G e n e r a l a r t i c l e

Crypto Art

A Decentralized View

M A S S i M o F R A n C e S C h e T , g i o v A n n i C o l Av i z z A ,

T ’ A i S M i T h , B l A k e F i n u C A n e , M A R T i n l u k A S o S T A C h o w S k i ,

S e R g i o S C A l e T , J o n A T h A n P e R k i n S , J A M e S M o R g A n

a n d S e B A S T i á n h e R n á n D e z

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Crypto art is limited-edition digital art, cryptographically registered with
a token on a blockchain. Tokens represent a transparent, auditable
origin and provenance for a piece of digital art. Blockchain technology
allows tokens to be held and securely traded without the involvement of
third parties. Crypto art draws its origins from conceptual art—sharing
the immaterial and distributive nature of artworks, the tight blending of
artworks with currency and the rejection of conventional art markets and
institutions. The authors propose a collection of viewpoints on crypto
art from different actors within the system: artists, collectors, gallerists,
art historians and data scientists. A set of emerging themes and open
challenges surfaces.

PRologue

Crypto art is a recent artistic movement in which the artist
produces works of art, typically still or animated images, Und
distributes them via a crypto art gallery or their own digital
channel using blockchain technology. In order to illustrate
the movement from a variety of perspectives, as well as to
highlight open challenges, we wrote a “decentralized” posi-
tion paper on crypto art, which includes viewpoints from
different actors within the system. The writing process went
as follows:

1. A general definition of the topic was put forward by
Massimo Franceschet and Giovanni Colavizza and
used as reference in asking a set of diverse authors

to contribute their viewpoints asynchronously and
unabhängig. Franceschet and Colavizza offered
no guidelines before the authors submitted their first
drafts.

2. Nachher, all authors read and commented on one
another’s work, and Franceschet and Colavizza en-
couraged the authors to make connections among
viewpoints explicit. Franceschet and Colavizza fur-
ther asked each author to suggest open questions and
future perspectives on the topic of crypto art from
their vantage points. Each author kept full control of
their own section at all times.

3. Last, Franceschet and Colavizza distilled a set
of emerging themes from a comparison of all
viewpoints.

This process allowed for multiple voices to freely emerge
and blend to create contributions on a common topic. Der
full position paper that evolved out of this process is available
in the online supplemental materials. In diesem Artikel, we first
provide an introduction to crypto art and then summarize
the main findings from the comparison of the viewpoints in
the position paper.

CRyPTo ART: RARe DigiTAl ART on

Massimo Franceschet (data scientist, artist), Department of Mathematics, Computer
Wissenschaft, and Physics, University of Udine. Email: massimo.franceschet@uniud.it.

The BloCkChAin

Giovanni Colavizza* (Forscher), Department of Media Studies, Universität
Amsterdam. Email: g.colavizza@uva.nl. ORCID: 0000-0002-9806-084X.

T’ai Smith (art historian), Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Universität
of British Columbia. Email: tai.smith@ubc.ca.

Blake Finucane (art historian), Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory,
Universität von British Columbia. Email: blake@blakefinucane.ca.

Martin Lukas Ostachowski (artist), ArtbyMLO. Email: martin@ostachowski.com.

Sergio Scalet (artist), Hackatao. Email: sergio.scalet@hackatao.com.

Jonathan Perkins (gallerist), SuperRare.co. Email: jperkins@pixura.io.

James Morgan (gallerist), KnownOrigin.io. Email: james.morgan@blockrocket.tech.

Sebastián Hernández (collector), the Momus Collective.
Email: sebdecentr@protonmail.com.

*Korrespondierender Autor

See https://direct.mit.edu/leon/issue/54/4 for supplemental files associated
with this issue.

We describe the crypto art system by first considering the
gallery SuperRare, a major crypto art marketplace. When an
artist uploads an artwork to the SuperRare gallery, a transac-
tion is created on the Ethereum blockchain. This transaction
creates a nonfungible token (NFT), uniquely associated with
the work of art, and transfers the token to the artist’s cryp-
tographic wallet. The transaction is digitally signed by the
artist, using asymmetric encryption, in order to prove the
authenticity of the work. The token is permanently linked
to the artwork and is a one-of-a-kind asset that represents
ownership and authenticity of the underlying artwork.

The gallery distributes the artwork file over the nodes of
the peer-to-peer InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) Netzwerk.

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The IPFS network names the image with a code that uniquely
matches its content. This means that the same image, sogar
if distributed over several nodes of the network, will always
have the same name and will be conceptually identified as a
single resource.

