Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Arranging Tangerines, presented by Lydian Stater.
Speaker: Conversations with contemporary artists, curators, and thinkers about the intersection of art, technology, and commerce.
Speaker: Your hosts are me, Alessandro Silver and Joseph Wilcox.
Speaker: I know what to do.
Speaker: I know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to be like you.
Speaker: I know what to do.
Speaker: I don't know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to be like you.
Speaker: This week's guests are photographers Matthew Porter and Carlo Vandero.
Speaker: They have formed a dynamic partnership known as ZONE, an artist-run collective focused on collaborating with artists in the NFT space.
Speaker: Within this innovative venture, they've successfully launched two captivating projects, 22 Pigeons, in collaboration with renowned photographer Roe Etheridge and One Five Forever, alongside the talented visual artist Mariah Robertson.
Speaker: Welcome, Matthew and Carlo.
Speaker: Well, thank you gentlemen for agreeing on such short notice to be on our podcast.
Speaker: It's been, it's great.
Speaker: I listened to you guys.
Speaker: I think that that last drop you had with the, um,
Speaker: was it the Mariah Robertson?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Mariah Robertson.
Speaker: Who's an amazing artist.
Speaker: Um, I, I heard you guys on, on Twitter, on Twitter.
Speaker: Um, I was like, I was like, yeah, these guys are doing similar stuff than we're trying to do.
Speaker: Um, with traditional artists and utilizing the NFT, um, not in a speculative way, but as a way to kind of like, uh, bring really good art to inform audiences.
Speaker: How'd you find that Twitter spaces?
Speaker: We're friends with Danielle Ezzo.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: She went to the same school that Joe and I met at.
Speaker: I was just thinking about how we met her and it was because she went to Leslie also.
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: So she posted it and you saw it.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: That's how things work, right?
Speaker: Yeah, well, we don't have a... Yeah, right, exactly.
Speaker: We don't have the biggest reach at the moment, so I just was curious, but that's great.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think Matt's question was pretty telling.
Speaker: How did you find it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No one was supposed to know.
Speaker: I mean, you sat in there in the dark for hours.
Speaker: That was recorded?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I just had a really similar real life experience when I went to a fairly new gallery in Chinatown and it's gorgeous and the show's great.
Speaker: But same thing, like, you know, they don't have a ton of followers on their Instagram.
Speaker: And I was looking at the show and I like went back and I was like, hey, thanks for, you know, the show looks awesome or whatever.
Speaker: And he's like, oh, yeah, thanks for stopping by.
Speaker: And he's like, hey, hold on.
Speaker: He's like, how'd you find us?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which is, you know, which is always a good question if you're trying to figure out how to get people to find you.
Speaker: But yeah, that was actually one of my questions for you both was just and I think that it's a common kind of understanding now, but that like Instagram and Twitter don't operate in the same spheres when it comes to the traditional art world and the NFT art world.
Speaker: And what your experience has been like trying to bridge that.
Speaker: I've found that I just, I have a hard time maintaining a presence on Twitter because I don't use it personally.
Speaker: And so I was curious about how that, you know, how you approach that with zone.art or is it zomi?
Speaker: It's zone and the URL is zone.art.
Speaker: So we accept both.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay, cool.
Speaker: I was just trying to make sure.
Speaker: Yeah, zone.art.
Speaker: But yeah, I was just curious about that.
Speaker: Before you answer that, could we just back up a little bit and just say how you guys kind of met?
Speaker: Good question.
Speaker: And how you kind of came into the space and a little bit of background?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: That is a good question.
Speaker: I know exactly when we met.
Speaker: Do you?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: I remember.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Crystal clear.
Speaker: I would have said it was out of a mutual love for falling off skateboards.
Speaker: No, it was at the Pulse Art Fair.
Speaker: in I don't know the year but this was a long time ago but we were both showing at the same gallery at the time it was the Pulse Art Fair and um it which was out on a pier at that point um and and I was there I don't I'm not even sure I had work in the booth but I just was sort of trying to keep up appearances and just sort of show my face with the gallery as they were setting up and I
Speaker: I knew there were new people coming into the roster, so I knew who Carlo was, and he showed up, and the gallery was excited to see him, and he put this portfolio on a table and started going through the portfolio, talking to them about the additions, picking spots on the wall for the pictures, and I just was waiting for my moment to just say hi to the gallery or be introduced, and so I was sort of trying to maintain a kind of
Speaker: sort of to be cool and aloof at a distance but also I was watching this intensely thinking this fucking guy but yeah can we swear on this podcast?
Speaker: Of course please do but yeah that was the moment I mean you Carlo was very nice to me
Speaker: But I just remember you being very together and me at a moment where I really did not feel very together.
Speaker: I was probably thinking, wow, who's this cool aloof guy just hanging in the corner?
Speaker: Was this at an M&B booth, was it?
Speaker: Yeah, it was.
Speaker: And I think it was maybe the Pulse Art Fair.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, they were sort of trying that for a year or something.
Speaker: This was a very long time ago.
Speaker: Is Pulse in Miami?
Speaker: Or is that LA?
Speaker: They...
Speaker: Mostly, if I'm right, they were experimenting with opening a location during, I don't know, the spring.
Speaker: I don't remember what, yeah, whatever happened to that.
Speaker: But there were a lot of things back then that kind of, I don't know what happened to them.
Speaker: I can't, Pulse and, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: I'm not going to think of them, but there were sort of a few others that maybe came and went along the same lines.
Speaker: Scope.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Scope tried out New York, maybe.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we remained friends.
Speaker: Yeah, we would have drinks.
Speaker: The long pause.
Speaker: And I was like, is that true?
Speaker: You could tell that was a question, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: How long ago was that, though?
Speaker: I mean, that could have been 2012, something like that, 11 or 12.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And I feel like we had a very nice kind of sort of mutual sort of colleague's respect.
Speaker: We would get together for drinks every couple of months or something.
Speaker: And you were always very good about, you introduced me to your agent at one point, a commercial photography agent.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: You just were always generous about sharing resources and we would kind of get together and share horror stories and just talk shop a little bit.
Speaker: But you came to my 40th birthday.
Speaker: Oh, I remember that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Stuff like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The singing chicken.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Should we ask about this?
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: Probably not, actually.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's kind of the end of the story, actually.
Speaker: I left New York and we stayed friends and then reconnected.
Speaker: When I would come back to New York, you were actually one of the people I would always try to look up.
Speaker: I feel like the longer I was away from New York, the more
Speaker: some of those friendships kind of dwindled.
Speaker: It's interesting to see who you strive to stay in contact with.
Speaker: And at some point, I guess a couple of years ago, we sat down and had a beer and we were talking about, yeah, just like that.
Speaker: We were talking about the NFT space.
Speaker: It's probably- Is that where the overlap with that started happening?
Speaker: Was it 21?
Speaker: I would back up a little bit further and I would say this about you.
Speaker: Part of the reason I like to stay in touch, even though I think we didn't have much other overlap.
