Transcript
Speaker: Good morning GM everyone.
Speaker: Welcome back to the Polymath Experience.
Speaker: I'm your host Polymath.
Speaker: Today we have someone who was destined for this life.
Speaker: He's a child of the internet as well as a child of the art world which is a match made in heaven for our market.
Speaker: A lot of people I think, me included, heard about him for the first time when Sotheby's announced that they were
Speaker: that they were hiring him.
Speaker: And I'm looking forward to hearing about that.
Speaker: And for me, you are one of the most recognizable art curator, like traditional art type people that are in Web3 and that are connecting these two spaces.
Speaker: Arthamur, welcome to the show.
Speaker: Arthamur Mouwisleva- Thank you, Poti.
Speaker: Thank you for having me.
Speaker: And yeah, I guess there's a few of us that has those two hats from the art market in the NFT world, but not many of us for sure.
Speaker: People are usually very lucky about their involvement in the art market and stuff like that.
Speaker: And yeah, it's a little story when Sotheby's announced that they hired me, they also by the same occasion doxxed me to everyone, which wasn't the plan.
Speaker: It wasn't the plan.
Speaker: I didn't know that.
Speaker: That was a good way to start out.
Speaker: It wasn't the plan at all.
Speaker: I was at least expecting to dox myself, not being doxed by my employers, but that's how it is.
Speaker: Yeah, once it's done, it's done.
Speaker: But it is tricky.
Speaker: Like even I was not doxed for the longest time and I was struggling with people's identity.
Speaker: We don't really have a clear path for that yet.
Speaker: How is that?
Speaker: How is this time that you did it, Sotheby's and like being at the edge of both of those two worlds?
Speaker: Well, it was a bit like I expected, honestly.
Speaker: I mean, I had much more liberty than I did expect, though, but I had plenty of time to prepare myself because I think I applied in February and had like a dozen interviews over the span of like over four months.
Speaker: That was really long.
Speaker: And yeah, I think I ended up having a formal offer in like July.
Speaker: So yeah, it was like our four months of roperting process.
Speaker: So they had a bit enough time to actually think about it.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, overall, it was cool.
Speaker: Cool experience and the idea was that I wanted to have an impact in the NFT market and I was getting priced out as a car collector from the market and so I was thinking what could I do to have still some impact.
Speaker: And I guess working for a quite established art company that has this sort of institutional reputation in the webview world was a good way to go about it.
Speaker: And especially just for me to have an impact, which was my end.
Speaker: I did it successfully at some scale.
Speaker: So yeah, that was the idea.
Speaker: I joined there because I know this will provide me with further opportunity to support artists and support things I like.
Speaker: That's really cool.
Speaker: And so how, what was it like exactly?
Speaker: What did you do when you were there?
Speaker: What were your days, your weeks like?
Speaker: It depends.
Speaker: I mean, at first I was in charge of setting up the department in Paris.
Speaker: So there was a lot of back and forth about just fiscality and just how to set up the teams and
Speaker: and just system for us to handle sales from Paris, but that took at least six months.
Speaker: So for the first six months, I was mostly working with Hong Kong and with New York.
Speaker: The first thing I did with New York was to manage their Salgado projects.
Speaker: They had in the pipeline for a few years and they were launching, I think, just a month after I joined.
Speaker: It was a lot of time on Discord, a lot of time on strategizing for that means.
Speaker: and dealing with a few technical problems, stuff like that.
Speaker: That was a bit different from what they usually do at Sotheby's because they rarely do drops with mints, etc.
Speaker: They do at times with Sotheby's Metaverse, but that's not a big part of their activities.
Speaker: And from then, it was to work with Hong Kong for a few, what we call consitements.
Speaker: So what they have in auction houses is they have dates for sales, usually three to four months.
Speaker: from the moment they ask it.
Speaker: And you have to consign a few works to match a sort of a targeted price aim, which is usually half a million dollars at the very least, to just have the minimum to make a sales.
Speaker: And so first thing I did, I think, was to ask me if I knew about any Asian NFT artists that could be nice to include in Sotheby's.
Speaker: And I was like, well, of course I know some, but I think there is some people that in the space that specifically work on those topics that might be good to partner with.
Speaker: And so I put them in touch with NFT Asia, which is a sort of artist collective.
Speaker: And for the first time, so they consigned to them a few artworks from Grant Hu and then Ruben Wu and a few artists that they never had at Sotheby's.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: And it was pretty successful.
Speaker: I mean, the sales went really well and the Grand Tune and Rubenwood fetched pretty interesting amounts.
Speaker: So yeah, and since then, I always try to sort of have a collaborative approach to things, especially with sort of business, because I think even if they do have some sort of reputation,
Speaker: they were still looking and needing some sort of legitimization tools for them.
Speaker: And I think the collaboration with already established initiative in Web3 is a good way to legitimize yourself as an actor within that space.
Speaker: So that was, yeah, for the first, let's say, two months, that was that.
Speaker: I was actually about to organize auction of myself.
Speaker: The first one I did was in, in New York.
Speaker: It was the, in January, 2023 was the Delucris solo auction.
Speaker: And whenever you do that, you do pretty much, yeah, Delucris is an artist I've been working for a
Speaker: few years now.
Speaker: I didn't know that.
Speaker: I saw him in your wallet and I was in a group that pushed him heavily and I was actually considering buying some pieces for a while.
Speaker: Yeah, he's a... First, I'm working on a solo show for him to be held in Paris sometime.
Speaker: Oh!
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What would you... What would be your...
Speaker: like your go-to buy from Delucrisse right now?
Speaker: Like if you didn't have like that big of a budget, so where would you start?
Speaker: Well, that's what I did recently.
Speaker: A few weeks ago, I spent 11,000 Tezos on a work from Delucrisse.
Speaker: But it's actually something you buy in Tezos, but you actually get it if.
Speaker: And I thought Tezos were way much down than ETH was.
Speaker: So it was a bit of an arbitrage situation between ETH and Tezos.
Speaker: There is a specific edition called the Corruption Serum.
Speaker: And if you buy it, you can corrupt one Tezos edition and make it a one-on-one on ETH.
Speaker: Can you show us the pieces?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I've been in this space for a while too, so I've known about Tezos for a long time and especially because they're French, right?
Speaker: Swiss.
Speaker: Wow, close enough.
Speaker: Yeah, I remember seeing them at a conference in Paris where Xavier Niel and the whole shebang was there and I never... I just never got it.
Speaker: Even to this day, now that I have a little bit more... I took a little bit more of a step back, I don't understand what they're doing.
Speaker: I don't see the appeal per se.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: That's an entire debate of its own, I'd say.
Speaker: I mean, Tezos has had trouble literally since it started.
Speaker: It was one of the largest ICO ever.
Speaker: And it was one of the very much critical ICO because it did not give out any token from ICO investors.
Speaker: And so there was a drama and it's difficult to mint and to literally write codes on Tezos as well.
Speaker: And Tezos is not that supportive of its artistic environment, but the reason why Tezos has become such an important place for NFT is because of Ikenuk and Rafael Lima being a Brazilian artist and the idea that because Minkas were so inexpensive,
Speaker: it opened up the gate to a lot of artists from developing countries that wouldn't be able to mint NFT on ETH because back then, you know, it would cost you 30 or 40 bucks to mint NFT on ETH.
