"The Hook"
Production is no longer the constraint.
Images, variations, entire bodies of work can be generated at scale. The ability to make something is widely accessible and increasingly automated.
But attention did not scale with it.
When production becomes abundant, value moves elsewhere. It moves to direction.
@MWBTCSummit Thank you, @MWBTCSummit Midwest Bitcoin Summit. I’m honored to be part of this year’s event in Columbus.
Looking forward to sharing thoughts on art, authorship, provenance, and how Bitcoin culture can continue to grow beyond signal into deeper creative work.
Thank you for engaging with this seriously, @yonatvaks. The concepts you named, freedom, value, time, myth, the meme as conceptual instrument, are precisely the kind of arguments the essay names as the threshold for travel beyond the originating room. The work exists. That isn't what's being contested. The question is whether the culture around the work is currently carrying those arguments outward, into conversations where they haven't already been received.
A clarification on framing: the essay separates the work itself from the role it's being asked to perform. It isn't judging the art through the conference lens. It's critiquing that lens from outside it. The artists and the conditions of recognition around them are two different subjects, and the essay's subject is the second.
We share significant common ground: as you noted, many in the space itself don't fully understand what artists are doing, and institutional investment asks the wrong questions.
On the podcast question: the description in the essay was not aimed at any single invitation. I've participated in other Bitcoin podcasts in this same period. The variable isn't who's inviting. It's whether the conversation a given room is set up for can carry the questions I'm currently working through, which are about AI authorship and what follows.
@nodefnd@beeple When pressed, Beeple actually said something true, that artists are now the ones deciding what the final outcome is. That's authorship. The audience wasn't interested in that answer.
For clarity, this essay is part of a larger sequence.
The first essay credits the early frontier stage of Bitcoin art. This one asks what happens after that stage begins to mature.
I am not dismissing the culture. I am trying to understand what kind of artistic language it can build next.
1/4
I was recently asked to speak about Bitcoin art on a podcast.
I appreciated the invitation, but it made me realize the harder question is not whether Bitcoin has an art culture.
That is actually why I wrote the first essay in the series. I wanted to credit the early frontier stage before moving into the question of what comes next.
If Bitcoin art is still early, then its deeper artistic language is still being formed. My concern is not dismissing what exists, but asking what kind of language we help build from here.
Appreciate you reading it.
https://t.co/esRgixTanN
@mx12art Hello @mx12art
I don’t think I underestimate the culture. If anything, I take it seriously enough to ask harder questions about where it can go next.
I agree that it may still be early. That is why the language forming now matters so much.
4/4
Bitcoin art does not need to abandon its history.
But if it wants to grow, it has to become legible beyond recognition, memes, and insider belief.
The next phase will come from work that carries an argument.
https://t.co/AleCTj4y6Q
3/4
When I made vanitas work inside Bitcoin culture, I was not trying to decorate the space.
I was asking what value, permanence, death, speculation, and belief look like when money becomes both image and system.