Speaker: So it wasn't like we were socializing in the same circles, but we would just sort of make a point to kind of get together every now and then.
Speaker: And I always appreciated that you would make an effort to do that.
Speaker: And I liked knowing what you were up to because you were on a very unique path.
Speaker: And I'll let you decide how much of that story you want to tell, but it involved,
Speaker: a pursuit of art and technology in a way that I always thought was interesting.
Speaker: And you always had this shockingly impressive entrepreneurial spirit because I brought a friend of mine once to the satellite lab and it just blew my mind what you were up to.
Speaker: I mean, most of my friends at that point, you know, we were cutting up paper in the dark room and thinking about photography and materiality.
Speaker: And here was, um,
Speaker: not just art and commerce, but technology being applied in a way that I don't even think I could participate in a conversation about what you were doing.
Speaker: It involved strobe lights on a technical level that I just had to sort of stand by and listen.
Speaker: And I remember, I think I was with more than one person and we sort of left like, what did we just see?
Speaker: And so in the back of my mind, there's always like a short list of people and this conversation
Speaker: this I think will sort of lead into how Zone got started, where I just thought, I don't want to, and I thought this way about galleries that I've worked with too, it's like, you want to be close to the flame, you want to be where there's some excitement and some energy, and I don't always have that myself, you know, I'm not the person to lead the parade, but I definitely want to play an instrument sometimes and get involved, and so you have this short list of people in your head, like, God, if, and I don't think I, you know, that this wasn't something that I had realized at the time, but
Speaker: you know, the shortlist where you're thinking like, if there's ever an opportunity to do something with that person, I'm going to take it.
Speaker: And I think, Carla, you are sort of one of those people.
Speaker: And so you were the person who formally introduced me to NFTs because I had been kind of paying attention to it, not because of photography, but I just thought the story of CryptoPunks was kind of interesting.
Speaker: And some of my thinking about the art world and what was happening with the art world and my general feelings about technology,
Speaker: It was one of those things where like, this is a cocktail conversation.
Speaker: I don't want to be left out of it.
Speaker: I feel like everybody's sort of responding to this as if they've only read a New York Times opinion piece headline.
Speaker: And I actually think if you are interested in collectibles and you read about what Larva Labs was doing with CryptoPunks, this seems appealing to some of us who are coming from the art world.
Speaker: We can get it.
Speaker: It's a short step to get from
Speaker: what we're doing in the art world to what's happening with NFTs.
Speaker: And then Carlo, I think just pinged me or something, because I had put, I had just made a kind of eight bit self portrait and put it on Instagram in this, the same resolution as a crypto punk.
Speaker: Nobody, it's like you said before, NFTs are on Twitter and the art world's on Instagram.
Speaker: Nobody responded to this at all.
Speaker: But Carlo pinged me and said, Hey, if you're interested in this, um,
Speaker: get in touch with me or we should talk more.
Speaker: Cause I think it's something you'd, I think you'd have fun doing this as a good moment.
Speaker: And yeah, cause you, you already, you knew a lot more than I did at that point and had already kind of like dipped your toes into the NF, well, more than that, you had released a project, I think.
Speaker: I think so, yeah.
Speaker: Which is part of, I think what got me excited enough to want to go a little deeper.
Speaker: So the backstory of what Matt was talking about
Speaker: with my introduction into working with coders and working in the art and technology space is that I was in a program at the New Museum back in 2014 that was very much about incubating art and technology-based people.
Speaker: And part of what they were interested in doing was establishing sustainable practices for artists where
Speaker: rather than create a piece of technology that may be used for a single art project, what if that could become, what if the research and development behind that could become something larger?
Speaker: What if you could build a space that could extend that research and development into other projects and so on?
Speaker: And so I learned a lot in that about working and collaborating with technologists, with coders, and about the business side of things like patents and intellectual property.
Speaker: and so on.
Speaker: And part of the outcome of that was that I was making work that was hard to sell, I guess.
Speaker: I'd sort of gone from creating prints and being able to sell editions of prints or books into creating interactive digital work that was sort of experiential within a space, but really had no way to, there wasn't really a vehicle to take that to a collector.
Speaker: And ironically, at that time that I was sort of faced with that problem, I was sitting at a desk with this guy called Kevin McCoy.
Speaker: And he was there and knew and creating what was the first NFT in 2014.
Speaker: And in an organization called, I think, Monograph, in which he was really trying to take the idea of the NFT to the art world.
Speaker: And I remember him saying, well, there is a solution for this.
Speaker: There's this thing called the blockchain.
Speaker: And I thought, no way that that's going to catch on.
Speaker: And, you know, many years later, when I was being encouraged by some photographers that were in the space in 2021 to launch projects in the NFT space,
Speaker: I sort of remembered that and started to think of it not just as a sort of a vehicle to collectors, you know, in terms of a market, but also as like a sort of a tool that facilitates a different experience of artwork or could.
Speaker: So yeah, dove in with a project in 2021 and back then, you know, it was a very different
Speaker: landscape and it was a very exciting period of time to be doing that.
Speaker: But instantly found a kind of like maybe a vacuum of conversation
Speaker: and dialogue and not a lot of photographers period in the space at that point.
Speaker: There was a guy called Chris Graves who encouraged me to come in.
Speaker: Shane Leverlet who runs assembly was there.
Speaker: It was like very, very few people.
Speaker: And so as I was thinking of, you know, who might be game to at least have a conversation about what's possible for photography as it meets the blockchain.
Speaker: I had seen what you posted, Matt, but also just sort of, I think, knew that you would be up for the conversation.
Speaker: I'd never heard that about Kevin McCoy before.
Speaker: That's, you know, because I think if you came to NFTs through...
Speaker: NFT Twitter, you think it's CryptoPunks and Larva Labs or something like that where NFT started.
Speaker: If you came in through digital art or Rhizome, it's Kevin McCoy.
Speaker: But rarely at that time did I ever see those two things together.
Speaker: It was you either came in this door or you came in that door.
Speaker: And so that's interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess I never, yeah, I didn't realize that you were sharing a, you were in such close proximity like that.
Speaker: And Rhizome was up in the building at that point too.
Speaker: So there was a lot of, yeah,
Speaker: There was definitely conversation around what it could be, but it was in a very different direction from where it is now.
Speaker: You know, I think that, I shouldn't speak for Kevin, but I think that, you know, Monograph was kind of looking towards what this could do for institutions and some of the spaces that are still yet really to, even now, adopt, you know, tokenized artwork.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And actually we just, we just had a conversation with Chris Graves last week that he's, he's going to be on the podcast and he was talking about institutions and that's where he's spending a lot of his energy now is, is trying to convince museums that these things are important to them or they should be.
Speaker: And it's beginning to happen, which is, which is great.
Speaker: But I think in terms of,
Speaker: I think the level that maybe it was envisioned to be in 2014, where you could put a chip on the back of a great master work and retroactively sort of track its history and give it a point of provenance and track it moving forward.