Speaker: If you're a guy that is from, you know, Indonesia, I think the average monthly salary in Indonesia is something like 200 bucks.
Speaker: So spending, you know, a quarter, 20% of your monthly salary and just minting on NFT,
Speaker: is a decrease.
Speaker: So most of those artists went to Tezos because it would cost them just a fraction of a cent to do so.
Speaker: And that's how this sort of artistical ecosystem on Tezos actually happened.
Speaker: It's mostly artists from Brazil, from South America, from Africa, from Southeast Asia and Middle East and some places where they don't really have much income.
Speaker: That's good.
Speaker: I'll ask for a few names.
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: I'm going to take this as a sign.
Speaker: I'm going to figure out how to bridge some Tezos and I'll ask you for names and I'll go collect some something.
Speaker: Sure thing.
Speaker: You can check out my, if you do type artemore.tez, you will see all my connections on Tezos as well.
Speaker: So yeah, the Serum of Delucris works like that.
Speaker: You got a correction.
Speaker: You have an addition on Tezos.
Speaker: You
Speaker: By the serum, it creates a custom 101 on Eve.
Speaker: And from there, you so there's all the eligible monster you can you can have and can use.
Speaker: I've corrupted this one, which is an addition of five.
Speaker: And the green one, the loudspeaker.
Speaker: Yeah, the loudspeakers to produce what we call the mega speakers that I will show you on the crease.
Speaker: And his style is just
Speaker: Yeah, it's very special.
Speaker: It does manage really well all this sort of mechanic and fusion and evolution and just the sort of utility aspect that arts often is lacking.
Speaker: It does manage that quite well.
Speaker: So you'll see right there how that works.
Speaker: So you have this original one, then it makes a custom one.
Speaker: It's usually double or just some sort of extension of it.
Speaker: And yeah, so that's a way to buy literally if artwork from the Lucreese for
Speaker: for Tezos and I spent so Elevent Tezos was something around six seven thousand euros and you know his floor on E4 101 is you know monster is but is at least eight nine ETH and then his additional usually roughly one to two ETH
Speaker: So you have to effectively getting a one on one that is custom, that is one of his most sought after series.
Speaker: Anything with the red is usually some sort of considered premium in a way.
Speaker: And you're getting it for just, I guess, discount, but just you're getting it for, I think, pretty affordable prices when you consider everything.
Speaker: But otherwise, this Mon series is already nice, a pretty nice edition.
Speaker: And the best of the best is, of course, the Monster series, but those are usually retailing between $30,000 to $35,000.
Speaker: So it's not for everyone.
Speaker: At least people listening are already getting value because they know of at least the first few ones will get an interesting arbitrage opportunity.
Speaker: And so you do keep the edition on Tezos as well.
Speaker: You just get the syrup sending back.
Speaker: So that's the only thing you lose within the collection.
Speaker: But you actually don't burn the Tezos edition, which can be expensive at times.
Speaker: Well, that's really cool to know.
Speaker: Let's go back a little bit.
Speaker: Because when we were talking, the two things that obviously pop out is your background in the art world, the fact that you've been raised around this, that you've probably
Speaker: like seen things, heard things, learned things that most people who don't, don't.
Speaker: Like you're an internet child.
Speaker: You were born with it and you saw it evolve.
Speaker: And so both of these things, I'd bet heavily impacted who you are today as a person and like primed you.
Speaker: prepared you for the Web3 world.
Speaker: Can you like recollect in either of those specific moments, specific things that you learned, specific things that you went through that really prepared you for that?
Speaker: some of the key dates were uh so i'm from like a very privileged background and my parents do have like two passion work that way that was traveling and collecting contemporary art pretty much but it was those are really two exclusive passions so they didn't necessarily sort of did any
Speaker: sort of education about it or, you know, pedagogy or whatever.
Speaker: So it was really up to us to get interested into it.
Speaker: The first sort of... Sorry, I keep getting notifications.
Speaker: So yeah, one of the first things that was most important to me was when I was a child, my parents got me to, brought me to the Tate Museum when there was the weather project from artist Olaf Orelia-Sohn.
Speaker: And since then, this artist has been one of my favorite artists ever.
Speaker: And this project is well known with the art history and just is considered as a major exhibition that happened in the 21st century.
Speaker: It was all immaterial in a way.
Speaker: So it's an installation that just played with lights.
Speaker: It's a huge...
Speaker: orange sun that this specific light spectrum has the specificity to take away all color all other colors from the visible spectrum so when you got there everything is black your skins your your clothes your it's really odd it's really hard experiences um so that was the first sort of approach to me of like a sort of a Erika light bulb moments um
Speaker: that I was getting into art.
Speaker: And after that, the other sort of key date was the Bill Viola exhibition in the Grand Palais in 2014.
Speaker: That was the first time I saw video art, digital art presented in a museum-grade exhibition with a monumental display and just something you could say, oh, that's video, but that's actually, you know,
Speaker: art that deserves to be in a museum.
Speaker: So that was something rare as well.
Speaker: And that isn't, you know, you don't see many common stories.
Speaker: And after that, I guess the other big moment was just crypto kitties and just, you know,
Speaker: getting, you know, turning 18, sort of thinking about what I was going to be working in, what was going to be my vocation, things like that.
Speaker: This came from mostly a passion and sort of a fascination for counterfeitures, the people that make fake artwork.
Speaker: And there was this other guy that was really fascinated by this national authenticity counterfeitures that was talking about blockchain back then.
Speaker: as early as in 2016.
Speaker: His name was Jason Bailey, also known as ArtNome.
Speaker: He's one of the first person I followed online talking about just blockchain and art and provenance tracking and the possibilities and all those different notions.
Speaker: And so that's sort of how I started to get interested in the application of blockchain to the art market.
Speaker: And just, you know, I was back then, I was just entering a sort of bachelor in business.
Speaker: I was really bored there and I didn't really got really interested by anything there, but I took that opportunity that I had many internships too.
Speaker: intern and galleries, auction houses, and also blockchain related art company.
Speaker: There was a few out there in 2017, 2018 that launched with several ICO and stuff like that.
Speaker: So like Codex Protocol, Myasenas, you add additional, you add Ascribe, even SuperRar were just launching back then and things like that.
Speaker: They did the presentation at the Arcan Tech Summit by Christie's in 2018, I believe.
Speaker: that I sadly missed because I was working as an intern back then.
Speaker: It's too bad because I missed out on the Lost Rubbies giveaway.
Speaker: Those are worth like, I don't know, half a million now.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: An internship there.
Speaker: Yeah, if you don't know the story of the Lost Rubbies, it's quite fascinating.
Speaker: So there was...
Speaker: The launch of SuperRAR presented with Jason Bailey, George Vag, I think a few others, people like that, Bernardine Borcher that had Vastery.
Speaker: And it's the first mint on SuperRAR.
Speaker: And so they distributed 300 cards with a sort of QR code back to it.
Speaker: You can claim an NFT.
Speaker: Most people don't understand what it was.
Speaker: Most people, I guess, threw away the card or discard it.
Speaker: And so out of the 300 that was ever distributed, only 20, 23 were 20 or 23, something like that, were minted.
