Well, it didn't occur to me till
just now that you're just going to
hear a lot from me first thing in
the day and it's a bit much I know
I'm going to talk to you about.
Introduce this panel and artists.
You know, something I'll say to you
right off the bat is
there's many ways you can think
about Nfts.
And I don't go too
far into it. We're gonna talk about
digital art, but I want to say
something to me the most important
part.
Of what's happened is not in fact
the growth of digital art,
but this simple transformation,
which I went to talk to earlier,
which is the
role of a distributed Trustless
ledger.
Here is a Babylonian food
disbursement ledger of 1800
B.C..
Wow.
That's looks like a lot of work to
figure out where the food's going.
But the idea
that with with this blockchain,
you can figure out
who's bought what and it is
available for everyone to see that
transparency.
Just to give you an analog
corollary.
Someone buys an artwork in a
gallery.
You write it down, private.
The gallerist writes it down.
It goes out.
It sells.
They write it down.
The next gallery writes it down.
The artist says how much they buy it
for. The guy says, I don't know.
He's out of the planning.
I ask.
Yeah.
And that's and there's a ledger, you
know, we keep track of things and
we'll write it down. But it's all
distributed behind doors in
every different place. You got the
idea, right?
What this allows is that the sale
happens online.
Everybody sees it.
The money spits out.
Why is that important?
That is a fundamental economic
transformation.
That's what's actually completely
radical, what's happening in this
space. I only say that because I
talked about earlier about the
artists rights, but a lot
of the conversation on Nfts is about
esthetics, about
digital art.
But the profound ship shift
is actually in this.
And the other part of this is what
and if teased the nonfungible
nature of this.
There's an essay.
By Walter Benjamin famously
called Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, where he talks about
what will happen to art when you can
actually mass produce it.
Thus, you know, foregrounding the
work that would come with Warhol
where you make prints and you
thought, oh my gosh, if you can make
it, you know, back in the day they'd
say, If you can make a photograph,
photographs can't be art because you
can make so many of them.
You know, all the conversations, the
NFT of the same as photographed
photography early on.
It wasn't till recently MoMA had a
photography department
just just to kind of get your head
around that because everyone
said, if you can copy it many times,
how do you build scarcity?
And then they were like, Well,
you'll come up with this thing called
additions.
So they'll be signed ten of them,
right? Well, what the Nonfungible
token offers is the ability to
produce one of a kinds
in the Internet.
I swear to God, when I heard one of
a kind images, I go,
That's the art world.
Ever noticed what's worth a lot of
money in the art world?
Does anyone know what's worth the
most money? What medium?
What is it?
Painting.
Why is painting so important to the
art world?
One of a kind.
Hangs on the wall.
I'm just saying that it took me a
long time. I'm very dumb.
I was like, Why is this painting
thing so important to people?
Why is it worth so much more money
than my friend's performance art
piece?
My friend, there was a performer to
tell me that in grad school when you
got into performance, they're like,
That's awesome.
You'll never make any money.
And the performance arts like
painters, that's dead.
The parents like, is it?
I'll just keep painting.
And then there's nothing like my
paintings a lot more than your
performance art piece.
That's because it's an economy and
the economy is real.
And the nonfungible token thing part
of this is absolutely profound.
Of course, there's a vast
history of digital art.
So much it's ridiculous for me to
talk about.
I mean, here we are, experiments in
art technology, 1967.
This is a group produced between
engineers Rauschenberg
and Robert Wilson.
Did person to person contacts
between artists and engineers making
a formal process of collaboration.
Here is what's considered the first
digital artwork.
I mean, I think it's crazy.
It was a nude fucking Hey man,
patriarchy never goes away.
Computer Nude Studies in perception
one studies the perception
4 million.
The most widely circulated early
artwork made using a computer.
Look at that thing that's back when
you had to, like, spend four days
for something to print out. And
you're you're like, Oh, my God, I
finally got some porn.
This is Quantum.
Kevin McCoy. This is what's
considered the first NFT.
Here it is. 2014 idea to use
blockchain technology creating
indelible provenance and ownership
of digital images of this game.
Quantum first of ever be recorded in
this way.
Great artist.
In 2017,
Cryptopunks came out.
Cryptopunks launched a fixed set of
10,000 items in mid 2017.
So funny.
In crypto land, 2017 is like
total O.G..
You were there and became one of
the first inspirations for the MRC
721 standard, the I.R.S.
721 Standard That is a protocol,
smart contract protocol.
Remember they were talking about the
contract, the token.
So this is a contract.
And what's important to me about
this, because for those late to the
game, you have to bear in mind this.
Imagine you're on the ground floor
of Nfts and someone
puts these out there, these guys,
and there's 10,000 affixed and
they start selling. These are
profile pictures like you buy one
and that becomes your profile
picture. You got it.
Simple. Seem silly enough.
Sweet.
What? What has become known
is these things are worth gobs of
cash at the start. Millions of
dollars, each one of them.
But you didn't know that at the
time.
It's not like this started that way.
This. This the crypto punks thing
all of a sudden demonstrate to
people there is a vast
interest on the Internet
of people having images that
represent them.
And because they're one of a kind.
Their value grows up a
lot.
Scarcity. It's almost like digital
arts. And finding scarcity.
And the basic economic principles.
So profile pictures in a tease.
The abbreviation refers to proper
use of these entities as little
profile pictures of social media
sites. Oh, this is Moon Birds.
I don't know if you seen that new
puppy project.
So here's CryptoKitties by a group
and you start seeing and we're now
in the world of video games and art
are very much related.
You know, video games surpassed film
and television and music as
the number one cultural influence in
the world.
So, you know, I'm like, I'm going
to long. I just thinking, you know,
when the pandemic came, my friend
Zain said to me, he goes, think of
the pandemic.
As a global boot camp for the
Internet.
Like everyone's going to get online
and everyone's going to be familiar
with it. And it's almost like all of
this stuff is going to come, but it
just sped up.
Right. And who was in the driver's
seat? The video game generation.
They've all been online.
They all understand scarcity, all of
a sudden, avatars, a whole design
thing. Oh, got it.
CryptoKitties was the first game to
be built on the Ethereum network.
I mentioned that players by trade
and Breguet,
but due to the game's population,
highlight several issues with
healthier and more, especially when
it comes to scaling.
That said, these basic
tricks that we're learning, they're
the fundamental building blocks of
what becomes nfts, and
they seem silly, but they're basic
experiments that take off.
And I think it's important to
appreciate what they do.
And their silly looks, I think,
is actually even more cool
because they look so dumb
and the importance of them so
radically important.
Mert Pok So this is the project I
mentioned. This happened not so long
ago. It the money
$91 million.
But this is the way it worked.
It was sold as an open condition.
Bias to purchase any number of
tokens, starting with the unit price
of $575, which
increased by $25
every 6 hours.
By the end, the tokens sold for
a total of $91.8 million.
And I forget the number.
Yeah, there was 28,983
people bought that project.
Just can you imagine going to a
physical gallery and having that
project?
Hold on.
We got 20,000 people coming by
today. Byers is
there. Gallagher says 20,000.
Byers
is not even exist.
Do we understand what it means to
have 28,000 people by
a singular artwork?
This is iax shells, although
it's a yard a.k.a.
IIRC shells.
By the way, I figured out my name
could be an eight zero
nado.
Yo, I'm going to rebrand.
So more than 15 years ago.
Tor Onion Services were brought to
digital life and ecosystem for
onions and blue. Me ever since.
This is a project where they
made one of a kind digital artwork,
a generative art piece derived using
private key, the very first onion
service. Oh, let's see it in work.
Let's see it.
I think these are dope.
Okay. Thought someone's telling me
to move along. Okay.
Here we go.
This is generative art.
I often.
This is a kind of a genre in digital
art that you may be familiar with.
I sometimes wonder, do you mean
art made on a computer?
When you say generative art.
But certainly what it is, you know,
some people credit Sol Lewitt as
being the first generative artist.
And so much as it's a rule system
or a program that produces itself.
This is an L.A.
artist you might know name or freak
out at all.
Whoa.
Trippy.
That's awesome. Okay. And then
there's a thing called on chain art,
another genre.
And this is the actual art that
lives on the blockchain itself.
It's most of this art
is pointed to from the blockchain.
It lives on a other service, so
the actual contract points to it.
But some art actually lives on
the blockchain is the code on the
blockchain, and thus the art
looks like tech nerd art.
It's like code.
I mean, this looks like code art,
but it's on the blockchain.
So this is
implemented with metadata and smart
contract both existing on the
blockchain. Here's some examples of
that. And then of course I got to
shill finally for Art World Project
I'm involved in.
This is a project by the artist
Waleed Rau that we're launching
with. It's called Festival of
Gratitude.
It is a series of birthday cakes for
dictators, sheikhs, shakers, CEOs
and goats.
If the 20th century started as the
era of the dictator with World War
One giving birth to Dada, the
early 21st century is no exception,
with the age of the dictator
being very much upon us.
Whether it's someone
who's being investigated right now
in the United States government,
but also across the world, we have
Erdogan, we have Modi,
we have Bolsonaro.
We have a world where the Democrat
and of course, here we're
celebrating the birthday, his 69th
birthday is coming up. Vladimir
Putin,
which this is a birthday cake for
him.
And then this.
We will also have available for a
large scale these slices
with his visage.
And I think we're going to have an
allow list for everybody.
So if you want to get pre-purchase
on that anyways, I'm shilling I'm
grossly shilling for this project.
But all that said and done, I want
to say this ultimate the most
important thing. And then we have
artists all present their projects
and they're phenomenal.