The digital work now begins its life on the blockchain,
where a collector or fan can purchase it and where it can
be subsequently exchanged, traded or held by collectors like
any other rare artifact. Typically, artworks are sold via auc-
tionen: Bidders make offers, and the current owner of the as-
set has the ability to accept an offer. When an asset is sold,
the corresponding token is directly transferred to the buyer’s
wallet, while the corresponding price in Ether—the cryp-
tocurrency used on blockchain Ethereum—is moved to the
seller’s wallet.

When sold, the artwork remains tradable in the secondary
market and, in manchen Fällen, each subsequent sale rewards the
original artist (e.g. mit 10% of the sale price on SuperRare).
Thanks to blockchain and IPFS technologies, each transac-
tion is cryptographically secured and is peer to peer, Bedeutung
neither the funds nor the asset is ever held by the gallery or
any other third party. Examples of crypto artworks by some
of the authors are shown in Figs 1–2 and Color Plate C.

The Rare Pepe Wallet is considered as the first decentral-
ized platform of crypto art. “Rare Pepe Wallet is a tool created
by developer Joe Looney that makes it possible to buy, sell,
trade, edition, gift and destroy digital artworks” [1]. To better
understand its significance, it is helpful to consider several
artists and movements from the twentieth century that could
be cited as precursors. To begin with, it seems relevant to
look to the history of generative art to understand crypto
art’s algorithmic foundations. But pop artist Andy Warhol
is probably the most notable example whose work “acted”
in similar ways to the creation and tracking of Rare Pepes.
Having openly proclaimed his affinity for commercial suc-
cess and making money as he looked to sell his brand to the
widest audience possible, he promoted himself as a “busi-
ness artist.” Warhol melded currency with art creation, daher
providing a model for crypto art’s reliance on digital tokens.
Alternativ, it is possible to focus on a genealogy that
stems from conceptual art and the dadaist Marcel Duchamp,
especially those works, like Duchamp’s Tzanck Check (1919)
or Seth Siegelaub’s The Artist’s Contract (1971), that sought to
foreground the commercial tendencies of the art world by
actively engaging (or exploiting) its institutional frameworks
or codes and the legal contract in particular [2]. Many char-
acteristics that were endemic to Duchamp’s practice, und zu
later conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, are now visible
in the immaterial and distributive logic of a Rare Pepe or
other examples of crypto art, though the discourse around
the latter has not yet focused on this history.

The “dematerialization of art,” a phrase that was coined
In 1967 by critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, identi-
fied the quintessential features of conceptual practices [3].
As Lippard later defined it, conceptual art was, essentially,
“work in which the idea is paramount and the material form
is secondary, lightweight, flüchtig, cheap, unpretentious
and/or dematerialized” [4]. Conceptual art could be created

Feige. 1. Hackatao, Rez.Girl, tokenized on the SuperRare gallery.
(© Hackatao)

Feige. 2. ArtbyMLO, Tokenized Cloud Sphere One (YYZ to MCO), tokenized
on the KnownOrigin gallery. (© Martin Lukas Ostachowski)

and viewed outside of major art centers or museums and
art galleries, features that helped conceptual artists challenge
the elitist tendencies of the art world as well as established
practices for how art could be bought and sold. Blockchain
technology permits a different kind of immaterial object, Aber
many of the same capabilities apply. The digital and con-
tractual determination of crypto art works in similar ways:
Decentralizing art creation and sales allows for the hyper-
portability of the “object” and the rejection of conventional
markets and institutions.

viewPoinTS

This section outlines the main themes that emerge from the
viewpoints expressed by the authors. For a full discussion,
see the online supplemental materials.

Franceschet et al., Crypto Art 403

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Understanding the Crypto-Artistic Movement

Art historians T’ai Smith and Blake Finucane provide much
needed historical and critical depth to the discussion of
crypto art. While the combination of blockchain technol-
ogy and digital art is new, the complex relationship between
economic and aesthetic modes of valuation has been ex-
plored throughout the history of modern and postmodern
art practice. In this respect, crypto art offers scholars a sin-
gularly compelling entry point to study the encounter of art,
technology and socioeconomic systems in the digital space.

Crypto Art Values

The crypto art phenomenon is intimately linked to the val-
ues that the blockchain technology has come to represent.
Crypto art is, in the words of SuperRare gallerist Jonathan
Perkins, “a new idea in an ancient field.” Decentralization,
democratization and individual control are themes emerging
from the viewpoints of artists, gallerists and collectors. Für
the artists, crypto art represents in this sense a way to get
and keep control of their artworks and reap related benefits.
Sometimes these values are not fully materialized yet, as in
the case—discussed by KnownOrigin’s James Morgan and
artist Martin Lukas Ostachowski—of the gallery-centralized
verification and authentication of artists and artworks.