Speaker: So it's now has some sort of historical value to show how the art market back then didn't understand anything about Web3, NFT and things like that.
Speaker: So it has become sort of historical.
Speaker: Oh, that's insane.
Speaker: And I have a friend that actually did an internship on the event, kept the card and only claimed it before.
Speaker: I think a few years ago when I asked her about it, when she told me she internet on the events and she literally is on one NFT and that's a lost Robbie.
Speaker: So it's literally worth half a million dollars and things like that.
Speaker: So yeah, it was literally the treasure in an attic sort of story because it was left in a bag in an attic.
Speaker: So, yeah, it was sort of treasure found, wasn't expected.
Speaker: But yeah, so let's get all things out like key dates of my involvements.
Speaker: And yeah, the last one, I guess, was when people did his first mint on NFT Gateway, where he technically has another mint.
Speaker: that was an auction on ETHTC sometime.
Speaker: That's just anecdotic.
Speaker: But this first Consider Genesis Mint is edition of Project is Bullshit on FT Gateway.
Speaker: And I just, you know, because I knew about blockchain and art and stuff, whenever he saw it, he told me that it
Speaker: He sort of shared on Instagram that he was doing NFT and that he didn't really understand or know what he was about, but he was just pretty much digital art on the blockchain.
Speaker: So things sort of clicked and so I sort of started collecting NFT gateway pretty much in mid 2020.
Speaker: And before that, I just collected a few crypto art projects that were not NFT.
Speaker: But yeah, that's the gist of it.
Speaker: And I've seen, I remember the first exhibition of CryptoPunk at the Kate Vaas Gallery, but there's dates like that and things that, yeah, important dates in both the history of crypto art and just of my involvement in art, digital art, blockchain arts, and then NFTs.
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Speaker: It's awesome because it really, yeah, you were there at key dates and key times and not in the... It's kind of cool to see stories that are outside of the holy shit, let's get a lot of money narrative.
Speaker: And really, like, you know, you went through the deep end and, yeah, I got a really cool story to tell.
Speaker: And by being around art all the time, you must have learned things, even if there was not, like...
Speaker: you know, an actual, hey, kids, sit down and let us tell you about art and art collecting by your parents.
Speaker: You have like you had to pick up a few things.
Speaker: And so there has to be things that come more naturally to you than it does other people.
Speaker: Because this wave has brought in a lot of people who want to trade, but also want to collect.
Speaker: And what did you learn from
Speaker: that you think would help them?
Speaker: Me too.
Speaker: I'm in that wave.
Speaker: I guess I've didn't learn detective things, but I've learned it quite realistically in a way.
Speaker: So you make connections you don't even realize you do.
Speaker: There's a notion of just, you know, training your eyes for the art as well.
Speaker: So I guess that, you know, if you're surrounded by great art, you by definition train your eye.
Speaker: good things and so you tend to be more capable of recognizing interesting stuff and yeah just this notion of flair and eyes that you know are inherent to the art world those are things that might have benefit through years of exposure to those notions to those artists to exhibition to things like that and just I guess you know just basic knowledge on some practice in the art market that some people that start out are still a bit naive about but
Speaker: about sort of what's going on behind the curtains.
Speaker: And he also, I guess, helped me not being too intimidated by the art world because I think that's something most people are really intimidated by art and intimidated by the art world.
Speaker: They don't, you know, they wouldn't imagine themselves pushing the door of a gallery or going to an auction houses.
Speaker: even though it's free and anyone can join and if I can attend any auction offices and you open any sales.
Speaker: There's even some people that are known to be just going from exhibition to exhibition just to eat at the buffet, for example.
Speaker: That's a good call.
Speaker: Yeah, there's some people like my mom used to do that when she went to, she had a scholarship to attend a Waltron business school.
Speaker: And she went there and at the time, I think, you know, she was 65.
Speaker: At the time, the dollars were really strong.
Speaker: And so she didn't have much buying powers in euros than she expected.
Speaker: And so she used to go from gallery opening to gallery opening just to eat because she could barely afford food.
Speaker: So there's a bunch of people that do that.
Speaker: That's cool.
Speaker: Grasshopping, literally just hopping from exhibition to exhibition just to eat.
Speaker: So it just shows that anyone can join an exhibition at any age you can be dressed.
Speaker: You can be dressed up as a bump.
Speaker: That doesn't impact anything.
Speaker: Nobody will ever...
Speaker: prevent you to enter a gallery on the opening date or something like that.
Speaker: It's just no private invitation.
Speaker: It's always free and in public.
Speaker: Oh, that's cool.
Speaker: That's I'll keep that in mind.
Speaker: What, what do you, why do you think you, you talked about some people maybe being naive about certain things?
Speaker: What did you have in mind?
Speaker: Well, you know, some people think that you just need to be great art to be, to be a great artist to be successful, but you know, there's sometimes there's a lot of mechanism system that you, we don't really realize exist.
Speaker: For example, some galleries, they have one best selling artist that sort of enable them to present other artists.
Speaker: And sometimes you have a waiting list.
Speaker: You can be a billionaire.
Speaker: It doesn't mean you can buy whatever you want on the art world.
Speaker: You need to be on the list, you need to be in the small paper of the galleries to do so.
Speaker: It's a bit like, you know, when you want to buy a really luxury handbag or watches, there's a list of waiting and sometimes you have to buy something else in order to buy these things you wanted to have.
Speaker: So there's all those systems that are a bit odd, that are a bit peculiar to the art world that we just don't realize did exist.
Speaker: But yeah, it's typical, for example, that let's say you want to buy a termineers piece from whichever gallery, they will tell you, well, if you want that piece, you must buy this other piece from that small artist we have in the gallery.
Speaker: Otherwise, I won't sell it to you.
Speaker: So there's all the system like that, that brurs and makes this world really obscure.
Speaker: And we just think that people have the money, they buy what they want.
Speaker: That's not necessarily true in the primary market base.
Speaker: Yeah, that's some of the things that are really peculiar against the art world.
Speaker: That's so interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, there's really... I completely understand the naivete thing because it's like when you're an entrepreneur and you think you only need to create a great product in order to succeed, and it's not the case.
Speaker: There's always a human component.
Speaker: There's always a connection network component.
Speaker: Do you see these types of...
Speaker: like dynamics happen in the now with this like burgeoning web free art space.
Speaker: Yeah, most most certainly so.
Speaker: I mean, it's
Speaker: The NFC space is paradoxical in many aspects.
Speaker: One, especially in the narrative of adoption and mass adoption, it's all about embodying people, but in the same time, it's all about exclusivity.
Speaker: And so those things are a bit paradoxical.
Speaker: You either be, you know, you are either very open or very exclusive and the NFC space pretend to do both.
Speaker: So, and the same thing with art, you know, this notion of art should be democratized, but in the same times, only really wealthy people are actually in
Speaker: interacting with it or being involved with it.
Speaker: So yeah, there's this notion, for example, but I'm sure there's plenty of other parallels we can do.
Speaker: But yeah, the NFT market, even though it's quite a parallel market, actually have a lot of the same actors involved within it, actually have a lot of the same mechanism, practice, and are closer from each other than both might think, actually.
Speaker: So yeah, that certainly is, I think, something that
Speaker: we're also being reinforced moving on as the market sort of concentrate on specific collection and sort of, yeah, reinforce itself.