A digital art has been around
a long time that is not new,
and they were a secondary step
cousin to the art world because I
think because they didn't have an
economy the way nonfungible tokens
allows and painting always
made more. And I always thought my
friends that made great digital art
eventually got exhausted by not
getting love from the art world, and
they went off and worked at Google.
And then I from my friend,
my friend Jonah was a Peretti
was an intern at this place, IBM,
and then he started BuzzFeed.
And I was like, Jonah's
like, I'm not getting in.
I'm not getting any love being an
anarchist artist.
No one cares about digital art.
I'm going to go start BuzzFeed.
All right. Well, that worked out.
But then but I want to say digital
art. There's so many artists doing
so many things that are interesting.
It's an extraordinarily important
thing. So let's keep the love for
artists. And with that said, let's
bring out our first artist.
I believe it's Glenn Kaino.
Give it up for Glenn.
I think if he's coming.
Here is a quick one.
Hey. Hello.
Hello. Los Angeles.
Yeah. Early Saturday.
Awesome.
Great to be here.
That's myself. I thinking that don't
s there and Claudia and the hammer
and everyone for being here.
You know, strange times.
Interesting times.
I'm going to take you through one of
my projects just by
way of background.
My my studio practice is very
heterogeneous. It's always, though
idea driven.
And the ideas
take me through sometimes different,
complicated, circuitous stories.
And this one that I'll talk about
today has led to
a large scale NFT project
that we can use as a basis for
conversation about a few other
things. But and then, you
know, just by way of other quick
background, you know, in that
meandering of my career, I have
had sort of interesting
experiences like at the forefront
of different technologies.
I was the chief creative officer of
a thing called Napster, which is
like a peer to peer music service.
And I was able to help
take that to be make it legal.
And we made the first streaming
service ever.
And so it's been very interesting to
watch and track some
of the parallels between
distributed art making with
distributed music and a few
other things that we can talk about
later as well. But this project is
called Pass the Baton.
But if you don't mind, I'm going to
segway away from digital into highly
analog, away from the future, into
the past, talk about
stories in 5 minutes, and then it'll
segway and you'll see how my brain
works and how we connect this all
together.
And so is anyone familiar with
this image.
So this is an image of Tommie Smith,
John Carlos and Peter Norman.
In 1968, after winning
the gold in the
200 men's at the Mexico City
Olympics, Tommie
performed this salute.
I had seen this first when I was in
high school, and I impacted me so
much as an image of courage and
sacrifice that I actually had a four
by five
small image of it, black and white,
just like this, taped to the corner
of my iMac in my studio.
And one day, about ten years ago,
a friend of mine walked into the
studio, pointed out, and he said,
Oh, Coach Smith, you want a medium?
And I was like, Look, to be totally
transparent and Tommy knows this.
If you're watching on stream, I
didn't know if he was alive.
I didn't know anything about him at
that time. I just knew what I
thought the image meant to me.
And but I know that when someone
says, Hey, Coach Smith, like coach,
coach is only the name.
You tell someone who you call
someone who has been your coach.
And so I was like, of course I want
to meet him. And my friend walked to
the corner of the studio and he
starts texting somebody and he comes
back a few minutes later because
they want to meet you. And I'm like,
Get out of town.
I had no idea. So I said,
Where do they live?
Turns out they live in Atlanta.
So I Expedia two tickets right then.
And three days later I'm at his door
in Atlanta and he shakes my hand and
he sits me on the couch like y'all,
and he starts playing the race that
he won for me
on a VHS tape, like
step by step, narrating everything
he's thinking, right?
And on like an hour on the hour,
his wife, DeLoach, who's also at the
time and still is his manager now,
my good friend and also I might
say I was watching as well.
She's also the mother of Montell
Jordan. This is how we do it.
And that's how we did it.
Exactly right.
So I'm sitting there in the house of
Tommie Smith and this is how we do
it. And I'm watching the race and
I'm getting narrated.
And an hour on the hour, his wife to
Lois says, Tommy, shut up, Glenn,
why are you here?
Tommy, we'll talk all night long if
you let him. But we need to know why
you're here.
I was like, Look, I'm a conceptual
artist and I'm not here to sell you
anything. I don't I don't actually
have an idea.
I have an observation, if I may.
And they say, What's that?
I say, Well, I was born after that
happened. So for me it's always been
an image since I've been a symbol.
But for you it's highly personal.
You shook my hand with that hand.
You brush your teeth with that has
you drive with the hand.
But the rest of us, most of us, we
just know that fist up in the air.
And so I say, what if we could
collaborate on it on a
on a project of some sort that
allows you to be a witness for this
rich history that you've created
for all of us to learn from.
And at that point, we're all getting
emotional, he says. What's next?
And I said, You come to L.A.
and I'll take the arm off your body.
And he was like, What is this
voodoo?
I'm going to make a cast. If I'm a
sculptor, I'll make a cast.
And so so we actually took him
to a facility to make a cast of his
arm.
And this is like an old photo now.
And I'll say that when the cast
came off, this is just a small,
amazing bit of storytelling in
history. When the cast came off, he
pointed out that little dark spot
you see by his glove, like below his
love has a dark spot on his arm.
He pointed that and he says, You
know what that is? And I said, What
is that, sir?
He says, That's a classic muscle.
I said, What do you mean? He says,
You only get that muscle from
picking cotton.
So when I'm up on that stage, I flex
it to let everyone know that
even if you pick cotton, you're up
here with me.
At that point, I obviously
was very moved.
I asked him if we could actually
record and film all of our work
and interaction together as we have
done for ten years.
And it's been I'll show you some
clips of that. But a few months
later, maybe nine months or a year
later, we debuted this
artwork, which
is a 100 foot long bridge
made out of 201 meter arm
lengths of Tommie Smith's arm
at a monument in
an exhibition in D.C..
And I'm happy to say it has just
been acquired by the Smithsonian
Museum of American Art as the center
of southern hand.
So great.
And but I obviously didn't know
this when when when we were when we
were doing this. And so I was like,
oh, man. Like
I got to, you know, we got to meet
President Obama. This is like, you
know, like 2015.
And I was like, I want
to point this bridge at the White
House just as a karmic I'm going
to put it out into the ether that
that's going to happen
because it was really funny.
Like what he did was
he had it go like this.
He had a bunch of wish
list items that say things that were
gaps in history that have yet to be
connected.
And so so we had gone on
a ten year I have now been on a ten
year journey with
him to do things like I
was able to he was never been on the
cover of the Wheaties, Wheaties box.
And so this is not an actually an
artistic representation of we
actually call the CEO Wheaties.
I said, get on the right side of
history.
And 18
months later we able to release a
Wheaties box with Tommy's image on
it. And we got 1.4 billion
impressions.
It was the most popular, most
seen Wheaties box in history.
We did a headphone cup collaboration
with the company Beats headphones,
and we were able to bring Tommy
Story to 4.5 billion
people through the course of the
headphone collab. And LeBron James
was at three times the NBA finals.
And I'll tell you, on the inside,
it's a secret thing that the all
that no. One I know that we're
public, but it's like a secret for
all of us.
Is that on the inside?
When they had me put my name on it,
I made the L in Glen a Lakers
L just so that every
team that because we gifted it to
everyone in the NBA, all the players
and all the all the opposing
teammates had a Lakers l in their
ear. And it is not
coincidental that we won the
championship that year.
I'm just saying, when you're getting
counterprogramming every day, when
you're when you're warm ups, it's
it's it's meaningful.
And so so
we then documented all of
our work together in a film
called With John Arms that that we
were graciously nominated for an
Emmy and debuted at Tribeca Film
Festival. And a lot of these stories
were in it. And I'll play you the
quick trailer for it.
1968 black athletes
were expected to perform
and shut up.
We were dealing with racism.
We were dealing with not having
a voice.
Running became my
voice.
I knew something had to be done.
My next move would be immortalized
in history.
He gave us all hope.
That, too, can do something.
That's a hero.
Is patriotism, protesting.
Oppression of patriotism, blind
allegiance, despite everything.
It's a whole different thing to
square up with white supremacy.
Change doesn't happen in America
without laws.
After that Olympics,
he was ostracized from society.
When I return home, the only
job I could get
was washing cars.
One day, a car pulled
up.
They were FBI agents.
Tommy was a victim of a fear of
radical thought.
Tommy's dreams had to be altered
because of that gesture.
It destroyed what I love
running in my family.
I hit rock bottom.
I needed someone
to hold a hand out.
I did not recognize
him.
It has to be a change.
Somehow a Japanese-American artist
became one of the captains of Tommie
Smith's legacy team.
Tommy Salute made such an impact on
me that I had to collaborate on a
project with him.
I said, What if we could make a cast
of your arm and then we'll figure
out what to make?
I thought it was admirable for him
coming and doing this.
He took a stand with me
to make the change.
I woke up.
I came.
Sitting on
my projects with Tommy allows you to
be a witness for this rich history
of the castle you created.
That history is happening
right now.
I will not let ourselves neglect
the next Tommy Smith.
The work that Glen and Tommy have
done is brotherhood.
It doesn't matter who you are.
We're all in this together.
For 50 years, people
have been putting words in my mouth.
That Smith pride
in midstream.
It means togetherness for.
One. As a nation.
Maybe bring
up.
It's available on Starz and Apple TV
if you want to go. But now.
So. So yeah.
So, yes.
So we made this film and got,
you know, went around the country
doing workshops with kids and
talking about stuff. And, you
know, as far as one of the
requests and the conversations that
really led into the NFT project
or the first part of that story was
when we first sat down, you know,
this before the Wheaties box and
before the Beats headphones day.