Speaker: I think it's going to be a while before we see that, if we ever do.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't think galleries are, I mean, you guys aren't air tagging your artist works.
Speaker: No, no, we're not.
Speaker: No, but it was exciting to see, what was it, the Pompidou that they announced as 30 or so acquisitions recently?
Speaker: Yeah, they did.
Speaker: And, you know, I think the same as there's this conversation about like, where did the NFT start and who,
Speaker: So much is about context.
Speaker: So will the CryptoPunks be seen as an art project or will it be seen more in the realm of collectibles?
Speaker: And so that kind of opens the door for the pathway from Kevin McCoy to what these museums are collecting.
Speaker: And then by the same token, what institutions were collecting art first?
Speaker: And, you know, I've seen some pushback on online saying, why are you celebrating
Speaker: these larger institutions when smaller ones had been buying and supporting digital art and immediately made the shift to the blockchain.
Speaker: But I do think it is different when institutions like MoMA say we are openly collecting works and expanding our digital departments or the Pompidou is saying, you know, publicly announcing these acquisitions.
Speaker: And I just, you know, we still have more than a foot in the,
Speaker: conventional legacy, traditional art world.
Speaker: And those are the things that are going to make a difference.
Speaker: You know, as a smaller European museum, that's always focused on digital art.
Speaker: It doesn't, of course they were interested in NFTs.
Speaker: It's in their mandate.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, and I do think there's like kind of an attitude within the kind of like crypto NFT space, which is like we don't need or want institutions because we're already doing our own thing.
Speaker: But also like when it happens, everybody retweets it and points to it and says, look at this thing that's happening, right?
Speaker: So, you know, I don't know what that means, but it's like people want to be able to have both sides of it.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I think it means that the landscape just expands.
Speaker: So there's just a lot of real estate in that arena.
Speaker: And initially the fear was, hey, us scrappy upstarts, we built this thing.
Speaker: You can't come in and take all the credit.
Speaker: And I think that's why some people are reluctant to kind of celebrate the larger institutions acquiring NFT works because they don't want them to thereby take the credit for this.
Speaker: And that kind of makes sense.
Speaker: But that always seemed inevitable.
Speaker: anyway.
Speaker: And I think that a lot of these things will exist in parallel.
Speaker: So in the same way that you have regional galleries who really don't care about the art fair circuit or something, I think what I'd like to think is that there are artists who just continue to mint their works online and it is just as useful to them 10 years from now as it is now.
Speaker: And there's no expectation that they have to be minted, so to speak,
Speaker: by the traditional art world in order to be releasing their projects or putting them on the blockchain.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think right now in the last year or six months to a year has been an interesting time to see who's sticking around and still making things, even though, you know, drops aren't selling out immediately.
Speaker: And I feel like the people who are still doing it right now are the people who actually
Speaker: like actually care about the tech, right?
Speaker: They're actually in it for the tech and they're in it for what it can mean for artists and galleries.
Speaker: And so, I don't know, that's been kind of fun, I think, to watch.
Speaker: And I think all the OG people are obviously still on board, but there was a lot of people who jumped on it in 2021 who are no longer around, right?
Speaker: Well, we might see some of those people return.
Speaker: And I was actually just talking to a collector about that last night because I think there's somewhat of a bad taste in some collector's mouth for some of these people who did pop up and have disappeared.
Speaker: But we've got to remember also, it takes a lot of bandwidth to sort of stay present in the context of Twitter.
Speaker: I mean, that's like a hyper presence.
Speaker: And, you know, if we think of some of the people that we have worked with or are working with Zome, you know, I think we have to acknowledge that while I think some of these people can bring a really fresh view to what's happening within, you know, as photography meets the blockchain, they don't necessarily have the bandwidth to stay omnipresent.
Speaker: And I think that that should be fine.
Speaker: And I think if people are able to return to a space with new ideas, they should be welcomed.
Speaker: I think there's like a spillover of cultural currency that has kind of permeated the way that we are thinking about people needing to be present.
Speaker: Because we're talking largely about a lot of introverted people that want and need to spend a lot of time in a dark room, you know, in order to be able to fulfill other expectations from collectors.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: No, go ahead.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so, you know, to tell artists who are over 40 who are really used to having galleries act in a kind of agent capacity and sort of part of their
Speaker: mandate or part of their job basically is to create a cushion between the collectors and the artists.
Speaker: And so suddenly tell these artists, you need to do the work.
Speaker: Um, I, I think it, it makes them uncomfortable.
Speaker: It made me uncomfortable for a week, essentially shilling my own project.
Speaker: But I came away from that thinking, I, every artist should experience this.
Speaker: Every artist should have the experience, not only of representing their own work to collectors of just going through this intense week of responding to DMS and
Speaker: getting on Twitter spaces, but also doing it for somebody else.
Speaker: It made curating a group show, little things like that, just really pale in comparison to what I'm sure as a gallery, you know, where you, you were the steward of that work and you're thinking of it as a cultural object and therefore having that kind of importance.
Speaker: And so it, yeah, I just thought that that was,
Speaker: just the first, the first drop was a row after project.
Speaker: And I felt like, I can't believe that this person has entrusted us for this week.
Speaker: And so that more than the financial pressure, it was just don't screw this up.
Speaker: Um, he, he basically had said, you know, it sort of implied, like, I just don't want to, I don't screw the, don't make me look bad here.
Speaker: Not in so many words, but don't screw this up.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And especially in like an environment where people are like kind of rooting for people to mess up.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's like, yeah.
Speaker: Everything else that he's hearing.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Everybody else that he's talking to everything else, like we're over here in his, in his ear saying this could be life-changing for you.
Speaker: I think you'll find this a satisfying experience.
Speaker: It will be creatively satisfying to you.
Speaker: We will find a, you know, a project that if not generative, it seems unique to the blockchain, you know, it's going to be great.
Speaker: And then the other year it's like scam, scam, scam, scam.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I remember I was really excited about the Marina Abramovich drop because it was on Tezos and we do most of our stuff on Tezos and I just...
Speaker: It was exciting to see such a big name use that blockchain.
Speaker: And then the drop was like a total mess.
Speaker: It like didn't work.
Speaker: People couldn't mint.
Speaker: And it was just like, it's like everything you didn't want it to be was what it was.
Speaker: And I don't know how much it affected the overall project in the end in terms of
Speaker: you know, how it was received or anything like that.
Speaker: They sorted it, you know, within probably an hour or something, but an hour on a drop is kind of a long time.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, and those kind of concerns, you know, I don't think that that appeals to a lot of artists of a certain generation, you know, to tell them that we kind of have a month for this to work itself out.
Speaker: And I know that there are people out there that have, that Carla was talking about, people like Shane, who have said,
Speaker: Shane Lovelette who said this isn't sustainable you have to create a platform where like a gallery people can just come go to the website and they look at work they see exhibitions things are curated around these artworks and we prolong the time frame for these drops so maybe we don't even call them drops anymore but yeah the work is sort of released or exhibited and we remove the
Speaker: the time frame.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We've been, we've been real careful to never use, I think never use the word drop when any of our shows open or anything like that.