Speaker: So yeah, there's a lot of parallels to be made on this.
Speaker: It's quite just same thing, but different in a way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: If you were, uh, if you were president of the Web3 art space, what would you do?
Speaker: What would you do different?
Speaker: Like what would be your laws so that we have like, I don't know, better experience for collectors, better experience for artists?
Speaker: Um, I guess in force enforcing royalties actually on chain would be nice because so far it's just on platform and you know, it's been quite a,
Speaker: a roller coaster on that topic about what should be done and what's, how should it be done, et cetera.
Speaker: That would be against the first thing.
Speaker: And then also sort of stop having censorship on NFC because there's plenty, there is no open C whenever they receive a DMCA, even if it's an artwork that Fall Interfair used to just delist it right on and suppress it.
Speaker: without getting the artist any notice or any chances to
Speaker: contest that TMCA request, which is to do have that opportunity in the trade art world.
Speaker: So I don't see why they don't say in what you eat.
Speaker: It seems ridiculous.
Speaker: You know, OpenSea also prevents Iranian artists to means prevent bunch of nationalities to participate in it to it.
Speaker: And it's most of the time the nationalities that most need it.
Speaker: I did a few exhibition about Middle East and North Africa about how NFT was a tool of emancipation, was a tool of, you know,
Speaker: to counteract censorship and state control to fiat currency.
Speaker: So they are sort of the country that most need it and they don't get the chance to participate in it.
Speaker: And I guess the last sort of measure I would have is try to sort of make it, make the space more polyglots.
Speaker: It's really anglophone.
Speaker: And if you're someone that's from a country where, you know, the level of English is not that, that,
Speaker: that important.
Speaker: How do you expect a bonding?
Speaker: Those people will never be able to do so.
Speaker: I'm not even sure the Bitcoin white paper is translated in Arabic and in that many languages itself.
Speaker: Might be, I might say something wrong, but if you're an Arabic speaking person and you're trying to find documentation on NFT, good luck.
Speaker: You'll not find any.
Speaker: What was that experience like working on those exhibits, working with these artists from countries that are not in the mainstream current of English speaking?
Speaker: Because you've worked in traditional art, you work in hyped web3 arts, and you've worked in now more humanitarian.
Speaker: How was the perception of that art?
Speaker: How did it do?
Speaker: So I did that exhibition quite early on.
Speaker: It was at the Menard Art Fair.
Speaker: So it's an art fair that focuses on Middle East and North Africa.
Speaker: It was early 2021, I believe.
Speaker: So February or March 2021.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: So it was quite early on, but even back then, those artists felt like a bit on the sideline of this entire movement because they didn't really speak good English.
Speaker: They were in a very different situation.
Speaker: But the thing that came clear to me that there was an opportunity for them that was just not a financial tool for them, but it was pretty good.
Speaker: something else one of the example that was the most striking was when i was working with kurdish artists uh you know in kurdistan when you're you're born into an actual turkey they strip you out of your kurdish name they give you a turkish name so most of the artists the first time they were about to sign artwork with their real kurdish name was in nft because they wouldn't be able to do it
Speaker: in the national in Turkey because they were an ostracized and, you know, I mean, we know the Kurdish situation with Turkey, it's quite difficult.
Speaker: And so for them, it was really something else than just financial tool.
Speaker: It was a way for them to actually exist with their complexity as individual
Speaker: and to live free.
Speaker: And one of the examples was one artist that flee Syria during the war against ISIS, rather than, you know, traversing Middle East and the Mediterranean Sea with cash and jewelry in his pocket.
Speaker: He actually bought EVE, and so, because he bought it at early 2020, and it was a really good situation when it pumped during the bull run.
Speaker: So, you know, that's one of the few stories I know of a refugee that
Speaker: go away from his home because it's a war zone and end up in Europe being a millionaire.
Speaker: Can you give me I want to have him on the podcast.
Speaker: That would be insane.
Speaker: That would be really cool story asking, you know, people that are in artists in the Xenium, they sometimes don't really want to be recognized.
Speaker: I can ask him, but it's a peculiar situation.
Speaker: They're really touchy about sometimes.
Speaker: So
Speaker: Got to be mindful of that, but I can show.
Speaker: Yeah, of course.
Speaker: Ask him to participate if he's up to it, for sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And AI is going to do a lot of good, I think, because it's going to break down that barrier of language.
Speaker: It's going to allow... We're not completely there yet because the costs of...
Speaker: I was talking to a company called Wondercraft who they can very seamlessly take my voice in English and transcribe it into Spanish or French.
Speaker: But it's like for a podcast episode, it would cost them like $300.
Speaker: So it's not really doable.
Speaker: But in the coming years, the cost is going to go way down.
Speaker: And so you're going to have people from Africa who don't speak a word of English who are seamlessly participating in that market.
Speaker: And so when you have an open financial system and you have an open technological system that breaks down the language barrier, then we could see some real magic happen, I think.
Speaker: Hopefully so, but it's crazy.
Speaker: We have to wait on AI to do so.
Speaker: I feel this is part of the idea.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: Don't start me on that.
Speaker: I'm really surprised that it hasn't been done already, to be honest.
Speaker: But yeah, surely it will help.
Speaker: And that's most of the time how I was interacting with those artists because we were writing to each other in English.
Speaker: They were mostly using Google Cloud to...
Speaker: sort of exchange with me uh so yeah it facilitated the exchange but you know even though with google trad and some tools there's still some miscommunication happening a few mishaps so that's part of it but that will surely helps hopefully so i didn't really thought about it this way but now that you mention it makes sense yeah
Speaker: And now that you say what you said, it's nuts that I'm now counting on machines to do that because it is part of the ethos, but I guess it's still like...
Speaker: We're greedy little humans and we care about the next big thing, the next big shiny thing.
Speaker: And so if it's too much hassle to understand what's happening or to make ourselves understood, then yeah, we don't do it and we focus on something that we do understand.
Speaker: What is art?
Speaker: What for you is art and why do people buy it?
Speaker: Because I know that psychology is one of those things that you also like to fuck around with.
Speaker: So what is it and why?
Speaker: So the question, what is art?
Speaker: I'm sort of trying to disregard it a bit.
Speaker: I mean, it's been a question of art history for as long, you know, sort of, you know, a bite from the Dushantien
Speaker: definition of art being whatever an artist decided is, as long as you signed it and as an artist's equivalent to it.
Speaker: It can be a urinoir, it can be a toilet, it can be whatever you want as long as you decide it is.
Speaker: And then on why people do
Speaker: I often refer to the theory of the sociologue Bourdieu, which is a French sociologue, and the notion of cultural, social, and financial capital, being which that every individual with a high financial capital tend to use that financial capital to acquire and gain social and cultural capital.
Speaker: And that's especially to anyone.
Speaker: France, I believe, where, you know, if you look at the billionaires in France, they all are involved in the cultural world.
Speaker: Patrick Drahi owns Sotheby's, Francois Pinault owns Christie's, and then you have, you know, the guy from LVMH, Bernard Arnault, that has the LVMH Foundation in Paris.
Speaker: Pino also has the Bourse of Commerce, so they all have their own little private museum.
