The artist´s mission is to do Art.

A 🧵 on community building, social media and doing art in the NFT space.

To ask an artist to be creating and maintaining a community is limiting his mission as an artist. This can feel like an investor perspective asking artists to protect their investment by pumping hype on the works they’ve acquired. This an inheritance of the pfp craze.

Artists commitment is to build a solid career based on pushing his art and experiments. The more liberty the artist has with this the bigger of an artist he will become and the value, artistic, historic, community and monetary will build around his work.

I think of two mayor pfp projects like; cryptopunks and Autoglyphs. How much community building are their designers actually doing? Not much. It was about innovation. Using funds to be free to do crazy shit that brings in more people, fans and collectors.

The project/art that was created IS the community. If the project isn’t cool and have some kind of cultural-innovation value it would not be of interest to the “collector community”. But projects are institutions. Artists are loners.

Communities around pfp projects are based on volume of pieces created and their interchangeable nature. Artists can’t do that. The pfp projects and gen art have in their nature this multiplicity and they are amazing and work the market idea perfectly. 1/1 art needs another thing

Should we be asking artists dedicated to build and experiment their careers to become hype machines, creating more and more simple and commercial art in order to be building community and an art career based on social media and digital communities?

Is that what collectors want? To buy work that is simplified to appease their investments? Do they want social media art? Do they want us artists to not be risk takers in the realm that we inhabit which is art making?

Do we stand a chance, like I mentioned before with the zombie formalism craze, to create artists that peak and disappear after they are consumed by the immediate market not the market based on long term value building?

I am not here to build community per se. I am here to do art, make friends and find collectors, all while I do... Art.

My mission is always the art. Art makes me commit to the space. Art makes me support my peers. Art is what will protect the Art into the future.