Hope everybody had a great holiday weekend!
I was texting with a friend about NFTs versus trad art over the last few days. He's a painter who has no experience in the crypto space so it was sort of a complicated conversation to manage via text, but it also made me think more specifically about what I'm doing in the creative crypto space.
For me, blockchain spaces in the metaverse mean currencies, tokens, and creative expression. But most importantly they mean decentralization, no censorship, and self-organizing. It's a kind of anarchist's dream world where we're free to create, collaborate, converse, learn and work with anyone we might choose to, for any purpose we might prefer. Or not. Blockchain values radical freedom, and art - what you make, how you make it, how you sustain it - is all about values.
I consider myself to be an intermedia artist. Intermedia is a term that comes from the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Dick Higgins coined the term to describe work that combined separate mediums or techniques -- drama and painting for instance. Here he is talking about Fluxus...
I like to mix traditional art mediums with digital tools and techniques to create works that represent hybrids which combine the texture and depth of analog traditional art with the limitless palettes and effects of digital art. My Mighty Nifty collection at Open Sea features acrylic paintings brought to life with animation effects. My Demon Brothers combine traditional techniques and digital tools. I create them on my phone or tablet. These came out of a series of abstract works I made for a works on paper show at a gallery in Nashville. I was into the idea of making digital paintings using tools that emulated traditional brush and canvas work. The paintings were giclee printed on watercolor paper. The end result was pigment on paper and plenty of painterly brushstrokes and oozing textures. Wasn't this a REAL painting?
I'm mostly an abstract painter, but I often find that plants and animals emerge from my otherwise random gestures. When this happens I usually indulge these discoveries a little bit without fully committing to anything representational. This original My Demon Brother is an example of a figure emerging from chaos. It's still a very abstract work, but I also indulged the little demon more than usual. We all love cute/creepy creature NFT collectibles so I decided this could be a great series for the blockchain art space.
NFT artist Gabriel Dean Roberts shared a great video about pricing NFT on his YouTube channel this weekend.
I love the idea of having an expensive luxe space for 1:1 artworks and another collection or storefront for more affordable works. This strategy makes work available to all audiences, but also doesn't dilute the value/price of your work. Going forward my OpenSea space will be my luxury store and my collections @nftshowroom will be more affordable editions of multiple works.
With that said, this first My Demon Brother is the only 1:1 work I'll ever mint for this collection. I'm also planning to burn this work on 4//20. @digitalartchick on Twitter has organized #NFTBurnDay and digital artists should consider joining us. For me it's an opportunity to draw attention to this work, but also to re-structure my art offerings with a clearer strategy in mind.
Collect this rare work today before I light it on fire.