Speaker: And I think that's because in France, being rich as fuck is not enough to be respected.
Speaker: In the US, if you have a ton of money, people respect you, think you are successful, think that you must be really smart, etc.
Speaker: In France, we do value still a lot the fact that you can be accepted within intellectual circles.
Speaker: And I think that's the objective of many billionaires in France and many people that have wealth.
Speaker: is to also be able to be part of a higher cultural social life.
Speaker: And yeah, it's like all people make fun of like the traders in, you know, in La Défense that makes a ton of money, but go back to the house alone with the little pasta box and stuff.
Speaker: And this life seems absurd to us because to us, it's something like they don't actually believe.
Speaker: In the US, they will be regarded as, you know, very respected individual and they might be inviting stuff, etc.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: I guess, yeah, in France, depending on the country and culture, we do value differently social, cultural, and financial capital.
Speaker: But the one thing that is for sure is that anyone with high financial capital at some point need to use that capital to acquire other things to have either an impact on the world.
Speaker: But, you know, if you're donating to save the baby seals, that might acquire you a lot of social capital and compassion and, you know, sort of...
Speaker: something that people actually like you.
Speaker: And if you're someone that has a bit more involved in art, if you finance whatever art project and stuff like that, that can get you a bit of social point as well.
Speaker: So I think there's a lot to it, but then there's the specific case of true art collectors that are
Speaker: Inamely, people with a mental problem, which is, you know, an obsessive, compulsive disorder of buying out work and accumulating stuff.
Speaker: So there are specific species.
Speaker: And honestly, it's, yeah, it's at some point a psychological problem that are socially accepted.
Speaker: But it's, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's almost like a Diogen syndrome.
Speaker: It's an accumulative, compulsive disorder that makes it so that you cannot refrain yourself from buying artwork and acquiring a lot of art and stuff like that.
Speaker: Most of the art collectors, they have more artwork than they can hang on their wall.
Speaker: And at this point, I think truly are art collectors.
Speaker: And there's also the notion of building a narrative around your collection.
Speaker: I mean, all those different aspects you need to take into account.
Speaker: But I think that's...
Speaker: In the gist of it, the reason people do buy hearts, depending on the person.
Speaker: That's crazy.
Speaker: It's funny because if I had to answer in just a few words, it would be to make more money.
Speaker: And you can get tax rebates, right?
Speaker: Or there are tax implications sometimes.
Speaker: Depends on the country, but there are less advantages that you might think.
Speaker: The most interesting thing about that is that art is not taxed from patrimonial.
Speaker: So if you actually buy a yacht or a car, you pay taxes on it every year because that's part of the capitals.
Speaker: But effectively, fiscally at least, artwork is considered just as cash on the wall.
Speaker: Pretty much that's what it is.
Speaker: It's just cash on the wall.
Speaker: And so you only pay tax.
Speaker: You can get a tax rebate on it under a very specific condition that I don't have really in mind right now.
Speaker: And they're usually on the resale part of it, on your pre-value that you get tax rebate, but you actually do pay taxes when you buy it.
Speaker: So it's not like a tax or anything like money.
Speaker: as people think.
Speaker: You can do donation to a museum, but out of 200 possible donations that were done to a museum, only 20 were accepted last year at least.
Speaker: So it's not something that is super common either.
Speaker: So it's case-by-case basis, but no.
Speaker: Usually,
Speaker: There is very few people that buy artwork to make money.
Speaker: They usually buy artworks to, yeah, sort of reduce the patrimonial and so therefore reduce their tax imposition at some point.
Speaker: But it's not, no, I'm sure there's others better way to do it.
Speaker: And I did my thesis on art as an investment, and I compared the performance of art investment funds in comparison to the stock market on the same period.
Speaker: And the conclusion was the stock market always outperform art investment funds on the same period.
Speaker: So if you actually want to make money, art is not the best investment at all, honestly.
Speaker: you do have this one out of 100 chance of finding an artist that really pop off.
Speaker: And then, yes, this will cover most of the losses you make on the other purchase.
Speaker: But it's a bit of a casino game here.
Speaker: It's a lottery game, which, you know, there's nobody that really can assure you that this artist will be worth 10 times more in 2, 5, 10 years.
Speaker: Anyone that tells you that is lying to you.
Speaker: But, yeah, it's mostly, it's rather to acquire the social and cultural capital rather than
Speaker: we acquire more financial capital might not be super right.
Speaker: And so what do you make of what's happening here?
Speaker: Cause I'm like, I'm going to throw in an outrageous number, but I, I, I'd bet that 70 or 80% of the people buying art, at least on Ethan in our space are in it because they're expecting it to gain value and to resell it later.
Speaker: Yeah, but that's the case for collectibles.
Speaker: I mean, just like collectibles market is not the same thing as the NFT art market.
Speaker: And collectibles like, you know, Artifact and CryptoPunks and Bordape, they have a very different approach to it.
Speaker: It's not artwork.
Speaker: And just like if you're buying collection cards or Pokemon cards or handbags or watches,
Speaker: People that do buy watches this day, they buy it for the potential resale value, they do fine with it.
Speaker: There's a bit of a flex aspect to it as well.
Speaker: So there's this notion of social capital too.
Speaker: But this approach of financial gain is more specific to collectibles market than the NFT art one.
Speaker: And even long-form generative art and collection like the Fidenza and Ringer, because of their large supply,
Speaker: is a bit different from one-on-one art and, you know, small series and small edition.
Speaker: So they have market elasticity in Ocean that are closer to the collectibles market than the actual art market.
Speaker: So there is that, but I mean, the reason for it is also there was the bull one,
Speaker: speculative bubble can make it makes sense for them i guess uh to leverage those different systems and you know flip is existing as well but you often have contract that prevents you to sell stuff right on or right after you bought it so just because it was the far west and it was starting out it was a free fall and you know
Speaker: People that want money came in and make money, whichever way they could, but their intention always was financial gain for sure.
Speaker: So then it's a game of hot potatoes, you know, it's whichever is the last one to all the potatoes that get browns.
Speaker: There's not much to it that is art related, to be honest.
Speaker: It's just speculative market.
Speaker: And so what does that make you?
Speaker: as a as a curator what's your role if it's not to because i i sort of pictured it as a like art advisor and and in that sense was here's art that's going to gain value in the future but you're saying that that's not the case so what's the role of art curators
Speaker: Well, first, I'm starting to say less and less than I'm an art curator because just to give you an example for the exhibition I did at Paris Photo two weeks ago, the curation took me three hours.
Speaker: The exhibition to organize took me three weeks.
Speaker: So curation is a small part of the job I do.
Speaker: But the difference is it's a need.
Speaker: So as an art advisor, who hires you?
Speaker: people that want to invest in art.
Speaker: So then you're making a collection plan with a notion, with a team, with an objective.
Speaker: It can be ROI, but it can be different things.
Speaker: And then, yes, you're making projection.
Speaker: You cannot make promises as any investment fund.
Speaker: There's no promises of
Speaker: specific criteria.
Speaker: There's an idea of how much, but there's always a notion of risk and you can lose it all.
Speaker: And that's part of the game.
Speaker: But you can think about the collection plan with in mind the ROI aspect of it.
Speaker: That's for sure.
Speaker: As a curator, the people that hire you are most of the time venues.