Lois, Tommy's wife, said to me,
You know, you don't have
any goals for this partnership, but
we have three goals, so that's
great. What are they? They said,
one, we want to meet Oprah,
you know, for our part.
And they said, two, we want to be in
the Smithsonian.
And three, we want to be the
president. And this is just so we're
clear, President Obama.
And so this is this is how long we
will work together. And so I was
like, okay, great. And it just so
happens that I have in my past spent
a lot of time working also with
Oprah Winfrey. And I had seen her
like after I got that request from
them, I saw them.
I saw Oprah a few weeks later
and I said, oh.
My God, you know, I'm.
Working with Tommie Smith and
Oprah's so great.
She was like Tommie Smith.
Tommie Smith, like, you know,
exactly like she does the time.
And so I said I said she would love
to meet you.
And she said, sure,
I'll meet him tomorrow morning.
And I was like, I didn't you know, I
didn't expect that.
And so I booked you tickets
again on my phone, just like I did
before for Tommy Delta,
you know? And I was like, you know,
Hey, Tommy, I got you a meeting with
Oprah. And it's tomorrow morning at
9:00, you know, and he was his son.
I'm too old to jump on a plane right
now to go meet it. We'll do it some
other time. And I was like,
look, you know, look, if you
all corner me outside at
a Christian and you ask
me to do three impossible things and
I do the first one and you
pass, I kind of think I'm off the
hook for all three. Right?
That's just the whole that's like
the rule.
Apparently not so much, though,
because February the year later of
2016,
the was called me up, she says, I
just want to remind you, you're on
the clock.
And I said, I said, What does that
mean? I don't know what that means.
Like fantasy basketball.
What does that mean for like
for for you?
And she said, we want to meet the
president, not an ex-president.
And I was like, Oh, that's a gantlet
throw down or a glove.
And so so I called everyone,
all the curators that I know, anyone
that knew President Obama, I knew I
know a couple of his really good
friends. I called up people and I
the answer I got was everything from
no to hell no, you know,
and then to like one time they were
like, Oh, we'll get you in in the
fall. And I'm like, I hope he's
campaigning for someone in the fall.
And then they finally say, Well, if
you can come to D.C.
on official business and,
you know, we can maybe, you know, up
your security clearance and see if
we can get you and tell the
president you're there. And they
didn't know that I had just met
Lonnie Bunch, and he's on the
film. And Lonnie,
most notably, did not have yet
anything for his new museum
from Tommie Smith.
And this is before the artwork was
even, you know, a thing.
And so and so and
so what we did was we
got to DC, you know, with Tommy,
and then the president invited us in
and on the way into it to the Oval
Office, I had made this drawing for
President Obama of a of a of
a Tommie actually passing a baton
to the fourth runner and the first
time set a world record race.
And we
gave it to President Obama. And on
the back,
Tommie wrote this inscription, I can
only imagine the link, the passage,
but most importantly, the baton has
not been dropped.
Congrats on The Magnificent Eight.
And then and then this is like my
little by little humblebrag photo,
though, which is there's four people
smiling, not five, you know.
And that's because, like, when I saw
the photographer out there, I
thought it was a six person. I'm
trying to get Tommy's down where I'm
standing, you know?
But President Obama was like
because, like Glenn Simon took a
photo and I was like I was like, oh,
but I didn't practice what to do.
And she sees me juggling to go
around. He goes, he goes.
From the moment y'all walked in
here, it's been me, Tommy, me,
Tommy. C'mere, birthday boy.
And it was hand like this.
And I don't know how to stand with
the president is like B-Boy style.
What are we doing? And so.
So my hand, like, accidentally comes
in and I'm actually you don't see my
hand because it's in his jacket
and I'm giving him a squeeze.
And that's what that is.
Right.
But but this whole time, just to
fast forward that this whole time
we were being asked obviously to do
NFT projects and you know, my
background in digital work
got back to Tommy's house and I saw
this, which was the actual button
from my drawing that we gave to the
president.
And you know, by way
of just other background, two weeks
after our visit, President Obama
went on the DNC for Hillary and he
said, I'm going to be a private
citizen. I'm going to pass the
baton, you know, and in
12 speeches, he said, pass
the baton in two weeks time frame
from our visit. Now, I'm not going
to say that we wrote that or put
that in his head, but it happened,
and that's just a fact.
But I went to his house.
I saw I saw this baton and I said,
man, that looks amazing.
That's like a sculpture.
You know, he had used the red
seventies label maker tape.
So I put his team names and the
split times on there, and it looked
like a beautiful sculpture and it
also looked like a light saber.
And as y'all don't like Star Wars
fans like me, you know, every Jedi
has its own lightsaber.
And I was like, Oh, man, that'll be
amazing.
I didn't want to do transactional
NFT. I've done that as well.
I wanted to use a smart contract,
which we could talk about later on
as a conceptual gesture.
And so we said, What would we do if
we could do this? And so what we did
was actually we deconstructed
the button, made it different
colorways, made different grip
tapes, and we put different names
on the baton, and we generated
four teams of 1968
batons and signifying for the year
and made over 7800
batons.
And the teams then the names we put
on there, or some of
the biggest and most active civil
rights leaders of the moment, you
know, everyone from John Legend to
Megan Rapinoe from the pop cultural
side to incite
the Tata Brown and,
you know, fantastic people.
David Johns and, you know,
Justin Barge or Tiger.
Eddie helped us put the whole thing
together and we assembled,
you know, a coalition of 80
million people that the batons won
when they went to public, mint
served.
We raised hundreds of thousands of
dollars for these non-profits
because the Smart contract was
written so that,
you know, some money went to production,
but the rest of the money all went
to, you know,
these non-profits, you know, to
create a scalable economy
for for that work.
And then we also committed, through
the utility of the baton to host
ongoing conversations about social
justice.
And we just did one a few weeks back
over at Pace Gallery
with Bree Baker, Latosha Brown,
Aisha Shabazz and so forth, and a
bunch of people. And, you know, and
I'd say just in conclusion, one of
the things that I wanted to talk
about tonight and or today and have
you all tonight, look, it's dark on
morning. It's not even brunch
is a word that I think that is
really for me.
But more so than any of the
technical conversations, more so
than any of the economic
conversations there was there was a
word that I think that for me
defines this opportunity
and this moment for NFT and the
landscape and that's community.
Right. And I think because one thing
is about NFT landscape is that like,
you know, it's an opportunity
for a community to get together
to agree that something is valuable,
you know, and like we're all in the
room here because you're curious,
right? But we're a community, you
know, the hammer.
We've assembled people together.
And you're curious about if this art
form of this medium has value.
All the cryptopunks, everything that
Naito talked about, straight,
you know, communities have gotten
together and what they've done is
they've expanded their fiat to
assert themselves that these things
have value in art.
Our work with Pass the Baton was
this idea is like, can we in this
nascent infrastructure, can
we suggest the idea that
human rights has a value?
You know, that that equality has
value, that the value systems
of the people that we placed on the
baton are enough
to create an ecosystem
of value and to do that.
And we were very heartened that
thousands of people bought the
batons and, you know, joined our
community. And we have a robust
discourse now. And and so I think
that one of the things that is the
underpinning, you know, despite
all the confusion of all the
different technological components,
which I'm sure will be untangled in
the writing all over the course of
the next several years.
One thing that is not fungible
or changeable on this circumstance
is the fact that it all is about
humans.
You know, it's all about us and it's
all value systems. And one of our
motivation is so yes, I'm
looking for the conversation and
thank you for having me.
That's a see.
Also, I'm back.
Hello.
Hey, I wish I had Obama
in my presentation.
Damn, it was supposed to go after
that. All right.
Well, GM, as they say,
you didn't put that in your
presentation.
Yeah.
GM Good morning.
So I'm
Mieke Marple and I'm going to talk
about the Medusa collection,
which is a set of 2500
generative Art Nfts
that I launched in fall of last
year.
Uh, and as with
Glen, I'm going to start with
an analog precedent.
So the Medusa collection really
starts here.
This is an exhibition of paintings
that I did in 2019
called Bad Feminist after
the book by Roxane Gay,
which was the first time she talked
about being gang raped
as a 12 year old girl.
And I chose.
This is also the first time I worked
with Medusa as a subject
matter, and
I chose Medusa
to work through some of my own
feelings of monstrous ness.
As some of you might know,
I used to be an art dealer.
I was co-owner of Night Gallery
from 2011 to 2016.
Ages 25 to 30,
roughly.
And when I left at the end of 2016
to focus on myself and do
some deep soul searching,
it was a really shocking
transition for me.
My inbox went from 50
to 100 emails a day.
It felt like to one or two
generic emails a week.
And I took this falling off of
attention really personally.
I felt like something
was wrong with me.
Something was monstrous
that I'd been so loved.
I can tell I'm getting emotional.
They've been so loved.
And then it just, like, evaporated.
So I started drawing Medusa
and I didn't know Medusa's whole
story when I first started drawing
her, but quickly found out
that you say to actually been raped
by the God Poseidon
and turned into a monster
by his wife, the God Athena.
So Medusa, the person we think
of as the quintessential female
monster, is actually a
survivor of sexual abuse.
Yeah.
And this I felt like just
spoke volumes.
If I spoke volumes to the ways
in which we so rarely
scratch under the surface,
just discover why monsters
are monsters.
And also that so many of
these, quote unquote, monsters
start off as victims of
abuse, often
sexual.
And on a personal level, the
join me do said better helped me
see and understand myself
how my own history
with sexual abuse
fed into my own self perception
of monstrous ness.
