intersection of the traditional art world and blockchain. She shared her thoughts as follows:

"It’s really exciting that there is so much value being attributed to blockchain-based art. It shows that blockchain can play a really important role in helping digital art become more prominent. Blockchain provides a way to create digital scarcity, which means artists can, for the first time, create unique digital works and therefore monetize their work more effectively than ever before."

 I tend to agree with Jess. I would add that while the traditional art world is dipping its toe into blockchain technology, the real innovation is currently happening in the CryptoCulture. If you want to know where art and the art market is going, keep a close eye on the CryptoArt community.

Concluding Remarks

As I mentioned, I struggled with how to address the alt-right concerns around Rare Pepes and Pepe the Frog. Many of the recent articles in the mainstream media opt to leave out Rare Pepe in the story of CryptoArt - to me, that is like writing about the play Hamlet without mentioning Hamlet. Having spent the day and then partying long into the night with the Pepe-insider crowd, I can say I have never met a more diverse and immediately accepting group. Pepe has been used for some really horrible things, but from what I saw firsthand, that is not what this group, who I would now consider friends, is about.

This post started as a recap of the Rare Digital Art festival, an amazing event that was put on at no cost to attendees. I decided to write it less as a news story about the festival and more as an evergreen piece exploring what CryptoArt actually is. That said, I want to thank the organizers of the festival for an amazing event. I'd encourage you to read the excellent recap of the festival written by Ian Allison in IBT.

Finally, Beatriz Helena Ramos, Joe Looney, Jason Rosenstein, Jess Houlgrave and many others have been incredibly generous to me with their time and friendship, and I would like to thank them warmly for that. While it is impossible to get the entire story of CryptoArt into a single post, I hope that I have done justice to the community. I look forward to writing future posts that dive deeper into the lengthy interviews I have conducted with these and other folks in the community. Thank you for reading, if you have other ideas for stories around the intersection of art and data you can always reach me at jason@artnome.com.

If you are interested in learning more about art on the blockchain check out my podcast, "Dank Rares" where I interview the pioneers in the blockchain art world. You can find it here on Soundcloud and you can also subscribe on iTunes here.