Speaker: So your Web2 events, you have a gallery, you have a museum.
Speaker: Those are the people that hire curators.
Speaker: And it hires you to suggest a list of artists on a specific team.
Speaker: As I did, for example, this exhibition on Middle East and North Africa at the fair early 2021, I then got a job as a curator for an event in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia that I think was a three-day long exhibition.
Speaker: And they hired me to do a proposition of several artists to be included because there's not been people like me that had a listing with artists that were specifically from this country and working in NFTs.
Speaker: And so for them to save the time of looking all around to find that's really, you know, they were actually asking me because I already have catalog everything, I have my listing, so they save time.
Speaker: So most of the time you buy, you hire a curator to save time on the curational process or to come up with non-commercial thematical exhibition, can be writing text, can be a look,
Speaker: huge part of the curatorial job.
Speaker: So yeah, it's different, different job dealers, art advisor, curator, galerists.
Speaker: It's mixed and it's like an umbrella term in the, in the NFT world.
Speaker: We use curators number of them for all those different jobs, but there are actually different jobs.
Speaker: So yeah, it depends on who you address, who are your client, how do you work with them on which basis?
Speaker: So yeah, that's, that's where the difference lies.
Speaker: If that's clearer, I mean, yeah,
Speaker: Yeah, a little bit, a little bit.
Speaker: I mean, it's not clearer.
Speaker: It raises more questions, but it shows me a little bit more about basically what is it that you do.
Speaker: I actually just thought of something that could be really cool if you're up for it.
Speaker: Like if I said right now, I'd like to build a portfolio only in crypto art, in Web3 art for like 25 ETH.
Speaker: Could you like help me like and maybe share your screen as well of
Speaker: picking out, you know, a few of the artists that you, you personally recommend, or maybe ask me the questions that you would ask me if we were in that process.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's no way I'm going to show my screen and show my listing.
Speaker: I'll tell you right now.
Speaker: It's something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: If you've seen the 10% of the series, 10% on Netflix.
Speaker: I haven't, no.
Speaker: Yeah, but they always are really protective of their fichier, as they call it, or their files.
Speaker: And the same thing for curator, you know, it's like a... No, that's not what it made.
Speaker: Yeah, no, no, no.
Speaker: Of course not.
Speaker: I meant more like on the public front, like things that are out there in the public, artists that you know that you care for and that you would recommend.
Speaker: Yeah, but I would need to be paid for that.
Speaker: But anyway, what I just...
Speaker: Okay, fair enough.
Speaker: That's what it is.
Speaker: Honestly, it's like the only thing I provide the fact that I know those lists.
Speaker: So every time people do like tweets, it's like, oh, any artist recommend.
Speaker: I'm like, I can recommend you, but how much do you pay me to do so?
Speaker: It's a bit the same.
Speaker: No, that's fair.
Speaker: It's a bit like, you know, the analogy I often took is a bit like you hire an architect to build your house.
Speaker: He makes a plan.
Speaker: Finally, you don't hire him, but you keep the plan.
Speaker: That's not possible.
Speaker: It would never happen.
Speaker: It's almost like asking the source code of an artist's work.
Speaker: Whenever I do that, you know, it doesn't have any security anymore that you're actually going to pay him.
Speaker: For example, there I've made a collection plan for a specific... I can, I guess... No, I cannot share this one because I have it for a client that wanted to do a
Speaker: collection on your band team and so I found 20 artists on the team of your band art and etc etc but I'm not sending them the document as long as they haven't paid me for it so I've just presented it in a way but never will I send that document as long as I'm not paid because as the moment I send it they don't need me anymore so that's the problem but usually the question I ask is the same question as any financial advisor is
Speaker: What's your horizon?
Speaker: What's your risk you're willing to take?
Speaker: And do you want something very diverse or something that focuses on specific collection?
Speaker: And which market segment are you focusing on?
Speaker: 0.1 to 1 ETH, 1 to 10 ETH, or 10 ETH plus?
Speaker: So that's the sort of, yeah, things just like the horizon, risk, typology of things you're looking for, objective behind the collection, and the diversification level you want to have in it.
Speaker: Are you doing this work for people who are like very wealthy and, and, and, or is, cause you can, you can name your price if you're, if you're comfortable with it, but just to, just to try to understand if like any person who has even like a, what's, what's the minimum budget someone would need?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's a better way of doing it.
Speaker: What's the minimum budget someone would need in order for it to make sense, to get your help in order to build their portfolio?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, well, usually I take contract that starts around at the very least 10K for sure.
Speaker: Usually depends on which and what, but usually it was 50 to 100K.
Speaker: project projection because that's where you have a budget you can do stuff with.
Speaker: For example, there is this project that they were, it's actually a project they want to raffle out artworks to their members and token holders.
Speaker: So the objective for them was to have a lot of different artwork they can raffle to people.
Speaker: They had a 15 if budgets for it and for to make that document with just the works links
Speaker: suggested price you should buy it to, I was taking something like $200,000 for it, just for the documents.
Speaker: And then if you want to have additional service like Artist Liaison and work with artists specifically that I have contact with, that's about twice as expensive.
Speaker: But it depends.
Speaker: I can work on a share revenue basis as well.
Speaker: I had early bull run, I had people that sort of wanted to send me, I think, $100,000 to do a correction plan for them.
Speaker: And I would have kept...
Speaker: I think half of any benefit the fund would have made.
Speaker: So it was a 50-50 based on commission rate.
Speaker: I didn't take up from payments, but it's really case by case on who I'm working with, what's the objective, etc.
Speaker: What amount of work is going to require it for me.
Speaker: But usually, yeah, people that say, oh, if I send you $2,000 and you manage something for me, I'm like, no, you know, if I do it for 10 people at $2,000, it doesn't really make sense, except if you get together.
Speaker: But otherwise, no, I usually have carte blanche or whatever I buy, and you can actually make interesting moves starting from $50K to $100K.
Speaker: Usually, that's where I'm the most interested in working with.
Speaker: What's the max you've done?
Speaker: Depends.
Speaker: For Sotheby's, it was a different kind of budget, I guess.
Speaker: It was more of a trying to sell things for them.
Speaker: But I think 100k was perhaps the max.
Speaker: It's not something I've done much, honestly.
Speaker: I've done it times to times, but...
Speaker: At some point, I just was working at Sotheby's at different time of job.
Speaker: But yeah, 100K, 200K, something like that was the max absolute manage within the portfolio.
Speaker: And then without the valorization of it, honestly, but yeah, it was about that, something like that.
Speaker: I think with 100K, the most that we've increased was half a million, something like that at some point, with just the different price changes.
Speaker: But yeah, something in half a million.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: I had as a question of like, who are you?
Speaker: What type of artists are you eyeing right now?
Speaker: But I'm not sure you want to share that now.
Speaker: I wouldn't say no.
Speaker: That's the same thing.
Speaker: Follow him on Twitter and maybe you'll get clues.
Speaker: Yeah, you can stalk me on my wallet, but usually it's the thing.
Speaker: It's like, oh, I'm looking to buy this.
Speaker: And if I tell the world, then I'm going to get cut off from it.
Speaker: So that's not... Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: There's this notion of trying to be rare.
