When I see posts beginning with "It is a great honour for me to be included..." I generally start thinking of murder, but here I am, in this stupid position that I really think this is a readable interview by the unstoppable @postanika. All you have to do now is click & read.
In conversation with Vuk Ćosić (@supperman) for SLEEK
The Internet After Failed Utopias
AM What are your thoughts when you hear a new generation of artists saying, »We’re going to democratize the art world. We don’t need gatekeepers. We don’t need institutions«?
VC It’s a little sad because I literally recognize sentences from our manifestos or posts written in the middle of the night, and I see them again today, as if we were speaking about the same utopian possibilities. I don’t buy it.
That rhetoric was abused by network speculation, especially by NFT people. The rhetoric of liberation, zero gatekeepers, or disintermediation was captured by the crypto crowd because they have a use for an active, participating audience of creators. NFT artists are slightly trapped by that rhetoric. It’s not their text. It’s the text of the Bitcoin people, or blockchain people in general.
But if there are kids out there who believe in it, and they generate work while believing in it and trying to make it happen, then it may be good. Maybe it’s like a useful psychosis.
@halecar2 I sometimes say NFT is reality https://t.co/Mms2pM4Q9I, but that is not exactly fair because some of the principles you described apply also to the nineties generation (early canon, piling of curators and collectors...).
[appreciate the trucks, btw, respect-o!]
@postanika Strangely, this appears in many sources. Even by people that knew all of us and could have checked. But who's gonna doubt such a romantic story?
Vuk Ćosić is credited with having coined the term https://t.co/PfN23JeW5H. Well, apparently that was a hoax, Vuk Ćosić claimed when we spoke.
»We happened to like practical humor, pranks, and hoaxes, so in a sense, it rhymed with our attitude. That was a hoax piece by Alexei Shulgin on our mailing list, nettime, and he invented a story that I had received an email that was totally garbled, and in it, I saw some stuff that looked useful.
Pit Schultz suggested this name, and we loved it because it made dot art like dot doc, you know, like a file extension, like a Word file. And we said, ›Oh, this is cute,‹ and we liked it, and we accepted it, let’s say, as the label.«
– Vuk Ćosić (@supperman)
Vuk Ćosić: "Political satire, hoaxes, pranks, and all kinds of provocations were... the overture for us to implicitly realize that critical media art is what we were striving for. And that is the difference between... early https://t.co/1dcgaTeO8p and later digital art..."
Digital Masterpieces: From Code to Canon, debuting at @ArtBasel's Zero 10, Basel (June 16 – 21, 2026). Above quote from Anika Meier, in conversation with Vuk Ćosić for SLEEK, May 21 2026.
Vuk Ćosić is credited with having coined the term https://t.co/PfN23JeW5H. Well, apparently that was a hoax, Vuk Ćosić claimed when we spoke.
»We happened to like practical humor, pranks, and hoaxes, so in a sense, it rhymed with our attitude. That was a hoax piece by Alexei Shulgin on our mailing list, nettime, and he invented a story that I had received an email that was totally garbled, and in it, I saw some stuff that looked useful.
Pit Schultz suggested this name, and we loved it because it made dot art like dot doc, you know, like a file extension, like a Word file. And we said, ›Oh, this is cute,‹ and we liked it, and we accepted it, let’s say, as the label.«
– Vuk Ćosić (@supperman)
@Noahbolanowski Here, with Olia Lialina and Domenico Quaranta at the opening. The AI labels are from some tool from 2-3 years ago.
There's also a video somewhere of me pretending to be Hans Ubermorgen, explaining that piece behind me.
Platforming Vuk Ćosić (@supperman) next after @SHL0MS. Vuk was the inevitable next person in that lineage. (He’ll be part of Zero 10 by Art Basel through the Digital Masterpieces booth.)
AM: Your utopia as artists was that you did not need to rely on institutions and curators.
VC: This is by now part of the vernacular. We knew we didn’t need to talk to people like you. Educated people, terrible.
We all had https://t.co/Bp0KOd5uXH histories in confrontational art practices. When you are this hyped-up person with a Molotov in one hand and a spray can in the other, writing graffiti, you are completely self-sufficient.