Speaker: Just cause we, we know, we know what expectations come with that specific word.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I, you know, I wonder if people are going to continue to use if the, if the portal will just be,
Speaker: continue to be Ethereum, you know, or some currency or if it isn't just digital art that is on the blockchain and you're paying through the gallery's website in dollars.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I do think... There's a lot of strange... Sorry, Joseph.
Speaker: No, it's fine.
Speaker: There's a lot of strange mechanisms that we sort of adopted, I think, like the idea of the drop when we came in sort of on the heels of maybe generative art.
Speaker: The one thing that struck me when I was first figuring out how to sell work was
Speaker: this way was the idea of like a collection or a series of work being kind of akin to a edition and that the larger the size of that collection uh the it affected the price of the individual work in a way that
Speaker: what was considered a one-of-one work doesn't.
Speaker: And there were these sort of unspoken rules about not expanding that collection after you've released the drop and so on.
Speaker: That's very different from what we were used to in the traditional photo world anyway.
Speaker: And now I think which is already kind of being replaced by ideas around open editions
Speaker: um, in additions in general.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We, we were talking about Uber earlier and it kind of reminds me of those early Uber days where, yeah, you could get across LA for $5, but, um, that is not the case anymore.
Speaker: It's not the reality for the passenger or the user or the driver.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: Like a lot of these technological innovations, they're kind of thrust on everybody.
Speaker: Everyone is told you have to accept AI, you have to accept Uber, you have to accept self-driving, you have to accept Web3.
Speaker: And I think that's where some of the resistance comes from.
Speaker: But the analogy that I like to think about is just digital photography.
Speaker: In the beginning, we were told as photographers, film photography is dead.
Speaker: You have to accept digital photography.
Speaker: It's better than film.
Speaker: But it wasn't actually better than film.
Speaker: It was better than film for somebody who say was on a budget and taking pictures in a regional theater or something and able to upload those pictures to their website and do it in darkness at a low resolution.
Speaker: And that was great.
Speaker: And now I mostly use digital photography.
Speaker: It's changed the way I think about making pictures.
Speaker: It's made me a better photographer.
Speaker: And so that acceptance
Speaker: To me, it seems like that was a positive pathway.
Speaker: And we're able to sort of assimilate it, I think, in a more positive way.
Speaker: But it was painful in the beginning.
Speaker: And so, you know, will this be sort of like that technology where once it gets good enough, well, everyone basically universally will accept it?
Speaker: Or will it be like Uber where it just, God, it was great.
Speaker: seemed like for both user and driver in the beginning.
Speaker: And now what a nightmare.
Speaker: The fees are really high.
Speaker: They're not making any money.
Speaker: Their cars are a wreck and they're underpaid.
Speaker: And yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: And what effect institutions coming into the space will have, I don't know.
Speaker: But yeah, I'm sort of curious, hoping for the best.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I think with at least with NFT technology in the Uber analogy, there was, you know, in that startup culture, they're like, they're losing money on purpose to kind of like get people in.
Speaker: And I don't think that was the case or is the case for artists who are working, making digital art on the blockchain, right?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, there are obviously like people who I'm sure employ those strategies in actual startup companies that work with
Speaker: blockchain but but it doesn't um it doesn't seem like that is the like general case because it's mostly artist driven right right right yeah no that's true and hopefully platforms like open sea you know i i there was they i think they did they change their royalty policy in the last week in the last couple of days yeah um right so yeah so you know that that could
Speaker: we'll see what happens if the other platforms take note or, or if they choose a different path.
Speaker: Um, or if other platforms emerge, you know, like a vertical that's specific to certain art forms that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, square, Squarespace just have its, you know, the NFT tab or, or, or Adobe straight from Photoshop.
Speaker: Um, you know, Instagram's adopting, um, you know, they have tokenized little tokenized, um,
Speaker: icons now so you can you can link to your your stuff on chain through Instagram and they're they're going to extend that to be able to you know mint you know upload to Instagram and then and then there actually might already be a facility that's there so upload to a social platform and then mint from there yeah yeah I kind of imagine being adopted by
Speaker: by artists, but it's interesting to see it sort of spreading.
Speaker: Yeah, I thought I didn't care about the immutability part.
Speaker: I thought I didn't care about tracking provenance because for me, it really was about the money and empowering artists.
Speaker: It really seemed to me like, to go back to what I was saying about artists having an entrepreneurial spirit, it seemed like this is a way for artists
Speaker: to have more agency and take control of their careers.
Speaker: And that really appealed to me.
Speaker: And I thought, you know, the work can still be stolen.
Speaker: Your stuff still can be stolen from your wallet.
Speaker: Just because it's immutable doesn't mean you can get it back or you necessarily know where it is in any way that's useful.
Speaker: But I have since then, there have been some works that, and I'll get an email from a gallery that says, this thing looks like it was damaged
Speaker: And we should fix it.
Speaker: And we're looking at this thinking, how did it get to this?
Speaker: I think I know what this is and where it came from.
Speaker: What's it doing in this place?
Speaker: And so I've been rethinking that a little bit and thinking, it would be nice to know what hands that older work has passed through.
Speaker: It would be nice to have a way to keep track of that.
Speaker: We've sort of had these discussions in the past about the idea of like a one of one piece almost acting like a digital negative piece.
Speaker: both for like rarity reasons and for provenance.
Speaker: And I still really like that idea.
Speaker: I know it doesn't really work for us as photographers because you're putting something, you know, high res up on online into permanent storage, which is the thing we've been deliberately avoiding for decades.
Speaker: But in a way, I wonder if that's just
Speaker: If we just have a little bit of a hangover from those last couple of decades with that, it kind of echoes to me like 2003 when we all put watermarks on our images.
Speaker: Like, oh, someone's going to take this, but I'll never be able to use it because it has this watermark on it.
Speaker: I wonder if we should just... No, yeah, and you put your images on a CD and mail it to the National Archives so that they can copyright it.
Speaker: But maybe it's time to let go.
Speaker: of that and embrace, if you did put something up there,
Speaker: your 8K file that is the source of your editions and that the print editions retain their value out of the fact that, you know, the craftsmanship that you put into creating the prints and the rarity of that edition in itself.
Speaker: But the file, the one of one does act as a negative with provenance and maybe trackers can be attached to that, you know, so you know,
Speaker: a great deal about where it has been used and all that tracking information is pulled back to that point of provenance.
Speaker: Someone's gonna take that and put it on a t-shirt, but,
Speaker: I think that doesn't matter is the real question.
Speaker: And like, imagine people downloading your 8K file and making a print and putting it in their house, right?
Speaker: I mean, that's kind of, I feel like that's kind of amazing if that can happen without reducing the value of the works that are sold to collectors, right?
Speaker: As long as everybody kind of accepts that this is the new way.