So this was a really healing,
really personal, really heartfelt
show.
But I was really aware of the
limitations of this,
of exhibiting paintings in a gallery
space.
First of all, there's only four
paintings that can be owned
by four people, Max.
Also felt like this status of the
paintings as luxury commodities
overshadowed some of the content.
And there's no good way for me
to have
a dialog, like have a real
connection with people that might
have come into the show and
and been touched by the content.
So fast forward to
2021.
My partner told me about
a friend of his who had sold a
painting and then separately
sold an image of the painting.
And this I thought was.
The craziest thing I ever heard.
Why would anyone pay money
for an image? They could pull off a
website for free.
But I'm a business
minded person, and if there's
a way to make more money without
doing much more work, I
am game.
So I did that.
I minted my first NFT
is where images of paintings not
dies but a different pair.
And they sold right away to a great
collector who immediately
afterwards put me in a really
prestigious benefit
NFT auction
with eight other artists,
one of whom was Beeple.
And this was two weeks
after his $69
million sale.
So I had just minted my first NFT
two weeks earlier and
suddenly I was basically in the same
room in the same
show with people
at my NFT, was literally like
underneath his on the nifty
gateway screen.
His ended up selling for 69 million.
His in that is sold for 6
million, but mine
sold for the humble price of
the equivalent of 25
something thousand, which was
much more than my actual paintings
went for.
So NFT has had
my attention, needless to say,
but wasn't really convinced that
just pictures of paintings were the
most interesting
thing I could do.
So I kind of.
I kind of observed this space
for a few months knowing
that I wanted to do something
ambitious.
Unsure what that would be,
or like how to do it authentically
for me and my practice.
Until I came across this.
How many people have heard of world
of women?
All right.
That's more than. That's good.
So you've already been introduced to
PFG collections, these collectible
sets of, like, ten k
unique artworks.
So World of Women was the first
really successful ten K
collectible that was depicted
that depicted and targeted
women.
And the thing about these
collectibles, these are actually
also made generative, Leigh, just
like some of the generative art you
saw by Rafiq and eggshells.
But the thing about owning these
is that by owning one,
you don't just owned the artwork.
It's also a ticket
into a larger community,
a community that gets together
at conferences, that has contests,
that has subgroups with common
interests,
that honor, discord, etc..
And.
This was a real light bulb moment
for me because
as an art dealer, I had also
very much been a community manager.
I put on events once
or twice a week sometimes.
But as when I left to
focus on being an artist.
My.
My life was very solitary.
It was sort of head down in the
studio just
focusing on my work.
But with this I saw how to be a
community organizer
as an artist.
And how do they integrate these
two very real sides
of myself into
like a single bigger vision?
So that is what brings me to
the Medusa collection and.
Thanks for that.
So the Medusa collection is made
very similarly to these
these ten KP collections,
where
though instead of having one central
image, I actually
had six and they're all different.
Medusa's based on
Medusa sculptures by famous
Italian
art historical men
Bernini. Casanova.
Fellini.
And each of these
Mideast heads was basically
a very large Photoshop file
of 7080 layers
that were categorized into
like eight or nine categories.
And so basically how it worked is an
algorithm would come and randomly
choose a different
variable option
from each of the different
categories and put it together
into a single
complete digital Medusa
painting.
And it did this 2500
times, which
might sound like a lot, but
I actually want to calculate the
total possible permutations
and it's something like 2.5 billion.
So it's a relatively small sample
size.
But this project,
in ways that I'm still digesting,
really changed my life.
It changed my relationship to art.
It changed my relationship to
myself.
In handing over some of the creative
decision making to an algorithm,
I really learned how to
let go of control
and.
It's kind of like, really like
confronting your deepest
fear, right?
That like, you can just, like, let
go and trust that
something bigger than you has, like,
got your back.
And in doing that, like
I could tell, like the work was so
much less inhibited.
It was so much bolder.
It was so much freer
than anything I'd made before.
And I felt like it was like
reflecting my
deepest subconscious back to me
is so much wilder and it was so much
more rageful
than I could have that I knew I had
in me.
And it also
met a lot of the unfulfilled
needs that I had from earlier.
I was able to reach a much broader
audience.
I was able to directly connect
with that audience over Twitter or
discord or in-person meet ups
and.
I think more than all
of that, it really felt.
That I was making contemporary
art, that I was a contemporary
artist, that I was using
the tools of our time
to reflect
the moment we're in, that
I was inserting my own personal
poetic glitch
into this language of
computers and this endless
stream of digital content.
That we take for granted often
that I was inserting.
Yeah, a.
I don't know. Just a moment of
self in that.
So, you know, I
think a lot of you are here to
discover if nfts are for you
and.
I guess what I would leave you with
is.
You know, if you're posting
your work on Instagram,
if you're using email, if
you're doing any kind of digital
mock ups, you're already a digital
artist.
And we live in a digital era.
And I think it actually behooves
everyone here to bring
conscientiousness
into that, to bring intention
into that, and
be the most contemporary,
contemporary artist that you can.
And I'll leave it with that.
But thank you so much for having me.
I appreciate
that.
Well, I.
My name is Paul Pfeiffer and
I'm super happy to be here.
I'm going to take a different
approach because
I think I might be the only one
of the four who's
like just in
well, hasn't actually made an NFT
yet.
So I'm really going analog,
not analog but pre NFT.
I'm very excited to be working with
Nato Thompson and the folks at
Art World on an NFT
project. And that's why I'm here
actually.
Why they invited me, I guess has to
do with the fact that I
come from a background in video.
And digital video specifically
starting in the late nineties.
So and
in the late nineties, i.
I.
They found it kind of the most
negative way to structure a video,
to just take a short
piece of found footage and just loop
it back and forth, because that's
what all the video editing software
does. Anyway, I actually come from a
printmaking background
and they are now from 2022
perspective, it looks like, you
know, like a medium or
something like that.
But really it was just kind of like
reflecting the language of the
software itself and what it
sort of wants to do in the
editing suite and
using that as a format.
Yeah. So
I really wanted me to, like, think
of a project and.
I happened to be talking to a friend
who was telling
me about this thing that was
happening just over the past couple
of years during COVID
in which.
Like towns in the Philippines
where a lot of people have lost
their jobs, has
started playing this
game called Axie Infinity
and
doing things within Axie Infinity
that would which is a crypto
based game to earn
crypto, which ultimately could be
taken out of the crypto world and
turned into real money.
So basically people were playing the
game as a job
to replace the jobs that were lost
and sort of, I guess traditional
they call it, you know, traditional
fields.
Up until COVID.
Axie Infinity is a digital
community where players can sell
their in-game characters for real
money using the Ethereum blockchain.
Players can breed their actions to
discover exciting new combinations.
Axes start off as eggs and
require loving attention from their
owners to grow up.
Take care of your axes and earn
experienced points by completing
daily activities.
Use experienced points to level up
your axis and unlock new abilities
which can be used in battle.
You can even trade your axes for
cryptocurrency on our marketplace.
Find out more on axie infinity
dot com available now.
I just downloaded that from YouTube
last night. And
what I wanted to draw from that
and what I find interesting is
that what seems to happen
in the game is starting
from breeding and
then nurturing and,
and then ultimately going into a
sort of competition.
Um, and then how that
relates to
the marketization or like the
financialization.
It's interesting to me in the way
that it sort of mimics
fundamental biological
or life patterns.
It's basically showing you
a kind of life cycle from cradle
to grave in which
you control and
and monetize the process.
It's really it's the process of
production on a biological
level, sort of
melded with production on a
digital level.
And I intuitively
find that intriguing.
It.
For me, it blurs the boundary
between what one
would consider, you know, one's
unique identity or
lifespan and
and what it might mean to bring
oneself into the digital realm
or into the realm of cryptocurrency,
into a marketplace,
the kind of the.
The gray area ness of it intrigues
me so.
Yeah. That's, that's what I was
thinking about in relation to this
NFT project and
the next and where it led was
just, you know, the Philippines
had an election just a couple of
weeks ago and.
One of the candidates was
was Manny Pacquiao.
And it really intrigued me.
The.
Just a coincidence of,
you know, probably the most
monetized, invisible
athlete.
From the Philippines becoming a
politician. And actually
he has a sort of triple life as a
person who gives
sermons as a religious leader.
So the kind of merging of.
Professional sports, entertainment
like nation state politics
and religion
to me blurs the boundaries
again.
Between what?
You know, in the previous century,
we considered very
important to keep separate church
and state.
And the role of these
institutions inherited from the 20th
century really like the inherited
political categories of
the previous century
and how they are transforming
in this era of new technologies
and how they really relate to the
propagation of belief systems.
Seems to me like
I want to say immersive.
In a way.
So
the idea that I had with Art
World was to do a series of
and it's based on.
All of the fights of Manny Pacquiao
in which he lost.
And as a video editor, what I'm
doing is going in
and working with
the material of video,
almost like a painter and.
Kind of breaking it down into
layers, building it
back up again,
playing with relationships between
foreground and background.
To transform the image.
So actually I wanted to
go back to something that Naito said
at the beginning, that one
of the things that.
Art can add to the conversation.
Today about NAFTA has something to
do with like consciousness of
media.
And that's my
favorite thing.
Like that's in a way the
playground that I choose to play in
and I'm very interested in in.
What media is and what mediation
means.
I was telling folks earlier today
that I thought that what's
happening in this conference
is a like a
meeting of witches.
And what I mean by that is it
occurred to me that.
As as much as we might
be coming from different.
Backgrounds.