Speaker: It's a bit of this mix between content creation and also retaining information I can actually get paid to share.
Speaker: So it's a different, difficult mix.
Speaker: It's a fine line to walk.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: I get it.
Speaker: I won't be the one to blame you for it.
Speaker: At this point of the conversation, I have rapid fire questions.
Speaker: And so I'm just going to shoot the question and you can probably answer in just a word or a few.
Speaker: If you could only buy one NFT to hold for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Speaker: Well, it's terrible.
Speaker: I do accumulate a lot, but I guess the Depot artwork is might be the one I'll be the most interested by.
Speaker: one of his edition that I have already, the, the, for example, 100 edition.
Speaker: He has, that was the first sort of everyday,
Speaker: cut up the head that might be the thing or Alota Money artwork or Xcopy specifically, something like that.
Speaker: If you could only buy one digital artist, who would it be?
Speaker: But in your case, I guess you just answered the question.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Beeperl, I guess, or Bill Viola or non NFT digital artists, Namjoon Park, perhaps things like that.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Dona Four Eliasson would be great, but that is.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: If you could only hold one crypto for the rest of your life.
Speaker: If.
Speaker: Who are your top three people that you vibe with the most in this space at the moment?
Speaker: Well, there is my fiance, Art Girl, that I've worked with for doing this last exhibition I mentioned at the Paris Photo.
Speaker: She's also... I didn't know she was your fiance.
Speaker: Yeah, well, fiance, she don't like when I say that because she has no rings yet.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Is she there in the background?
Speaker: Yeah, she's right there.
Speaker: Well, it's the English.
Speaker: I have to say that because... It's on the blockchain.
Speaker: Yeah, because partners always look a bit professional and I didn't find the right word for it.
Speaker: It's a bit too quirky.
Speaker: But yes, I've been with her for over a year and a half now and she's also working in Web3, among other things.
Speaker: She's also a gallerist.
Speaker: And I guess I vibe a lot with her because we do discuss all the time.
Speaker: I hope you do.
Speaker: A lot.
Speaker: So there's that.
Speaker: And then I guess Art Gnome is someone I always refer to.
Speaker: I don't connect to him a lot because I'm a bit sort of still in the relationship of I refer to him as a mentor more than anything else, but I'm sure he's not even aware of it, to be honest.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But it's someone I look up to all the time and hopefully will get to work with at some point in the future.
Speaker: And I guess some other people are like,
Speaker: artists in particular.
Speaker: I mean, I do vibe a lot with Delucris as an artist that, I guess, trusts me a lot and allows me to do a bunch of things.
Speaker: And also, I guess, my team at Art Crush as well is something we haven't discussed it here, but I also co-founded a company that exhibits artists across the world on billboards.
Speaker: And that has involved me to exhibit more than
Speaker: I don't know, half a thousand artists on over 25 different countries in just a year.
Speaker: So that's pretty cool.
Speaker: And I get a lot of curatorial opportunity like that.
Speaker: So that's a nice thing.
Speaker: It's something that I do enjoy doing.
Speaker: That's why I keep getting involved.
Speaker: For example, at the moment we have a deal with Kierchanel, which is the leading billboard company in Belgium, but also across Europe.
Speaker: And at the moment, every billboard screen you see in Belgium will show artwork accruated every minute.
Speaker: So every minute there is about six to 12 seconds of art accruated show on
Speaker: over i think a thousand billboard screens all across belgium uh 24 7 for the next six months and that's wow that's amazing yeah so if you ever go in belgium you will most likely see artwork i've created on those uh billboard screens and that's something that is quite fantastic to be able to do that i realize i don't talk enough about because uh most people are not aware you should
Speaker: So I should definitely do because you really should.
Speaker: And we document every initiative.
Speaker: So there's videos of it all the time.
Speaker: There is example of what we've done.
Speaker: If I can grab Shama screen or one last thing.
Speaker: Yeah, please.
Speaker: We did something pretty cool during NFT Paris.
Speaker: We rented an actual sort of pickup truck.
Speaker: At the back of it, we put a fuel generator on it, and we scrapped on a huge projector on it.
Speaker: And so we managed to do a sort of, yeah,
Speaker: Sauvage exhibition on Nero Le Trocadero.
Speaker: And so we would get on one place.
Speaker: This is sick.
Speaker: Demits, the police would arrive, try to arrest us, but then they wouldn't arrest us because there is, you know, we don't bring the law here, but they will usually tell, oh, you're parking in a parking place.
Speaker: So we would move from places to places.
Speaker: We had sort of scooted for different walls beforehand.
Speaker: And so we had this little sort of
Speaker: we had and things people would find us if they were looking for us.
Speaker: So we did that as fun, but most of it is initiative like that, you know, small, large queens also, but also on Times Square, as you see here, and in every continent in the world.
Speaker: We did Africa, we did, yeah, LA, Milan, Amsterdam, Paris, Arbazel, Ghosn, and we have a bunch of like
Speaker: permanent screen as well.
Speaker: We have this permanent wall.
Speaker: And yeah, you have all the artists we exhibited before.
Speaker: And if you look at just the list of artists, I mean, one, two, three, four by row, eight, and we have 57 pages that are not updated.
Speaker: So yeah, eight times.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: That's yeah, it's quite cool.
Speaker: And that's not up to date with that's all version of our website, but it should exist right on.
Speaker: And we have so the business models that we have a membership that gives you Yeah, what does the membership get you because I was looking at your wallet and I saw them and I thought like this, I don't know what this is about, but it sounds cool.
Speaker: So every membership was done by a different artist as well, but pretty much what it gives you is that all the artists we exhibited during the World Tour, so there's a better artist, they all give us an addition.
Speaker: And that was what I was trying to solve before we got in our call is that so we receive addition from artists, they give us for free because we don't make them pay for the World Tour, we don't take commission of the work.
Speaker: They give us commission for free.
Speaker: They give us edition for free.
Speaker: And every week we raffle and we raffle those edition to the orders.
Speaker: So when you have the membership, you pretty much get your lottery tickets for getting artworks every week.
Speaker: That's in a sense what it is.
Speaker: And that still happens and it will continue to happen.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so we are aimed to, I think, raffle away.
Speaker: over 300 EF of value of artwork.
Speaker: For example, the first one we did with Jack Fried and there were addition that retails at one EF each.
Speaker: We had 10 of them.
Speaker: So just that first raffle was a 10 EF value raffle.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And we keep on doing that.
Speaker: We took a bit of, we were a bit late with artists not meeting it yet, not saying it to us yet.
Speaker: You know, managing 30 artists is sometimes pretty difficult to work coordinates, but it's still happening to this day and gives you those benefits.
Speaker: And there's,
Speaker: Other few benefits as well as we build up more daily screens, we will have access to screen all the time.
Speaker: And at some point, we expect that any members will be able to decide what art will be shown on the spillboard and have sort of a permissionless, more decentralized curation approach.
Speaker: So there's a few ideas in there, but at the moment... Maybe I'll pick one up.
Speaker: I like this.
Speaker: And you get ruffled all the time and you'll get an entry ticket.
Speaker: It's passive.
Speaker: You don't have to engage with Discord or engage with the community if you don't want to.
Speaker: There's a few things we do for the community member that want to engage with it with specific spots on OpenCourse, for example.