Speaker: It has no value.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It has no value except that somebody gets to, you know, adorn their house with it who wouldn't be able to because they can't afford it.
Speaker: It might have a little value, but I think whether or not that value has any kind of pejorative implications or, you know, is it really going to cause problems with you?
Speaker: I mean, I used to think I'm just before I had any kind of representation, I would just.
Speaker: This is in the blog days.
Speaker: So one thing that preceded photo NFTs were like photo blogs.
Speaker: You get emails from somebody and say, I saw your picture on this blog and I'd love to buy one.
Speaker: And I just, I desperately needed the money back then.
Speaker: So I would sell prints in places like union square to somebody that I met online.
Speaker: It was like a drug deal.
Speaker: They'd give me a couple hundred dollars in cash and I just give them a print in a tube.
Speaker: You know, sometimes it was signed.
Speaker: Sometimes it was not whatever we worked out.
Speaker: And I thought there's this weird stuff out there.
Speaker: If this is ever a problem, it's a,
Speaker: I'll be in a, if I'm in a place where this is a problem, I'll be in a better place.
Speaker: And so I'll have the mechanism to deal with it.
Speaker: But yeah, I forgot where I was going this, but, but you know, if I want to, at this point, if I want a Carlo print, I don't really have room in my house to exhibit that.
Speaker: And I don't, you know, I could put it in a drawer somewhere with all my other friends, prints and things, but there is something nice about,
Speaker: now starting a new kind of collecting, a digital collecting.
Speaker: I can show people that collection on my phone.
Speaker: I can look at it on my phone.
Speaker: I had sort of thought within a few years, people will be at lunch together and they'll be showing their collections on their phone.
Speaker: I think that happens a lot.
Speaker: It doesn't happen among the artists that I know, but that seems like a natural next step.
Speaker: You're looking at each other's work.
Speaker: People are always showing me stuff that they've posted on their Instagram if they want to show me what they've been working on in the studio.
Speaker: So now your collection is there too.
Speaker: And it just, it means, oh, I can have more work from friends also this way because I'm kind of reluctant to keep collecting their work.
Speaker: I don't have any place to put it and it's expensive to buy.
Speaker: And so there are all those possibilities on top of that.
Speaker: Do you think there are many collectors spending time in the metaverse looking at their work and other collectors' works curated into these metaverse spaces?
Speaker: I see it on Twitter, but I don't think that that's, that's not where the people I know are going to want to look at it.
Speaker: I think that that's people who are kind of coming in.
Speaker: Is that because we're over 40?
Speaker: No, but I don't, I, you know, some of these collectors that we know they have posted there.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I mean, you, maybe you've met some of these people, but so you might know, but to me, they seem, they could be around our age.
Speaker: They just, they haven't come into the traditional art world and they've really enjoyed building these virtual gallery spaces.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And so you can do that, but I don't see the people that, that I know from my world, I don't see them doing that.
Speaker: I see them showing pictures on, on their phone, you know, maybe on a, you know, if they could email them, they put them into a PDF or something, but like, they just want to see if you, if the wallet just looks like a nice way to present a graphic image or a set of graphic images, a set of images, then that's, that's the way they're going to share them.
Speaker: I think also for work that I'm starting to become more interested in that's generative or dynamic or interactive in some way where it's on a screen, but it also requires the sort of processing capacity of whatever is behind it, like a laptop or a phone or the player, that that work sort of needs to sit in front of that kind of processing power.
Speaker: And having it together in one space, you know, is much more enjoyable than sort of
Speaker: scrambling around, you know, on something that's, that's, that's live on a webpage or something, you know?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think, you know, all of these concerns, there are things that you and I are comfortable talking about, but one, one thing I remember you said to me early on was what, what's fun about being early is that you then go to your, to your friends and say, Hey, I, I, you know, I've warmed the water for you here.
Speaker: You should jump, you know, come on in the water's fine.
Speaker: And that was kind of,
Speaker: how zone started as a way to be engaged with artists that we knew and respected.
Speaker: And, and, and, and we, we immediately cared about this space and to sort of help guide people in.
Speaker: So we didn't have any VC money.
Speaker: Nobody had invested in this.
Speaker: We just built a website.
Speaker: And I thought this feels like the old days when you just kind of curate shows and somebody, a friend's garage space.
Speaker: And it would, it would,
Speaker: it would be done kind of in that, in that mode basically.
Speaker: And, and I think, you know, two projects in we're realizing, Oh, we're seeing these other platforms startup that continue to have investment money behind them.
Speaker: They build a board right away.
Speaker: There's just a lot of money for projects.
Speaker: And so I don't know that the space will continue to,
Speaker: how far you can go if you're just kind of working out of your garage the way we are on no budget.
Speaker: But I'd like to think with a little bit of coding and some work on the part of the artists and just a robust collaborative experience that, you know, lasts for more than a couple of months, you can have this really satisfying creative experience.
Speaker: But we're really
Speaker: trying to figure that out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think we've realized also sort of where our interest lies in all of this, right?
Speaker: Like working with artists, you guys run a gallery, so you know this better than we do.
Speaker: That's tough.
Speaker: Getting artists to, you know, meet deadlines, getting them to collaborate with coders.
Speaker: Stuff's not as easy as you might think.
Speaker: And there's a hustle to it too, which I think we were not maybe as ready for, right?
Speaker: You need to sort of go out and,
Speaker: spread word.
Speaker: I think the part of it that we've, I don't mean to speak for you, Matt, but I think the part of it that I found the most enjoyable is kind of working, like we're looking at an artist's practice and
Speaker: and figuring out how it can meet the blockchain and with whom and for what reason.
Speaker: And like that's a really satisfying and engaging experience.
Speaker: And I think I would continue to do that.
Speaker: I mean, hopefully we can do the artists proud in an ongoing way, but I would want to continue to do that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, you clearly have a talent for that.
Speaker: I mean, I think that's, you know, that's just part of your skillset now is you do have a knack for looking at an artist's practice.
Speaker: and thinking about how it can be folded into this technology or vice versa.
Speaker: And I think that that, you know, I wanna see you engage with artists in that, not just your own work, but provide this for artists in a way that's satisfying for you because it, I don't know, I try to find out what happens on these other platforms and what those artists experiences are like.
Speaker: And I think from, you know, the little bit of research that I've been able to do, it sort of seems like, well, in this case,
Speaker: the artist had an idea and they went off and built it for that artist and then they would show them things.
Speaker: Or in this case, they just
Speaker: they, this artist did have a regular contact with a, with a developer or with a graphic artist, but you know, the whole thing cost a hundred thousand dollars and, and it was bought by the owner of the platform who was also an investor.
Speaker: And, you know, so it's just sort of trying to figure out like how, what, what is a working model for the kind of thing that we want to set up.
Speaker: And I would like to think that, you know, like, like, you know, I, I don't know that much about your gallery, but I, I,
Speaker: I would be surprised if you had major VC backing or some huge investor or something.
Speaker: And I think the blockchain needs, NFTs need spaces like yours, needs people like you guys.