One thing that really
to me unites
artists and technologists is
an interest in
in mediation.
And I think of mediation as like.
A meta element.
It's like the.
Water that the fish swims in
and there's like a famous well, not
famous, but
a Jewish friend of mine said that
you can encapsulate
the Jewish critical tradition and in
the phrase, the fish can't see the
water.
It seems like an enigmatic thing to
say, but.
One of the ways, I take it is that.
As an editor.
When I'm editing, I'm taking
found material
and I'm doing something to it.
And usually the material I
work with has protagonists
in it.
But in a sense, I am also a
protagonist.
But I'm.
Made invisible in the end.
You can't see my hand.
And yet I am
asserting my subjectivity.
Through the material.
There's like a.
An analog to that in say like
a boxing match where you
have opponents
and that fight is being
mediated by a referee.
So all that's happening is I'm
taking out the opponent
in a way you're seeing an
intensified like
or you're honing in on the
sort of hits to the body that
are occurring and you're seeing the
mediation of the referee kind
of dancing around and.
It's almost like a third party
in that situation.
I also read at some point
think
about the relationship between.
Jokes and humor.
And revolutions and innovation,
that they all have a similar
structure in that if you
break it down structurally,
there's always three parties
involved
in a joke.
One person is acting on another
in a way that sort of
they don't realize there's a part
of the joke.
But there's always a third party
in that, which is the viewer,
the person playing
the joke on the other person
and the person who's the butt of the
joke don't know that the joke
is happening.
And in fact, there is no joke
unless that third person laughs.
So in a way, you know,
the.
I mean, I find it intriguing
in a way, like there's so many
narratives that are familiar that
appear to have to.
Protagonists are antagonists,
but in fact, there's always a third.
And I link that back to an idea of
what mediation is.
So what intrigues me about mediation
is that it's a kind of
necessary third party to.
A conflict, let's say, or to
an exchange.
And yet the effectiveness
of that third party
is based on their relative
invisibility
or their relative ambiguity
to the situation.
It's kind of the relationship
between foreground and background.
There's a project that Glenn Kaino
has done where he's
like studied
magicians.
This and a famous
performance space for magicians here
in L.A., I believe.
I'm super intrigued about that
project because it's a similar
thing, like, you know what?
Like the magician in some ways, like
a mediator.
Of perception or let's say like
sleight of hand is is
all about the mediation.
And the mediation isn't complete
until it's sort of like.
Well, it's completed in the mind of
the perceiver.
And in a sense it's
a negotiation in which the the
say like in sleight of hand,
the sleight of hand artist
is aware of certain inherent
blindspots and,
and uses them to produce
an effect that appears.
Well, that defies kind of logical
reasoning.
Yeah, I.
Like I feel like there's a relationship
too to nfts
in the sense that.
Well, it's occurred to me
that in a sense,
what like the blockchain does is it
reveals or brings into the
foreground the mediation
aspect.
Which seems like almost like a
contradiction in terms.
If the effectiveness of the
mediating element
is.
Is has to do with its relative
invisibility.
What does it mean to actually
foreground
the mediation process?
I also associate the mediation
process with change
or, you know, or revolution.
It's really taking like everything
that's expected and
then pivoting on
it in order to produce an effect
that produces change,
a change.
And so, you
know, I mean, it seems obvious to me
that in a way, the motivator behind
NAFTA is.
Has to do with a kind of, you
know, the fact that we're in a
moment of like extreme change.
Whether, you know,
technology is responsible for it or
whether technology,
you know, is is seeking to provide
a kind of way
through, it is
debatable. But, you know,
both in terms of not just the.
Technological evolution.
But. But obviously.
That we're at a state of war on
a global level.
And.
So there is a lot of conflict.
And as Walid Rod's project
points out, there's, you know, in a
way like new
types of
construct control structures or
kind of social formations
that appear to like kind of jump
over the assumption of, say, like
democratic grounding
and go back to like feudal systems.
There's something very nonlinear
about like the behavioral patterns
that are showing up now.
So sorry, I kind
of get lost in it, but in some ways
I want to take this opportunity to
address.
Yeah. To go back to Manny Pacquiao.
In a sense, what I was thinking.
Following gaming was
about sports activities.
Like, I don't know if you guys are
aware, but there's a thing called
NBA top shots, which is like,
uh, like
a multibillion dollar
thing now, and it's sort
of like, well, here.
Oh.
So essentially what NBA top shots
is, is that you can collect and own
official NBA moments like you
can own that exact moment in NBA
history. It's almost like buying and
trading NBA basketball cards,
but rather than having them on a
piece of cardboard, you actually
have a little clip of that moment
and you own that moment digitally,
which means that it can never get
damaged or destroyed.
It doesn't have to get graded like
basketball cards do, and it's always
in perfect mint condition.
But the part that really sucked me
in as a collector, because you guys
know me, I'm a collector of
sneakers, and pretty much anything
that I can collect is that each one
of these moments have a serial
number, and some moments are
significantly rarer than others.
So like common moments, there are
tens of thousands of those
available, rare moments.
There are low thousands of those
available, and then legendary
moments, I believe they're only 99
or less of those moments available,
which means some of them are
insanely rare like this.
Joel Embiid Assist.
As you can see, there are only 50 of
these series one hollow 2020 moments
that exist.
Moments like these have value
because the mint size and added
value for badges.
This moment has the Topshot debut
badge, meaning that the play feature
is the player's first moment to
exist on NBA Top Shot.
The following items are what make a
moment valuable to collectors.
Other variables collectors tend to
keep an eye on are things like the
box score and what the play means in
terms of the end result of the game.
So yeah,
I mean, it seems obvious and like,
I mean what I want to say about
sports is
the reason why is since the
late nineties when
I started working with digital
media,
I gravitated to sports is not
because I have a background in it
like I don't really
it's actually more because I feel
like sports is
I mean as you know is
is so like important to
filter in society
and and because it's so familiar
and.
People love it or hate it.
And it means many things, you know,
like an Glenn Kaino project.
It becomes like the medium
for a kind of political expression
in certain historical situations
by virtue of its popularity, like
by virtue of the fact that it speaks
to everybody in a way, like
in some ways, the invisibility
of my hand as an editor becomes like
the most complete in in
when playing with images from the
field of sports like who I am
and what I'm doing and what effect
I proposed to have is actually
overshadowed by like your
familiarity or hatred
or love for sports or
for the athletes.
So I could be doing like three or
four or five different things
and I don't have to reveal myself.
I mean, in some ways, yeah, no,
I won't even go on.
So, I mean, the other thing about
sports is just that obviously
athletes are people who live on the
court.
They are monetized their
careers.
Can be very short and it can be very
brutal on the body.
So like axie infinity,
we're talking about a game that's
monetized and that
the.
Most basic biological
functions of the person
become the vehicle
for participation in the game.
For me, athletes in that
way, like art, has become
almost like an every person.
Representing all of us
the way that we live within.
Economic structures.
So I'm just going to end by saying
like.
Art world recently
told me that they talked to a lawyer
and the lawyers. Now they put the
fear of possible lawsuit
around intellectual property
because of the use of an image like
Pacquiao.
And so.
For now, we're putting a pause on
the project.
And then they asked me
if I had any other ideas.
And I said, I have.
And I was working on another
project. I just want to mention it
briefly.
But I can show you this first.
They.
I will actually put
this on my radar.
It's a.
An NFT project called Juneteenth,
and it seeks to address the kind
of the disparity between
black creators on Tik-Tok who invent
dances that then go viral.
But other people get the credit for
them for for the dances.
They become so popular, they get
billions of views.
But the original creator is sort of
like left in the dust.
So there's this.
Project that seeks to
establish.
This next bar as my favorite car.
And this time you shall
go on and do the two.
Stay in, cowboy, but
grab a sweetheart in Spain.
I want you.
To hold that.
What you see is the original
creators are being 3D scanned,
turned into holograms which can
be brought into the metaverse and
can also be distributed to appear
virtually on your phone
in whatever background you happen
to be in.
So it's about like increased
circulation.
And I just have a
question that I want to put on the
table, which is, you know,
it occurs to me that there
is a potential discrepancy between
the sort of social
justice intentions
of a project like this
and what the actual
effect is.
And there's a question for me of
whether the
tendencies of the medium
or, say, the mediation.
Vehicle.
Which has, in a way, a brain or a
logic of its own
and is not human,
but market driven.
Could it not possibly overwhelm
the sort of the humane intentions
of a project?
And so what?
Oh, I was going to quickly.
I'm thinking about.
Living statues.
In the subway and
how they might be engaged as a
normal like an.
A cipher for our current moment.
These performance who have developed
the craft to
be in the midst of people, commuters
who are going by and stay absolutely
spell still and
seek kind of, you know, monetary
compensation for this
performance.
And there's a number of them in New
York that.
I think the fact that they're
painted gold speaks of like
value.
The kind of, I don't know, the
mashing of, like,
uh.
The the person and the object
and value and
almost like a
borderline like homelessness.
To me like resonates an on
an uncanny level with.
You know, what might be like a
collective sort of future.
That's a.
Hello.
Hello, everyone.
So nice to see all of you today.
All of your beautiful, nifty,
curious faces.
Let's get started, shall we?
We're going to keep it.
Keep it cute. Keep it fun.
Oh. Oh.
I don't know what that was about,
but.
I got to ask you to forward.
Okay.
Well, here we go.
Here's me.
Welcome.
My name is Sarah Zucker,
a.k.a. the Sarah Show.
If you spend any time on
NFT Twitter, you may.
You may recognize my lovely long
standing avatar here and
all her lady boss
finery.