Engagement and Community

Crypto art is seen as an artistic phenomenon most appeal-
ing to a broader and younger cohort of potential artists and
collectors, including—but also spanning beyond—the crypto
Gemeinschaft. This point is made explicitly by both artists and
gallerists, who have an affinity and appreciation for their
community of peers and customers. The artist Sergio Scalet
of the artistic duo Hackatao highlights how crypto art allows
them to move across physical and digital spaces with a speed
and freedom of experimentation previously unknown. Der
space for exploration remains quite wide if we consider that,
until now, crypto artists have been focusing on the relatively
traditional format of rectangular images and GIFs, as T’ai
Smith and Blake Finucane aptly note.

While for the artists crypto art makes for an opportunity
to engage with new peers in the digital art space, sowie
to attract new buyers, for the gallerists the engagement with
the community goes through the task of ever perfecting their
platforms’ services and ease of onboarding. For Jonathan Per-
kins, the biggest opportunity in crypto art is to bring the
collector side of the market to maturity by designing market-
places to maximize the benefits of transparency, provenance,
liquidity, social signaling and online collection management.
Crypto art might be, in this respect, just the beginning of a
whole new way to create, exchange and experience art in
the digital space, of which the collector Sebastián Hernández
gives a compelling example, discussing art exhibition in the
VR world Decentraland.

Economics of Crypto Art

The economic aspects of crypto art are crucial to the view-
points of almost all contributors. For the artists, crypto art

offers a way to directly market their own artworks without
mediation and at unprecedented speed—a crucial possibil-
ity especially for new artists, as Martin Lukas Ostachowski
underlines. Crypto art’s immediate economic incentives and
their sometimes-unintended consequences are discussed
and historically contextualized by art historians T’ai Smith
and Blake Finucane.

In a curious twist of history, crypto art has monetized the
conceptual art project of dematerialization. If Duchamp and
conceptual artists sought to disrupt and expose the market
by getting rid of material objects, crypto art has generated a
much more rapid market for digital artifacts, whose velocity
makes it akin, in some respects, to financial trading. Perhaps
as a consequence of the high speed and the relative lack of
curatorial control over artwork publishing, a significant cur-
rent challenge for crypto artists is “artwork hyperinflation”
(Sergio Scalet) or “over-tokenization” (Martin Lukas Osta-
chowski). The sheer amount of new artworks does not allow
for users and buyers to experience, digest and eventually buy
artworks before a flood of new creations arrives. Hyperinfla-
tion can have the effect of lowering prices on average, due to
a more abundant offering of artworks, and also of preventing
a secondary market from emerging. A possible step forward
could be to propose curated experiences, provided either di-
rectly by third parties and processes or using Decentralized
Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) [5] and Token-Curated
Registries (TCRs) [6].

Blockchain Technology and Applications

While crypto art is fully engaging with blockchain technol-
Ogy, there is a shared agreement that the movement has not
fully tapped into the potential of the blockchain technol-
ogy and value system. A relevant point has been made by
some of the authors regarding the use of crypto currencies
whose volatility makes the market, and collectors’ behavior
insbesondere, more difficult to analyze and predict. The recent
growth in adoption of stablecoins might offer a way forward
in this respect, as discussed by Sebastián Hernández.

Another striking example is the lack of interoperability
among galleries, which use different standards and identi-
fication of artists and artworks. This has the direct effect of
currently limiting the secondary market to within-gallery
exchanges. Ein anderer, related problem is the system-wide
verification of counterfeiting: A solution across the crypto
art world might come from DAOs and TCRs in this case as
well. System-wide interoperability would also allow for extra-
System (Re)use of crypto artworks, as well as for the creation
of third-party services such as a crypto art analytics platform
proposed by Sebastián Hernández.

Crypto Art Analytics

A crypto art analytics platform would require first and fore-
most the collection and alignment of data from different
galleries or, more conveniently, their adoption of a shared
standard to expose them programmatically. It would further
necessitate the development of crypto art metrics informa-
tive to the different users of the platform, such as artists, col-

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lectors, gallerists and even bystanders [7]. This direction for
future work is proposed by data scientists Franceschet and
Colavizza. Crypto art offers the full availability of artwork
Daten (images and metadata), transaction data (bids and sales)
and social data (likes and views) and thus will allow research-
ers to study the mechanics of success in art and creative in-
dustries, perhaps in unprecedented detail.

Außerdem, the open availability of crypto art data
might ultimately allow data scientists to model the trans-

action system and predict the future success of individual
artworks and artists. This possibility, coupled with the in-
creasing use of AI to generate, in part or whole, new art-
funktioniert, poses aesthetical, ethical and technical questions. A
self-predicting system, by creating redundancies in its (hu-
man) input channels, could rapidly drift away from its (hu-
man) roots, and move on to explore new creative spaces or,
umgekehrt, to become increasingly idiosyncratic. We leave
this final consideration open.