Speaker: So you have Pace Verso up here, but you also have good projects, critical artworks that are happening for not a lot of money.
Speaker: That just seems important to me that there are opportunities where you
Speaker: not just the prices down, but the cost of making work should be down too.
Speaker: And just as a photographer, that's become a problem.
Speaker: This has become a problem for galleries is if you're trying to produce a show that has 10 works in it and they're of a certain size and they're mounted and framed, they can only sell for a certain price point and it costs a lot of money to make.
Speaker: And I think that explains why they are, part of why they are so laser focused.
Speaker: on representational painting right now.
Speaker: It just doesn't cost as much money to make.
Speaker: And I don't wanna be an artist who requires massive amounts of money in production to make work all the time.
Speaker: And I'd like to hang something wet on the wall
Speaker: the night of the opening.
Speaker: And I'd like to see that happen in the NFT space too.
Speaker: This is a little bit weird.
Speaker: Photography does have a similar problem in the NFT space though, if you compare it to generative art, if you compare it to where generative art came from, which is largely creative coders who were creating their own work, you know, on a laptop,
Speaker: you couldn't really have smaller overheads for a project, you know, but as different people, you mentioned Pace, right?
Speaker: Like as Pace enters the space, they have to do a similar thing to us where you're kind of pairing an artist with a creative coder and looking for where they can collaborate.
Speaker: And so there's automatically costs.
Speaker: It's like in the early days of Pace,
Speaker: designers using Macs, like you had to have a Mac operator and a designer sitting there and say a red line, green line, and, you know, it costs twice as much to design whatever it was you're doing.
Speaker: We're still in a way there, right?
Speaker: Like it's not, it doesn't cost what it costs, you know, mountain frame work, but it also doesn't cost what generative art costs to create.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, I have said to ex-students of mine who I know have no money,
Speaker: you should look into this.
Speaker: And I've seen some of them do it.
Speaker: And even on a very small budget, they've been able to put a project on there, maybe make a little bit of that money back.
Speaker: You can't think of it as time put in because as an artist, you just can't think of the work that you're putting in as having an hourly corollary or something.
Speaker: You can't index that hourly corollary.
Speaker: that time cost.
Speaker: But, um, I do think that they, um, will spend some money minting work and get a little bit more than that back.
Speaker: Um, and, and not essentially not, not losing money.
Speaker: Um, which, you know, that, that's, that's kind of, that's kind of amazing to me.
Speaker: I mean, it just seems like there's a lot of potential there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's a way of putting work out into the world and to not the expectation that artists have to keep spending money.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: in order to put their work out there.
Speaker: Yeah, have your first show and don't lose money.
Speaker: Yeah, that sounds incredible.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sweat equity.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I'm usually not this silent.
Speaker: I mean, this is just a testament, as Joe would probably say, that my instinct was correct.
Speaker: You guys are kind of like, I think you are exactly who I thought you guys were.
Speaker: This like slow, artisanal, like...
Speaker: It's very nice to hear the way you go about your projects.
Speaker: And I think for Joe and I, we do see these projects that come, like you were saying, Matt, where they get VC money and they have a board and
Speaker: Or even Joe is always pointing out Pace's Discord channel.
Speaker: And it's like, it's one of the funniest things I've seen.
Speaker: It's like you have these people coming in there trying to lead and trying to like ruffle up people and like asking questions.
Speaker: So synthetic and so not like how the world or the art world operates.
Speaker: But yeah, we like to think that we're going about it in a slow methodical way.
Speaker: And part of the reason is we love these artists.
Speaker: We love talking to them.
Speaker: We love sitting down with them.
Speaker: We love coming together and coming up with these ideas that bring technology and their artwork into it.
Speaker: focus.
Speaker: But that takes time.
Speaker: It takes a tremendous amount of time.
Speaker: I don't think it's replicable.
Speaker: I don't think it's something you could do.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Maybe it is in the future you can do it in a massive way, but it's just like this slow methodical... I think in the future society is going to think differently about artists, for better or for worse.
Speaker: Because I think of my interactions with family, my partner's family who are largely lawyers, and
Speaker: you know, some of the work that they're doing is legitimately important.
Speaker: I mean, it has impact on, on our lives, depending on what state you live in.
Speaker: And, but they will always defer to me because I'm doing this mystical thing and, and, and it, they can't quite put a value on it.
Speaker: And I always want to say, you know, you're, you're looking at art in this way that like you can't decode it.
Speaker: Um, you're the one who's speaking in a language that I don't understand.
Speaker: It's not that hard to figure out.
Speaker: It really isn't.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: And I think a lot of, you know, some of the people you're talking about, I think these platforms hire these people to kind of gin up excitement.
Speaker: But I think if you're running your own small platform, you have to do that yourself too.
Speaker: You're the owner operator, you're the PR person, but you're talking to an audience that I'm not sure feels that way about artists.
Speaker: You know, they're expecting something back.
Speaker: They're expecting that artist, pay attention to them, to be present.
Speaker: to answer their questions.
Speaker: And I wonder what effect that will have on this kind of, the way I think society thinks about artists is sort of occupying this kind of mythical space and demythologizing it.
Speaker: Maybe that's a good thing.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I think that...
Speaker: Yeah, it might be good to sort of take some of the mystery out of it and for on the collector side to have certain expectations.
Speaker: It might be healthy.
Speaker: I think recently our track has been more towards hybridity and giving a foothold to those people that might unnecessarily completely be all in on the digital realm by giving them something that can actually physically hold on to.
Speaker: And I know photography has been that way since inception.
Speaker: It's, it's, it's been on both sides, right?
Speaker: Cause it's like, it's, it's ephemeral and it's a print and it's,
Speaker: It's neither here nor there.
Speaker: But with our ethos in our gallery, having this opportunity to have these real objects contextualize the digital objects and vice versa, it's been very satisfying to kind of like... I think we have collectors from the crypto side too who are like, oh, it comes with a real artwork?
Speaker: But that's a bonus, right?
Speaker: It's not even like why they're interested, but they're like, yeah, sure, I'll take a print.
Speaker: That sounds good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, you know, photography followed painting and printmaking for most of its life.
Speaker: And, you know, in terms of pricing, formatting, the language to describe it, you know, going back to the last century, all the photo sessionists and what people like Alfred Stieglitz were doing, you know, it's just trying to adapt the language of painting in order to be accepted as an art form.
Speaker: Well, this is a case where photography is suddenly veered off, merging with generative artists,
Speaker: Carlo was saying, some of them coming from the art world, some of them coming from the tech world, some of them coming from a hybrid of both.
Speaker: And there are some painters coming into the space, but it just, it seems like they need a lot of, they need a lot of support to do so.
Speaker: And like the Lowy Hollowell Pace Verso project, it's kind of like,
Speaker: will distill your aesthetic down to something that can be turned into like trading cards.
Speaker: And not to speak ill of that perfectly legitimate project, but I do think that it seems like there's a suddenly photography is maybe doing its own thing, making its own new friends and building its own new lexicon in this new space.