This is an artwork by my spouse,
Bronwyn Lundberg.
And the reason
I'm here today, I believe,
is because I have been auditioning
my artwork as Nfts since early
2019,
which has given
me this
very unique,
very psychedelic
viewpoint
of this entire phenomenon
as it began with
a very small number of
art nerds like myself,
just experimenting
and, you know, blew
up into the the zeitgeist
that we all know today.
So a bit about my artwork.
This is my art.
And this is this is for Esther, who
who loves cats, I hear.
My artwork could be described as
digital analog video visions.
I make use of the
interplay of obsolete
and cutting edge technology
to evoke a dimension of my
own imagination.
I have been working
with digital and screen based art
for over a decade now.
Having started originally as a
photographer.
And
I've sort of seen this entire
moment, you know, of screen based
art, or as Naito was saying about
performance art in
the past, we occupied this
very strange no
man's land of the fine art
landscape where
folks could, you know, admit, yes,
that is fine art.
But since we didn't fit neatly
into the gallery model, it was
often hard to
be acknowledged or supported
as such.
I've been in Los Angeles for about a
decade. I used to curate
a visual music show called PRISM
Pipe.
Maybe some of you are aware of
that. Used to play in Echo Park and
was a celebration of video
and gif art at a time
when animated gifs were
becoming ubiquitous on the internet.
And yet those of us
creating them were still sort of
being treated like, you know, a
bunch of punk kids smoking cigars
behind the gym.
Like we were not treated
as serious artists, and it
was seen as sort of sacrosanct
in a way. And
so so my artwork,
again, I've really leaned
into the use of
obsolete mediums, specifically
VHS.
And it's not just because it looks
cool, though.
It does look cool.
Thank you.
It's I see the use of these
vintage mediums as a type of
esthetic intervention.
You know, it takes the viewer it's
something that's recognizable.
It's something of our collective
past.
And so it grabs people.
It's it's this Trojan horse
of nostalgia, you know, that that
makes the viewer sort of open up.
And then I sneak on
in there with my little sneaky
Cheshire Cat.
Artist ways to bring
them these ideas that I'm
channeling from my own experience.
And so as
an artist who who began auditioning
my work in this way back
in 2019,
I could see from those early days
that that nfts
are a very simple technology
at their base.
They are simply
a container that is that
is all they are.
And yet that is truly revolutionary,
considering that they are able to
contain things that previously
have been considered non
objects.
Screen based art is a non
object based type of artwork,
therefore it was always very
difficult to collect in the past.
It's not to say it wasn't done.
And I know you're going to hear from
people today who've talked about the
history of of collecting digital
and screen based art.
But it was
it was not at a large scale, shall
we say, prior
to this ability to
create a container for this type of
artwork.
And so in the early
days and I
first began releasing my
work as single editions on
the Marketplace Superrare in April
2019. And I've
had the good fortune to release
work through many of the major
platforms and try them
all out and see see what they all
have to offer.
In those early days.
It was.
It was something that was in
theory, a way to get support
for our artwork
because we could recognize, you
know, just as a photographer
would make a print of a photograph
and then be able to sell that print
edition to a collector.
We as digital artists were now
making these editions
of our artwork and could sell them
to theoretical collectors
that might one day exist.
I often joke that in those early
days we were like fractals,
you know, like that.
You'd get a pebble from your friend
and you go, Oh, what a beautiful
pebble. And then you'd you'd go to
your other artist friend and go,
Here, I want you to have this
beautiful pebble.
Because we were all sort of
trading the same $50
worth of Etherium between us and
collecting each other's editions.
And why that's
well, that's incredibly, like,
adorable, you know, very care bearer
sort of way of being.
I look back on it now and realize we
were essentially establishing
proof of concept for what has
now become a multibillion
dollar market for
nfts, both in the landscape
of fine art and and
in the landscape of collectibles.
So that's a bit about
me and my and my history
with all of this.
And I've clung on.
I've clung through it.
And you've heard others mention that
that last year was sort of the big
watershed moment.
In February of last year,
there was a $69
million sale of an
artwork or cumulative artworks
of the artist people at Christie's.
And what
was so strange
about that to me, and I guess
unexpected to me as someone
again who who began
working with this technology before,
before Beeple and there were a
number of us who were back then
is is I just wasn't
expecting it all to mature
as quickly as it did
and I was not expecting it
to have the backlash
that it had,
not exactly in the way it did.
And those two things are correlated,
right?
I think the fact that this matured
as fast as it is, as fast as
it did, is inextricably
linked from the coronavirus
pandemic.
In March 2020, I had been
minting my artwork for about a year
at that point, and I don't
think that it is a coincidence
that March 2020
is both the
point in time when I had to go
inside like everyone else and
stop seeing my friends and stop
going places.
And it is also the point in time
where I, for the first time in my
life as a professional working
artist, began selling my
artwork regularly.
And,
you know, it's funny.
There's an interesting correlation
even to the Renaissance, right?
If you if you look at the
Renaissance and a lot of you know,
there's a lot of very positive
people in this space
on Twitter who love to make these
comparisons to the Renaissance.
And some of them are maybe a little
overzealous.
But the one that I think
holds a lot of water is
this idea that the Renaissance
followed the plague.
Right.
The Italian high renaissance
followed a plague that like
decimated Europe.
And so I think
in a certain way, we're seeing a
similar thing here.
There's this interesting push and
pull in society
that we endured this and
are continuing to endure this
very intense social
juggernaut that was COVID.
And it
pushed pushed culture
like through a Play-Doh spaghetti
making machine into all these odd
shapes we weren't expecting.
And so with the closing of
galleries, with the cancelation
of art fairs,
everyone had to go online and
everyone was terrified
and looking around and going, Well,
what now?
What does life look like now?
And there
were those of us who were already
extremely online, and we went,
Hey, hey, everybody, we're here.
Come on over. We have something to
show you.
And it took about a year.
And it and it it really took
it really gained steam.
So I bring this all up because
what I want to show you today
is a series
I made in March of
2021.
My art practice is often
transmuting intense
things I am personally grappling
with into
humor and joy
and delightful
weirdness.
So in March of 2021,
with all of this grand noise
sudden. Look around me and
my own experience of my
art practice leveling up
in a very intense
way.
I created.
So I created my series
called The Cassandra Complex,
which is a story at once, ancient
and familiar.
This is a style I work with.
She's not animating, but imagine it.
This is a style I work with that
I've developed that I call video
paintings, and I specifically
create these using a vintage
video painter device that I
begged my parents to get me for
Hanukkah about every year in
my childhood
and eventually got one for myself.
So it's all created on VHS
tape. These all exist.
All my artworks exist physically in
that way.
But I like to do this dance
between the material
and the spirit realm where
the work becomes digital.
And so the Cassandra complex
was the first
of what I'm now thinking of as sort
of portfolios.
Again, my background as a
photographer gave me this gift
entering the NFT space, realizing
these are just editions.
That's it's very simple.
A lot gets made of them like they're
the second coming or they're the
Antichrist.
They're editions.
And
it's really is it's
it's not that big of a deal.
It is a huge deal, but it's also
not that big of a deal.
And so so yeah.
So the Cassandra complex was
a way I was already in March of
2021, starting to see a lot
of these early works.
I had released the single editions
I'd released on Superrare
started reselling secondary
market sales, and already I
was as an artist contending
with, okay, it's
time to evolve my practice a little
bit. There's a lot of demand for my
work and it's never been my
intention to only make.
Art that is available to
a very select few
who are able to afford certain
levels. And so
I created this series as
a way to, again,
thinking about photography,
photography portfolios,
a way of telling a little
tale, a little allegory
through my art in these limited
editions. And it began
with this piece, which I called
a launch card, the Cassandra
complex, and this was actually
available open for
5 minutes.
These are sometimes referred to as
open editions.
This launch card mechanism is
something I came up with
in conjunction with the platform I
was releasing with.
This was released on its own
smart contract, standalone smart
contract through a platform
called Blink Art.
And we wanted to do this idea
of the launch card
almost like as though if you were to
go to a virgin massage of a of
a show, you would get, you know,
maybe like an exhibition card, a
little something that was with some
artists in time.
Even those little ephemeral
postcards become valuable,
become, you know, collector's items.
And so that was my thinking with
this. And it was available for point
one, if it was available in a very
affordable price point for anyone
who wanted one.
And it was a way then to go, I
really want people of varying
levels to be able to participate
with this mechanism.
And so a quick primer
on the Cassandra complex
and what it means if you're
unfamiliar.
I often work with myth
and I kind of infuse
my personal experience
and vibe with myth.
Cassandra was a
princess of Troy,
and in the myth,
the way to sum her up is she
was given the gift of prophecy
with the curse to never be believed.
And so you may
see where I'm going here with this,
and I'll start I'll start us off
here with our.
Oh, there we go. That's how she
looks.
So this is the first edition
in the Cassandra
complex.
Apollo's gift surprise.
This gift is really a curse.
So Cassandra was, you know,
a priestess of Apollo,
and Apollo gave her this.
This gift of prophecy to go.
Guess what, girl?
You can see the future is not
awesome.
And she was like, Yeah, cool, great.
And and then he was like,
also, you know, by the way,
like, you know, can I get a little
could I get a little something?
Something. And she was like, Oh,
yeah, no. Like, sorry, I don't
think of you like that.
Like, I thought we were just
friends, you know, like, didn't
realize I, like, had to put out to,
like, get, you know, fever.
Cool. Awesome.
Hashtag me, too.
And so.
So this is my little take on that
of, like, a present.
