Week IV March 2023 - SamJ Studios

Earlier this week, I had a conversation with somebody who had entered Web3 within the last 6 months, and they asked me about some of the history in the space from my POV. Recounting some of the historical moments in our community with a more retrospective lens helps me understand better how and why things unraveled as they did. Let’s look back at it.

I remember when Beeple started teasing ETH motifs in his artwork that this would be a huge moment for the Crypto Art space going into 2021. In December 2020 Beeple started to release his first artworks on the Blockchain and it was a huge win for everyone like myself who had been fans of Beeple’s work in the past to see someone of such magnitude enter the space so enthusiastically. Unfortunately, as we saw his presence grow more and more people were using his work as a speculative medium, as they were with most art at the time, and I think this might have caught him off guard, but who is to say. Upon the release of his largest piece, which ended up selling for such a significant amount of money ($69m) making history still to this day. It came as a slap in the face to everybody who came before him. It seems so bizarre that someone could come into our community and benefit from everything that we built as artists (pre-Beeple era) and somehow break all of our records and leave us in the dust at the same time… What was worse is that he essentially never collected other artwork, or outwardly supported other crypto native communities, outside of his own (to my knowledge I could be wrong, I didn’t track him down).

It’s still very uncomfortable for me to see a straight white men come into a space full of diverse identities and creativity, just to make some politically charged 3D comics and run away with an entire market of liquidity without paying any respects… but that’s from my POV. I don’t think that identity politics is very important in this situation, but I think it goes to reflect the general attitude of which characters crypto communities choose to champion. When he sold his collection for $69 million in Ethereum, he later swapped it all into fiat, and none of that re-entered the circulation of Web3 projects that had built the space to give him the platform in which he found such incredible success.

I have been a fan of Beeple since I started digital art and I remember watching documentaries about him when I was a teenager, later to collect prints of his artwork for my dorm room at art school that I still have up in my office today. To say that he doesn’t deserve any form of success would be very ignorant. I’m still disappointed, though, that all it took was a niche art celebrity pandering to the audience with the most money to collapse the entire approach to crypto art that had been fostered before him.

I do have to say, after observing the space for a few years following the monumental explosion of success I understand why Beeple wanted to just cash everything out and dip. I have seen people go absolutely feral over how others spend their money to support what projects. There are bots following and tracking every transaction from wallets that are farming Blur or even just collecting profile pictures. Securing $69 million puts a huge target on your back and I saw it in person several times when there were entourages of grifters and shills mindlessly following around Beeple at parties… Ironically, they didn’t know he wasn’t holding any crypto. To be honest, it’s none of my business how people choose to make or sell art or use their own money.

Something I’ve learned after several years here is that it doesn’t matter who does it first but who does it better. Even though I am someone known to do many things first, I try to do my best to represent myself in my community authentically and observe the people who find success in ways different than myself to learn from them and grow my practice.

To wrap things up here, I've been a fan of acoustic covers lately and here are two videos I bookmarked from last week, Frank Tedesco hasa bunch of great content on his channel!

Slay the house down besties,

SamJ