Speaker: And it doesn't have to follow painting and printmaking to determine how many editions
Speaker: sizing, the language around it and all of that.
Speaker: And that could be really interesting.
Speaker: That's what was so interesting about seeing the additions not validated when photography first hit the NFT space, that that was a sort of artificial rarity that had happened in the art world because of photography following painting.
Speaker: And it just didn't correlate to the people that were used to buying art.
Speaker: tokenized art.
Speaker: And so that's why it's taken so long for it to catch up, I think, in a way.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, I think some of those people, when you first got into the space, Carlo, I think a lot of what was happening was just, as somebody said, it's another column in your editions.
Speaker: So you have your short edition of five to ten or something, and then you have your digital edition or your NFT edition.
Speaker: So
Speaker: you run out of additions where photography supposedly can be endlessly copied.
Speaker: And so you make one digital copy and then that could be for sale.
Speaker: And those sort of seemed like the options at the times like onboarding of legacy collection.
Speaker: And I still think that that's a legitimate use of the, of the space.
Speaker: But one of the first thing Carlos said to me was, I think we could do more than that.
Speaker: I think we could, I think we could do more.
Speaker: I think we could try to connect artists with,
Speaker: coders.
Speaker: And of course, this is what everyone is doing now.
Speaker: But that that was just obvious to hand to you, I think, Carlos, just this is the next the next step in the space, which, in my mind, legitimized it, I realized, Oh, okay, well, that, that's, that was the last thing I needed to hear to believe in its legitimacy.
Speaker: Because if if it could only be something to just make a one more column in your in your editions for sale, then
Speaker: That seems pretty limited and much more of a gamble on its validity and its future.
Speaker: I think we were lucky too that, for example, we got to work with Roe, who actually kind of deals directly with the idea of a marketplace as a vehicle and was willing to address the screen as a subject.
Speaker: And I think it helped us do something more than just bring a legacy project
Speaker: Because I think when we were in Rose's project, we were thinking initially about that as being algorithmically created.
Speaker: But there was sort of enough, I think, just in the intent of the project for it to be satisfying.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It just seems like there's a lot to address there besides using it as a marketplace.
Speaker: Like we were talking before about just the idea of putting something into...
Speaker: Permanent storage, right?
Speaker: You're talking about the immutability and just the implications of putting a photograph that is by its nature, you know, photography kind of always is danced between like veracity and mutability.
Speaker: And so to take something that belongs to that medium and put it into permanent storage in itself is...
Speaker: an interesting subject.
Speaker: I think there's just a lot to deal with at this moment.
Speaker: But something I noticed in the early days also was that there was a very different sort of appreciation of work.
Speaker: Like it wasn't, you know, collectors were not being guided
Speaker: by any of the traditional pillars of, you know, taste making, gatekeeping and so on.
Speaker: And so they were off on their own, um, developing
Speaker: developing appreciation and different work from different work appreciated than we would have found appreciate in the space that we were used to.
Speaker: And that part of it has been fascinating to me, you know, like the idea of, you know, still, I think the majority of the collectors that we're probably talking about are very different from the collectors that were, or maybe not for you guys, because you're probably bringing in your collectors from your roster, perhaps.
Speaker: But certainly in terms of the people that we've been talking to about projects, they have been collecting quite different work from what we or Shane or, you know, Fellowship or sort of bring into the space.
Speaker: Could you elaborate a little bit more on that?
Speaker: Yeah, I'm trying to think of how to say it.
Speaker: I think you're saying it in a really nice way is what you're saying.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't want to be too derogatory, but my first introduction is... Like just the color pink is the thing that drives a particular collector.
Speaker: Well, you find that, I mean, I found that in the traditional art world too.
Speaker: I mean, I've been lectured to by collectors and been just astounded at the hubris or the arrogance
Speaker: It collectors who wield a lot of money who can change the course of a gallery's exhibition schedule and focus in the way that they, you realize, oh, there's a handful of people.
Speaker: You get into the topic, and I don't really participate.
Speaker: I don't participate in this level of the art world.
Speaker: But when I bump up against it or talk to people who do or I meet some of these collectors, it's you realize, wow, there's a handful of people that are driving the direction of this.
Speaker: And they don't want to listen anymore.
Speaker: Any listening that's done is done by people that they hire to do the listening for them.
Speaker: And kind of watching the sort of organic way collectors are sort of coming up in the NFT space, they really want to listen, a lot of them.
Speaker: They talk in a kind of unfiltered way.
Speaker: They miss cues and things like that.
Speaker: They don't represent themselves in a way that people from the traditional art world are used to.
Speaker: And it makes it
Speaker: very easy to speak of them pejoratively.
Speaker: And I think that that's, it's really too bad.
Speaker: We've been sort of trained to think of galleries and collectors in this adversarial way.
Speaker: But the quiet unspoken part is like,
Speaker: also honor them, make sure you honor them.
Speaker: You know, this is how you do a studio visit and welcome these people into the space.
Speaker: You know, this is, this is the way you should speak to them at openings and things.
Speaker: And so I, I think it's sort of a cliche to say this about the NFT space at this point, but the rawness of it, um, I, you know, to me, that seemed really encouraging.
Speaker: Like, all right, this guy, you know,
Speaker: jerk trader 69 is like up in my DMS right now, but I looked in his wallet and, and, you know, he's got all kinds of stuff in there.
Speaker: And, you know, some of it is work that I like.
Speaker: Most of it is not, but this person is very dedicated to this.
Speaker: And, you know, I want to see, I want to see where this goes and to go back to, you know, something that Carlos was saying earlier, like we, we got lucky with Roe, I think an artist like that who didn't want to be left out.
Speaker: And I think you have to have a carry that a little bit with you.
Speaker: Like I'm a little bored with what's happening in the art world and I don't want to be left out.
Speaker: And if you have that approach to technology in general, like, you know, a healthy skepticism, which I, you know, probably was very good with technology, but always seems to have a, you know, a healthy skepticism when it comes to its influence and all the contemporary aspects of our life.
Speaker: But, you know, also just,
Speaker: open to those possibilities.
Speaker: And for an artist, you need an artist like that too, who's sort of like, yeah, I'm hearing scam shouted in my ear, but I'm also kind of interested.
Speaker: artists are curious by nature right which i think is why we've managed to find with most of are they i mean but are they really maybe we've just been lucky the best the best i think the best of them are the best of them are i know plenty of who are just old cranks sure i think i think after a while you know after a while it's it's tough to remain uh curious but
Speaker: I was going to say, I really liked that Rose project wasn't algorithmic just for the sake of being algorithmic, right?
Speaker: And it offered this other version.
Speaker: And that's what the digital space offers is a different kind of addition or a different kind of work that can speak to the original work in a different way.
Speaker: And so I thought that was a very nice kind of poetic work.
Speaker: And it's not it's not twenty thousand dollars.
Speaker: You know, it's it's it's priced at a point for what it is.