A gift that contains a
little stank on the back.
And surprise, this gift
is really a curse.
Apollo was mad that Cassandra
wouldn't put out, so he said,
Oh, okay.
Well, yeah, you
have the gift of prophecy, but
no one's ever going to believe you.
And so
that story has played out
for for people,
early adopters, early visionaries
and just, you know, women
throughout the history of time.
So this was this was the first
edition. And then and then
the second edition in this series,
it's Cassandra's Vision.
Oh, the Ecstasy.
You know, she can see how it all
connects and what is yet to come.
This is. This is her.
My, my, my visionary,
my version of of Cassandra
here.
And, you know,
I am not saying I am Cassandra.
I want this.
You know, it's open for
interpretation.
I do think, again,
knowing when I created this project
and it was speaking
to really collectively
the experience of being an artist,
having been a professional working
artist for a decade at that point
and and knowing
how revolutionary
this technology would be for artists
as a class of people
you saw earlier Naito in
was showing you things and
you saw the very first NFT by Kevin
McCoy.
It was done through an experiment,
I believe, at IBM in
New York.
I saw that in 2014 and
that was around the time I was
curating this show, PRISM Pipe of
of GIF and New Media Artists.
And I saw these experiments they
were doing with blockchain.
The Ethereum blockchain wasn't
even live yet in 2014
and.
It just like clicked for me.
It was like, Oh my
God, this is going
to change
everything for people who do the
kind of work that I do.
And there are a lot of people who
do the kind of work that I do.
We get lumped into this
sort of insulting title of being
called content creators, sort of
dystopian way of saying artist,
you know, because historically
or at least for the during the web
two era or the social media
era, we were seen
as the providers of
the content that
which is what made people want to go
on social media.
And yet we were put in
this position.
The artist writer rips made a great
graph about this that I saw maybe
around that time that at that
time, the way we as artists
who worked in the digital realm
supported ourselves was we would
make cool shit and then we would
wait for emails and that
was it. It was this sort of faith
based workflow of if I
make something cool, if it goes
a little viral, maybe
I'll get an email from Doritos
and they'll ask me to make like a,
you know, cool ranch chip
gif and that's how all.
And then I'll support my art studio.
That's how I'll make, you know,
that's how I'll make this work.
And that's I, I consider myself
one of the fortunate artists that
that did sort of
make that work for a long time.
And so again, I
found out about NFT is in 2014,
the Ethereum blockchain launched in
2015.
And that was when I started seeing,
you know, these, these groups, these
new media groups.
I was involved with people starting
to debate theoretically
what this ability would
mean for artists, because the
Ethereum blockchain was also
the advent of what we call smart
contracts.
Again, a lot of this can feel very
arcane.
Smart contracts are just like
regular contracts.
They just exist in a way
that can be implemented on the
blockchain.
And so I just
knew I was like, the second
this becomes available to me, I have
to experiment with this.
I was very involved.
My work was very has gotten a lot
of views on Giphy.
I've had 6.8 billion
views of my gifs on Giphy.
That's like almost the population
of Earth.
And yet people often
ask me like, well, how much, how
much money did you make from that?
And I go, That's going to be
zero, my friends.
That's going to be a zero on that.
And that was just standard.
And it still is standard for most
artists that you are paid
in this faith
based concept of exposure,
that your work is seen.
Therefore you should be grateful.
And yet the
image I use for that is like
having a running faucet that's
just shooting resources out.
But you don't have a bucket.
You don't have a bucket.
You you don't get to collect any
of those resources.
You know who does have a bucket
Facebook.
So so that's what
we're talking about here.
It's it's absolutely something
that
it's on a social level.
And to me, this this project
specifically Cassandra complex
was speaking to the experience of
being a member of the artist
class and having this
oracular moment of.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Whoa, this little thing is
going to snowball.
And it's it means a big, big,
big difference for artists,
digital and otherwise.
Well, so that was the
fun part of it.
And then and then.
And then here's what happens, guys.
Here's what happened in March of
2021.
The queen says no.
She says, absolutely
not.
We cannot allow these
ideas to take hold.
I don't like it.
I don't like what it means.
I reject it completely.
And
the queen here
to me represents
a lot of different folks.
And really a sentiment
more than anything, a sentiment that
I think, again, like like anything
myth based is as old as
humanity itself.
And that sentiment is one that goes.
I'm seeing something new
that I don't understand
that is definitely changing
the way the things
I'm in control
of are handled.
Therefore, I do not
want it.
I did not order this.
Please take this back to the
kitchen.
I don't care if this is what's for
dinner. I don't want it.
And for me, when I say I was
surprised by the backlash.
What really surprised me
was that.
There were so many
there were so many people who I had
long known to be champions
of the digital arts,
who when this
moment happened.
At this moment, meaning the beeple
sale the the proverbial
rock being lifted up,
all of us little critters being
exposed to the light.
People who I had long known to be
champions of the digital arts
joined in with the chorus
of voices saying, This is bad
and these are bad people doing
this.
And.
I got to tell you, my experience
being there and at that point
already being very well regarded
within the community,
the Neft community, and and
having again, having a long
history of my own experience
in art. At that point,
it encouraged harm towards artists.
And people were getting death
threats. People were being attacked.
I had a number of artists
I had curated who I had a good
relationship with, who
were sending me violent
messages saying they thought I was a
bad person, that I was working
with this, how dare I work with
this? Didn't I know that
it's it's bad.
Everything about every single thing
about it is bad.
And it's something
that I hope will be discussed more
today.
I would by no means tell you that
this is a perfect technology.
We are in the dial up modem era
of this.
It is clunky, it is inelegant.
It often does not work the way
we want it to work.
As was mentioned, it's not it's
having difficulty scaling now
that so many people want to
participate in it.
But this was something that was
pioneered by artists.
And I guarantee you that artists
are still the ones driving
it forward.
They're still the ones taking up
these tools and and and
out of their own just artistic
curiosity, going, Ooh, what can we
do with this?
And to me, that's like
that is one of the most beautiful
aspects of humanity that we have,
people like that, who, who get
that way about the things that scare
the shit out of everyone else.
And
and I guess my feeling on it was
this sort of thing, specifically
with seeing arts
institutions take
this angle of, you
know, you know, not those nfts.
Those are bad, bad
things by some bad boys.
Absolutely not.
Like we are not we
are not deigning to dirty
our our little paws with those
in my sort of oracular
moment, recognizing
that you're going to have
to like it's
it's not going to go away.
I knew at once this became
once I started seeing it on CNN, on
BBC. Like, I was like
I thought we were like five
years out from all that happening,
but COVID, like, put it all into
overdrive.
And once the lid was off
Pandora's box,
that's Pandora's box.
You know, you can't put it all back
in.
And so this was
me. This is my this is how this is
the level of anger that
I allow myself.
This a silly
loser drawing of
because I was I felt very
betrayed, in a way, because I've
always been someone who.
Yeah. Who cares a lot about about
the fine arts.
So.
So it was just it was.
It was just something to reckon with
there.
And so this is this is the last
edition.
This is how I processed all of
this and how I when I sort of put
my mind to it, how do I think
this story is going to go?
And I'm standing here in front of
all of you.
It's a year later now you're in
some change.
And I think it has gone exactly
this way in this
last edition is called.
Turns out she was right
and it's kind of again, it's
it's it's funny but it's also
like dork cited
that this is historically how these
stories always go.
You know, the prophet the witch
gets burnt at the stake, the
queen gets her head chopped off.
Meanwhile, the people celebrate the
new ideas.
You know that Pandora's box
is never going to contain everything
in it again once the ideas are out
there out.
These are ideas that touch almost
every aspect of our culture, not
just fine art.
This is a better
mousetrap.
When I said that smart contracts are
just contracts.
That's that's true.
So when you think about how much of
our life and society is governed by
contracts, now that we have
a more
ironclad way of enacting
contracts between people, which
again, artists are pioneering it
because as was mentioned, artists
are the ones who've historically
been even innovating ways a person
can get screwed.
That, you know,
we are now here a year later.
And the fact that all of you were
even here, I think a year ago,
people would have been scared.
People were scared to even be
associated with NF TS.
People were scared because of the
violence, the the
activism that was, you know,
really violence in in
masquerade
was so intense and so severe.
And it's still there's still a lot
of it that I think people, even if
they were curious about NF TS
understood that it was one
of those social no nos.
It was like, don't
touch that. That's a scarlet letter.
Like, you'll be you'll be laughed
out of your institution
or laughed out of your house.
And so
this is how the story has gone and
happy to report again.
This is why I say artists as a
class. This is not a directly
personal narrative
that a lot of artists did suffer and
a lot of artists, specifically of
marginalized backgrounds,
suffered the most because they were
asked to answer for this thing
and they were kind of getting it
from both sides that
the NFT space, just like all spaces,
has issues of inequality.
That's not unique to it.
It's just it's humanity.
It's a space where humans are.
And so.
I think that here here we are, you
know, a year later and this is out
here. And I think that that that is
a good thing.
And I'm just glad that
I was able to be there and I was
able to document this document,
this feeling, this experience,
because nfts are going to become
more and more and more woven
into our culture.
They're going to become less visible
because they're just going to become
the, you know, part of the
infrastructure of how things are run
in our increasingly digital world.
And
it's just been it's been a joy.
It's been a joy to get to be there
at the at the front of it, even if
it was a little bumpy at times.
So that's all
I have to say to you today.
Thank you all for coming out and
listening.
It is.
Hey, let's give it up to artists.
So, yeah,
everybody, we ran a little late.