Speaker: So you have much more chance to be selected as there's
Speaker: not that many members in comparison to the numbers of artists that participate in our open calls.
Speaker: But the gist of it is, yeah, you get free art every week if you're lucky.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: And people like gambling.
Speaker: So maybe you have something, maybe you have something there.
Speaker: Let's move out of, uh,
Speaker: Well, let's not completely move out of Web3 just yet, because one of the subjects that I like that we're talking about, because you're from the art world, I come from the intellectual properly law world.
Speaker: And so one of the concepts that we both know about is droit de suite, which is...
Speaker: You create a piece of art and when that art gets sold in the future, you're supposed to be getting a cut, which doesn't really happen in the real world.
Speaker: What I'd written down was how could that actually work in practice beyond buying NFTs?
Speaker: How can we preserve ownership of digital assets happening on the Internet?
Speaker: Phew, that's a challenging question.
Speaker: Yeah, it is.
Speaker: I guess the blockchain solved that for sure, but still there's no images on the blockchain yet.
Speaker: So it's a convention, you know, just like anyone.
Speaker: If anyone agrees on something being the way, then it would be the way.
Speaker: You know, it's like the certificate of authenticity in artwork.
Speaker: It doesn't have any legal value.
Speaker: It's just a paper with, I say that this thing is authentic and that's all there is to it.
Speaker: It's a reputation-based paper that has a conventional value, but has no legal value whatsoever.
Speaker: So that exists and that has been a peer angulaire of what we've been doing in the art world.
Speaker: And even if that's no legal value, so...
Speaker: I guess NFT not being recognized as legally as artwork or anything is not an obstacle for it to grow as a market and grow as a artistic ecosystem of its own, I suppose.
Speaker: As long as people agree to it to be- So let's all agree.
Speaker: It would be the way.
Speaker: Let's all agree to that right now.
Speaker: You're the president of Web3R after all, so you can make that decision and we'll have to abide by it.
Speaker: One last thing, because you told me about the pixel war.
Speaker: And funny enough, I was in the car with my brother a few weeks ago and he told me about it as well.
Speaker: And I like you're the only two people in the world.
Speaker: What was that about?
Speaker: What was it?
Speaker: How how did it happen?
Speaker: Why was it so significant?
Speaker: And if you can show a suit, that would be awesome.
Speaker: It's not related to NFT at all.
Speaker: It's a Reddit event that was really sort of impacted by YouTube's communities in France, especially Kameto.
Speaker: And just an example of collaborative art stuff we can do on the internet, pretty much.
Speaker: This was the last fresco they did for the last one.
Speaker: And it was sort of...
Speaker: thing of thing of the French are so important in the internet community because you see out of all those initiatives, the French flag is huge.
Speaker: It's right there.
Speaker: It takes like a huge part of it.
Speaker: You even have this event there.
Speaker: I mean, you have a bunch of French initiatives.
Speaker: And yeah, we've like, you know, you have the face of Zidane, you have a bunch of stuff there.
Speaker: Even Emmanuel Macron, I think, tweeted it on it, something like that.
Speaker: I mean, it was a huge internet phenomenon.
Speaker: And just to say that, you know, internet has been a way for co-creation with for decades.
Speaker: And NFT just sort of a consequence of that.
Speaker: Then we didn't wait to...
Speaker: for NFT to be able to create art collaboratively online.
Speaker: And it was just an example of things that existed with it.
Speaker: And to say that pixel art is not necessarily something that can be created with the crypto banks or something like that is something that has existed for years and years and years before that.
Speaker: And so how did it, what was the mechanics?
Speaker: Because the way my brother described it, it was sort of a competition between people.
Speaker: Like the French rallied and tried to use up the space.
Speaker: And what were the dynamics?
Speaker: I think you could place one pixel at times every 12, 15 seconds or something like that.
Speaker: So everyone can just place one pixels.
Speaker: So you have to coordinate people to make it so that they actually produce something that looks like something.
Speaker: And so you have plenty of system for that.
Speaker: We have Excel sheet that say place disc colors on this specific X and Y coordinate.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: That's crazy.
Speaker: So just an example of huge cooperation of bunch of people on Discord that actually managed to do something
Speaker: cohesive and that's no especially it's listed that over 24 hours I believe so you have to manage time differences there were alliances between people from different zone of the map so they sort of agree not to attack each other and so yeah there's plenty of stuff like that and you can surely find a lot of YouTube references on it that just explain that and just dig much more into details and depth than I'm doing here but it's just yeah just to see that
Speaker: You don't necessarily need to own stuff to be able to enjoy it.
Speaker: It must have been a great experience for anyone that participated.
Speaker: You don't need to earn money out of it.
Speaker: You don't need to pay, oh, that was mine.
Speaker: I have NFT of it to enjoy it.
Speaker: That's what I say most of the time.
Speaker: Even if you're just curious about NFT, you don't need to buy it to be curious about it.
Speaker: You can just check it out.
Speaker: You can just go on SuperR and...
Speaker: see what's up and see who's sitting, see who's getting interest and traction, and just look at the art.
Speaker: It's already plenty enough.
Speaker: And you might see some fascinating, interesting phenomena that are comparable to what happens at the pixel wall of Reddit.
Speaker: just interesting bunch of nails and geeks that get together to create fun stuff online and push the boundaries of what you could collaborate if you do online just to see that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sometimes we always heard about social media in a way that's all, you know, harassment and mass stuff and negative stuff, but there's plenty of.
Speaker: There's also beauty there.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: There's as much beauty as there is sadness and ugliness.
Speaker: So, you know, we need to look up to that as well.
Speaker: So, yeah, I think it's just important.
Speaker: But just to say that there's plenty of way to express and experience, experiment out online beside NFT.
Speaker: And if the blockchain crypto thing aspect of it is a setback for you.
Speaker: then you have plenty of other alternatives also.
Speaker: There shouldn't be an obstacle to just get interested in digital art and new media creation and new artists and stuff like that.
Speaker: What a beautiful way to close out this conversation.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: Thanks to anyone who's listened to this conversation.
Speaker: You should...
Speaker: definitely follow Arthur Mort.
Speaker: Like you'll learn a few, a few things or two.
Speaker: Maybe if you, if you look close enough, if you manage to identify one of his wallets, you'll get that alpha without having to pay.
Speaker: But if you have some budget and if you want to start collecting, if you want to build your portfolio, then I highly recommend you, you reach out to him because he, he didn't talk about it too much.
Speaker: He didn't show it too much, but he is well-connected and he, he,
Speaker: knows his stuff.
Speaker: He knows his art.
Speaker: And I know he'll help you build a very good collection based on your horizon, your budget, your needs, your risk profile, and all of that good stuff.
Speaker: Don't forget to join the Discord.
Speaker: Don't forget to like, follow, comment, all the usual stuff.
Speaker: This is a decentralized podcast.
Speaker: It could belong to you too.
Speaker: So join us.
Speaker: Arthamort, thank you so much for joining.
Speaker: This was nice.
Speaker: Thank you, Polly.
Speaker: And hopefully next time we'll see.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: 100%.
Speaker: We'll see each other soon.
Speaker: I'm coming to NFT Paris too, so I'm sure we can connect around that.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: Bye-bye.
