I spoke with Benji's family this morning and I know a few people already received the news but we lost a really great last week.
Benji Connell @_concreteclouds passed away last week of a previously undiagnosed heart condition.
He was one of the great hallmark artists of our community and has many great collectors. Much of his work was on Known Origin (and a few on superare) as he mostly called KO his home. He found his footing there and the rest is history.
Over the next few days, I am going to be posting my favorite works that he has done within my collection.
Before KO closed down, he gifted me this work he made of himself (with a bear suit on) riding off into the sunset on his chopper with his bag of mints. I thought it would be fitting to post this one first.
Love you Benji.
@AutismCapital@pravijn Wait until they wrote the book in 20 yeats about how Dominion software rigged elections for 30 years all over the world. Created through Venezuelen drug network funds
Danny Jones just had a journalist on who is covering the two CIA whistelblowers (Gary Bernstein) who inadvertently discovered the dominion voting machine software that was invented during Chavez regime and now being sold all over the world. He says L.A is epicenter for Dominion software and has previously rigged elections. So this no surprise She won.
This is delulu to think that the GOAT needs to somehow "connect" with a generation that didn't even get to see him ascend to the throne?
Nobody talks about this but there was a time in 05 when the industry was at a point where it was drifting away from hip hop angle leaning into pop punk and indie rock. Hov did ALOT at Def Jam to make sure that the cream of the crop in hip hop would make it through to the next generation capitalized.
Literally all his contemporaries agree on his greatness.
@scaryhours5555@9thwonder You have no clue about the context ? Lmao.
He said that while reflecting on the recent feuds and how delulu people got with the internet and basically says it does nothing to push the culture forward anymore.
In conversation with Kevin McCoy for SLEEK
What happened to NFTs? AM When we first met a few years ago, I told you that you had changed my life, and I was not happy about it. (laughs) Because suddenly, being a curator in digital art became tied to the expectation of selling work. Curation was no longer primarily about creating context, but increasingly about selecting artists who performed well in the market.
KMC We saw those dynamics play out: curation becoming tied to sales and digital art becoming increasingly centred around ownership and wallets. To go back to Vuk Ćosić’s conversation with you, one of the key figures of the 1990s https://t.co/PfN23Jeog9 movement, he said: we had the browser, NFTs got the wallet. He meant it critically, in the sense that the artwork became reduced to the wallet. And that is true.
As an artist, especially in that early Ethereum moment, producing work that ultimately ended up in a wallet did not feel great. It did not feel like making work had felt before. When you make work for a gallery exhibition, people experience it together. There is a social dimension and a physical presence to it. Doing a drop on a platform and having the work end up in people’s wallets was not the same experience.
A Tale of Two Cities.
30” x 80” Oil on canvas.
Examining how wealth and poverty exist side by side—separated not by distance, but by access, resources and power.
Neighboring communities living in entirely different realities.
@MissyElliott You cannot overstate the imporatance of Timberland and Pharell Williams when it comes to how hip hop music is produced, recorded and the sheer sonics of the mix.
There wont ever be something of this magnitude changed within hip hop ever again.
I also think that we keep talking about "barriers to adoption". This isnt going to get any easier than buying on Verse or any place with a card. I do not believe that that these barriers exist. If people are interested, its pretty easy. If not, they usually figure it out by themselves or they have somebody to help.
Nobody is saying " i woud love to get into digital art collecting but there are too many barriers to adoption so i am not going to take the leap today".
We have convinced ourselves that the reason why there isnt more organic adoption is because there are "too many barriers".
@Polymarket What business schools?!
Wharton tuition has actually risen 4 percent since 2022. Its like 90,000 a year for tuition alone, up from 82,000 in 2022. Include living expenses and books it can be 120,000 a year.
The only ones that are cheaper are ones that never mattered.
@metaDJZOii@KlNGDOMlNUS Why? Because their sound transcended hip hop, you label them as......(clears throat) alt hip hop?
Genuinely trying to understand why you label as such. Is it because they didnt use samples in their production?
@AlmineRech, @HauserWirth as well as Marian Goodmen all legacy galleres debuting work at Zero10 in Basel.
It also looks like they will be exhibiting non web3 native artists (to be expected.)
Hopefully their draw will help expand into a newer collector base that cannot be reached by our beloved native web3 galleries.
Now in its third edition, Zero 10—Art Basel’s global initiative dedicated to art of the digital era—makes its debut at our flagship fair.
➡️ Discover more of the Swiss edition of the initiative: https://t.co/fLl8zVCHm6