I know, I know. So we're going to
we're going to finish it since we
got, like, 13 minutes to do some
questions. You want to ask them a
quick let's give it up to him again.
I love artists.
I love art.
How dope is that?
Thanks, Glen.
Thanks, Paul.
Thanks, Sarah. Thanks, Mika.
We'll take, I don't know, one or
two questions from you.
I think you guys got microphones
right Ikoko.
So, you know, just the and
Sarah really appreciates, you know,
we rounded out with you and I think
like it's really interesting.
I kind of love that analogy, the bit
that comes up and there you are
underneath and you get the spotlight
on you. And, you know, it's one
thing to be a private scene
and it's another thing to be exposed
on the popular media stage in
general. We all know in social media
land, whenever the spotlight comes
out, the trolls come out, the trolls
come out at night,
but it can feel like you only, you
know, the negative space can be
really overwhelming.
But I want to just ask for each of
these artists and if we can all be
brief, but it
isn't, you know, the artists,
you know, I would say people, you
know, if someone's in the art world,
if they tell you they hate the art
world, that's the first sign.
You know, like, oh, you're deep if
you hate the art world because
that's that's what artists do.
But how do you, you know, in terms
of like keeping going and you,
Sarah, you were in it.
But I want to hear from each of you,
you're how do you navigate
the space of like your excitement
but also navigating your personal
relationships of a lot of
conservative ness in the community?
Because you're right, it's not
embraced. I mean, oh, my God.
The face of people I talk to when I
say nft, the look
like like, oh, my God.
They're like.
Oh, God, I have to deal with
this.
But anyways, maybe so you can say
final your idea, but may each of us
just talk about just like what it's
like to be in this space personally
for you bet.
Sure.
Yeah. It's I sort of alluded
to this earlier that the
NFT space is funny in that it's
this amalgamation of tech
people and and some
art people. But I would say it is
very different from
what we would call like the fine art
space. And there
is this mode there
of, for lack of
a better term, you could call it
toxic positivity.
Everything is up.
Only we're all going to make it.
Which, you know, speaks to the
euphoria people feel
when they're selling art,
when they're or, you know,
for artists, it's when they're
selling art. For others, it's when
they're selling, you know, monkey
jpegs or whatever, whatever it
is. And and when the crypto
prices are going up, up, up, up, up.
And as we sit here
today, the crypto prices are going
down, down, down, down, down.
And it feels bad.
And it's kind
of an interesting
moment of reckoning.
And I've been through a number of
these at this point, having done
this for three years, it's
kind of nice in a weird way
because it's a reset, right?
It's it's this reset.
It kind of burns out
the more disingenuous parts
of all of it.
And and it's like anything, right?
It's like wildfire.
It's feels very bad
to experience on a personal level,
but it's actually part of how an
ecosystem maintains itself and
stays healthy over over the long
term.
And so I
have found
I'm a sensitive person as artists
often are.
And Twitter is like
jacking your nervous system into
the nervous system of millions of
people.
It can be a little overwhelming.
So having some
good boundaries about Twitter and my
phone has helped me a lot.
And speaking to this
idea, you know, of like
being one of the bad people who
makes NFT out of my art.
In a weird way, it's been a gift
that I was not well-established
in the world of fine art before
that, even though I was experienced,
even though I was conversant
in the language of it, I
did not have a long standing.
I did not have a market for my work.
I did not have long standing,
shall I say, galvanized reputation
in that space.
And so that ended up for me
being the right recipe of
knowing what I was doing without
having the stakes of
worrying about what I would be
sacrificing.
And so I recognize that now,
especially for people getting
involved with all this now, if
they're coming to it from
careers in fine art, having
perhaps markets for their work, for
their object based work or,
you know, institutional support in
other ways, I
recognize that we have to be mindful
that that what worked for me isn't
necessarily going to work for them.
They have stakes.
Everybody has their own set
of stakes. And so
while it was very unpleasant
to experience the pushback
last year and to
bear the brunt of sort of
a lot of negativity that was born
of of what was misinformation.
Like I said, it's not to say this is
not still in an elegant
technology that needs improvement,
but there was a lot being spread
around about it that was also not
factual.
Sure, it was a lot of sort of
boogeyman fear mongering.
Sarah So let me just move to I'm
just going to keep moving along and
I appreciate that. And listen, it's
so crazy because Twitter, I
mean, we should probably all start
with a Twitter therapy session
for all of us just to kind of talk
about boundaries. Mika, you kind of
like you were like how did you make
that transition to like a being a,
you know, like Gallery two artist?
Yeah.
This is on. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah.
So I've had an interesting journey,
but I think, you know, after
four, ten years,
just so desperately
seeking the world's approval
and getting it to a certain extent
as an art dealer
and then having this, you know, like
almost like a falling out,
getting kicked out of the garden or
by choice, but also not,
um.
Just becoming really disillusioned
with it. Like I basically stopped
seeking its approval.
I basically didn't give a fuck.
Well, the art world thought about
me. It's like, you know,
I f you.
And that
was great. I was like, it totally
gave me the freedom
to go into this and not
really, like, care what.
I don't know what people would think
of about my practice
or what I was doing.
And then the irony is, like now
the art world is coming around to
me, like now Artsy
hit me up to like create one of
their first NFT shows.
And I'm speaking here and I feel
like that's always how life works.
Like the second you stop
seeking approval is
when you start to get it.
That's not true always.
Certainly.
You know, obviously there are people
that don't seek approval and never
get approval. And that's,
you know, but it's good you got, you
know, some some love you
well-deserved. I'm with you I
mean certainly the NFT things come a
little full circle I wouldn't say
the art world embrace.
Wait, just a quick question.
Is there a museum? That's what
museums buying NFT is
llama what they buy.
Well. Hey.
Krista. Kim.
Oh, that's all right.
Wait, wait, hold.
Well, I was on I was on a conference
with someone from Z camp, and
they had a digital arts curator.
And the guy was so funny.
He's been down the basement of Z cam
in Berlin. And it's I don't know,
I bought two Cryptopunks.
And now the whole museum is
interested in me.
They had two cryptopunks, and they
were like, What?
What did he buy over there?
What? How much is that worth?
What all lets you
have? You talk to that digital arts
curator who's been the basement for
20 years.
Paul, how's this going with you?
Proto NFT man?
Yeah, mostly.
I feel like there's a lot of.
Collaboration between formerly
separate fields.
I think that's super exciting.
And I just think, you know,
the world is changing.
I'm just I feel like
it's great
the sense of like how we
as people immersed in the change
as it's happening in real time can
like bring that into
form as a voice to participate
in it. It's freaking awesome.
Yeah, it's up and down and like,
people don't know what's going on,
but, like, that's nothing new.
Like, in a way, the engagement
is galvanizing.
And Glenn, you know, you're full
circle because, of course, you got
some Napster pastor
and then and then you want your art
and then you got digital.
I mean, I just want to kind of you
got a very different kind of
trajectory that there's a real
clean fit in a way.
In a way.
Yeah. First of all, you're awesome
at this, and thank you so much.
This is hilarious and great.
So everyone give it up for Naito.
I mean, Jesus.
Yeah. No, I think.
Look, I think the art world is
awesome. It's like a world, though.
There's good parts and there's bad
parts, you know? And we get to
imagine for a living and what a
crazy thing that we get to actually
imagine new worlds for a living.
And I'll be in a room where we're
talking about speculative futures of
technologies and economies and
whatnot in value.
And and so I will
just my only bit is
because Paul referenced, thankfully,
my magic work as well.
And, you know, in terms of knowing
and not knowing. And when I first
started to work in magic and, you
know, we have a, you know, Derek
DelGaudio and I made a big project
called In and of Itself on Hulu and
the Good Fire. Thank you for the
plug. We have a show called The
Force for the Trees in downtown
L.A., of course, L.A.
now. But when we started to think
about magic, I went to
meet a magician.
And the first thing he did is he I'm
not going to do a piece, but he took
a coin and he vanished
into thin air.
And it was beautiful.
And the first day I sat down with
them and and I said, he said,
I'll show you how to do it. And I
said, What do we do next? He says.
He hands me the coin and he says,
Take this home and learn
how to pick it up a thousand times.
And then tomorrow I'll tell you how
to out of it.
And I said, That's fantastic.
I'm going to go do that. Because for
me, I was like fourth generation
Japanese-American. That's like wax
off, wax on stuff.
Like, I'm like it.
And so I said, I'll do that.
But I'm always going to ask you why?
Because I don't really care about learning
magic tricks. I care about learning
the theory.
And he says, when you are
in front of an audience and you make
a coin disappear, you have to
believe that is dissolving in thin
air.
Because if you don't believe the
most, nobody in front of
you is going to believe more than
you. And I just showed you a punch
of a resin arms that is
supposedly a meditation on the
connectivity of our past, our future
and postcolonialism.
And we've talked about all of our
projects and we don't believe the
most no one's going to believe more
than us.
And so I think that's what I think
about all this practice.
And then after years and all this
landscape and art, you know,
we have to be the believers in
charge of our own work,
of the context from which our work
is situated and from all of us here
together. So we are the believers in
charge. And so that's what I think.
Well, thanks, Glen.
I really appreciate that.
And you know what?
I hate to do this to you, but I do
want to stay somewhat on time,
meaning a half hour late.
Thank you. We're going to cut for
lunch. Listen, thank you guys
for coming out.
I don't know. When's the next thing?
2:00.
Grab a bite.
These artists are available.
I've got some allow list cards if
you want to get some I'm shilling
your you're showing let let's talk
kind of tease up next be
tough nifty lunch thank you
thank you guys.