Referenzen und Notizen

J. Bailey, “Rare Pepe Wallet & the Birth of Crypto Art,” Artnome (25
Januar 2018): www.artnome.com/news/2018/1/23/rare-pepe-wallet
-the-birth-of-cryptoart (zugegriffen 20 August 2019).

2 B.P. Finucane, “Creating with Blockchain Technology: The ‘Prov-
ably Rare’ Possibilities of Crypto Art” (Master’s thesis, Universität
of British Columbia, 2018). The Artist’s Contract, a legal document
and work of art published by Siegelaub in magazines worldwide, Ist
more formally known as The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and
Sale Agreement.

3 L. Lippard and J. Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art In-

ternational 12, NEIN. 2, 31–36 (1968).

4 L. Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Six Years: The Dematerialization
of the Art Object from 1966 Zu 1972 (New York: Präger, 1973) S.
vii–xxii, P. vii.

5 A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is any autono-
mous organization with a decentralized governance and budgeting
System. Cointelegraph, “What Is DAO”: www.cointelegraph.com
/ethereum-for-beginners/what-is-dao (zugegriffen 6 April 2021).

6 Token-curated registries (TCRs) are decentrally curated lists with
intrinsic economic incentives for token holders to curate the list’s
contents judiciously. Mike Goldin, “Token-Curated Registries 1.0”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BWWC__-Kmso9b7yCI
_R7ysoGFIT9D_sfjH3axQsmB6E/edit (zugegriffen 6 April 2021).

7 M. Franceschet and G. Colavizza, “Art Metrics,„arXiv:1907.07758

(2019).

Manuscript received 20 August 2019.

MassiMo Franceschet is an experienced data scientist.
He has published 60 peer-reviewed publications in the fields
of data science, complex networks, bibliometrics, logic and
artificial intelligence. Under the name HEX0x6C, he is also
a generative artist, with works exhibited in different digital
galleries including SuperRare and KnownOrigin.

Giovanni colavizza is an assistant professor of digital
humanities at the University of Amsterdam. Colavizza works
on machine learning and data science applied to GLAM (Gal-
leries, Archives, Libraries and Museums) collections and on the
use of computational methods in the humanities.

t’ai sMith is an associate professor of art history and me-
dia theory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver,
Kanada. Her research focuses on media and economic concepts
in art and design. The author of Bauhaus Weaving Theory
(University of Minnesota Press, 2014), she has published

numerous articles, chapters and museum catalog essays, In-
cluding for the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern.

Blake Finucane graduated with her master’s degree in
art history from the University of British Columbia, where she
produced one of the first academic theses on crypto art and
blockchain technology in 2018. She is currently working at a
private equity firm.

Martin lukas ostachowski is a geometric abstrac-
tion artist based in Quebec. He explores blockchain technol-
ogy through the subject of clouds in physical and digital media.
His solo exhibition Tropopause Contemplation—Blockchain
Technology and Inclusive Decentralization (September 2019)
was one of the first blockchain and crypto-art–themed solo
exhibitions in North America.

serGio scalet is part of the artistic diptych Hackatao (mit
Nadia Squarci). Hackatao merges cultured quotations from the
past into bold and ultracontemporary forms, standing out as
an innovative exponent of current artistic scenarios like crypto
Kunst. Hackatao was formed in Milan in 2007 while Scalet and
Squarci were working together on the creation of the Podmork,
sculptures with soft and totemic forms that are at the center of
their imaginative research.

Jonathan Perkins is an American entrepreneur whose
work has spanned technology and art as a performing musi-
cian, recording engineer, computer programmer and creative
technologist. In 2018, he cofounded SuperRare, a social plat-
form for artists and collectors to trade crypto art. He holds
a bachelor’s degree in digital media arts from San Francisco
Staatliche Universität.

JaMes MorGan has been involved in the digital arts space
for only 18 months (as of writing) and feels he still has much
to learn, while recognizing how far the KnownOrigin team he
is a part of, and he personally, have come. The technology, Die
people and the artworks have shown to Morgan the power of
what a fairer system could look like and he hopes to help push
such a system forward in the future.

seBastián hernández is a technologist and entrepreneur
who happens to love physical art. His involvement in the Mo-
mus Collective—a group of crypto enthusiasts who build Vir-
tual Reality experiences—led him to purchase over 300 crypto
art tokens through multiple providers including SuperRare,
KnownOrigin, snark.art, CryptoArte.io and Larva Labs.