Speaker: And so we had a discussion about that.
Speaker: It's like, all right, you produce this work, you make it for the space.
Speaker: We're very excited about that.
Speaker: And it should have a corresponding price point.
Speaker: So don't think this is not a cash grab.
Speaker: You are making your work accessible to a new group of people.
Speaker: Let's be clear, you're making your work accessible to this group of people that you have not had exposure to before.
Speaker: And, you know, that journey, like we said, can be creatively satisfying.
Speaker: And at one point in this manic week, he said, I got to take a break and go snowboarding upstate.
Speaker: And and I had this flashback because I had the same conversation with Carlo in the week that I had my own drop.
Speaker: I was like, I don't know if I can do this.
Speaker: for all the reasons that we were talking about before, just being the storefront essentially for your own work and being the steward, the curator.
Speaker: And he said, well, yeah, you can just fuck off and leave it.
Speaker: You can walk away from this thing or you can put the time into it.
Speaker: And yeah, hopefully you make some money, but you will have built something, a foundation in this space that I think will be valuable to you going forward.
Speaker: It's up to you.
Speaker: I had dinner last night with a couple of the collectors that bought some of the first pieces from that project.
Speaker: And they were so proud to have seen it travel, you know, a project that was sort of, you call it NFT native, make its way back through, you know, to Gagosian and to be shown as print work.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which I, you know, I was sort of always curious to know whether, how interested collectors would be in that crossover.
Speaker: Because they're arguably not that interested in it crossing this way.
Speaker: But crossing back with, you know, they were very proud to have been the early collectors of their work.
Speaker: Yeah, well, that's something we talk a lot about, right?
Speaker: Does the real world value or the legacy value of the work matter to these collectors?
Speaker: And in our conversation, some of the platforms that we talk about seem very focused on that and others don't.
Speaker: And in the space, a lot of the value is with people who are native to the NFT space.
Speaker: And whether that will continue, if their value kind of plateaus, whether the resale value declines and people who have
Speaker: legacy artists who are already millionaires as they move into the space, you know, what, what will that, how will that ratio change?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Cause and, and in promoting the work, we had had those conversations too, sort of like, what, what are we talking to people about?
Speaker: Are we talking about process or are we talking about the collections that these artists where their work is, is, is already maintained the collections that it's already in?
Speaker: What are we trying to convince people of here?
Speaker: That it's interesting work and it's valuable towards the future?
Speaker: Or are we looking back towards its value, the value that the art world has already given it?
Speaker: Maybe we could go back to Joe's initial question about how you guys promote on Twitter.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What has worked, what hasn't worked, and what do you wish could be better, I guess?
Speaker: When we launched Rose Project, I sort of feel like the space was still very small.
Speaker: I think that what's happened in the last few months even has sort of probably made a big change to who's collecting work like that.
Speaker: At that time, there was like literally, you could count the collectors that I mean, what was the addition on that?
Speaker: 22 pigeons was it?
Speaker: 22.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I think they were around roughly 22 collectors.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That would be interested in the work.
Speaker: And it's changed.
Speaker: It's changed.
Speaker: Now, I think.
Speaker: It's
Speaker: Yeah, because certainly economic circumstances change when you have a gallery.
Speaker: They change on a season and they change depending on what's happening in the economy.
Speaker: And so I'm sure you have all of those concerns.
Speaker: But man, we would have to... I think we delayed that ROE project at one point because we just didn't know what was going to happen to the price of Ethereum.
Speaker: And so it wasn't worth doing it that week.
Speaker: So you have to be... It felt like you had to be pretty nimble if you're just relying on...
Speaker: the reach of your Twitter.
Speaker: And I don't really like being reliant on Twitter for obvious reasons.
Speaker: Yeah, I think the short answer to your question is that we reached out to collectors privately.
Speaker: Gotcha.
Speaker: Yeah, for that work.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that tends to be something that we've been more proactive about than
Speaker: than using social media.
Speaker: So, you know, we didn't have a Twitter account until we started this.
Speaker: And so we probably have 40 something followers.
Speaker: So what's the point?
Speaker: I think we're, this is one of the things that I actually enjoyed when I first started in the space was sort of the immediate dynamic with collectors.
Speaker: And it's nice to go back to them and sort of talk to them about
Speaker: work that you've been entrusted with and work that you've been collaborating on with somebody?
Speaker: My guess is that the website will be valuable over time.
Speaker: And that's something that I'd really like to build out and so that it has more content on it.
Speaker: So if Twitter implodes or people lose interest in that, you kind of have the internet staple.
Speaker: You have this site.
Speaker: And that would be the... So even though these works are on OpenSea,
Speaker: it was you can always get there by going through the website that was something that i felt like was really important early on especially if you're trying to onboard legacy collectors which we really haven't been able to do um but i i i did really try you know i would look at collections that were out works that were out there and because of the blockchain i could kind of see you know the thing is you can see some collectors and if they're open they will post their
Speaker: Twitter address in their OpenSea page.
Speaker: There are ways of locating these people.
Speaker: Sometimes it's just an anonymous wallet.
Speaker: If it wasn't an anonymous wallet, I would kind of look at that person's forward-facing social media and decide if it was a person that was worth approaching.
Speaker: And if they seemed like a decent person, then I would often send them a DM.
Speaker: And I can't say that that yielded many sales, but it certainly sparked conversations.
Speaker: And some of those people started to follow Zoom and will kind of, you know, maybe ask a question every now and then and seem involved.
Speaker: So, you know, that's part of building the community, you know, and the same thing that you would do in a brick and mortar gallery is you're just you just got to make a connection with somebody and you try to hang on to that person.
Speaker: And maybe they tell somebody and a couple of years down the road, something happens.
Speaker: And so that's that's kind of the way I thought about that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, right before this recording, I was doing research for this conversation and I went and followed about five or six collectors of Rose Project because if they're interested in that, they might be interested in the stuff that we're putting out there because there's definitely overlap there.
Speaker: I think they...
Speaker: I was just gonna say, I think we've had success in a similar way with with reaching out to people and, and starting those conversations without without the intent of necessarily trying to make a sale, right?
Speaker: You're trying to have a conversation about the work.
Speaker: And then who knows what happens a year down the road or whatever.
Speaker: Some of these people have become friends and are generally, you know, a lot of them are very approachable.
Speaker: I mean, this is something I think we would never have done if we hadn't had, if I hadn't had that experience, right?
Speaker: The idea of tracking somebody down who's collected somebody else's work.
Speaker: barely sounds legal.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: No, but that's like, that's one of the nice things about the public facing aspects of, you know, these people put their ETH address in their OpenSea profile that's connected to their Twitter because they want to be out there in the digital space.
Speaker: And I think that it's like a much more open forum in that way than it is in the brick and mortar galleries.
Speaker: Yeah, nobody, sometimes people don't respond, but often they do respond.
Speaker: And, you know, I start with an apology and they say, no, thanks for reaching out.
Speaker: And I'm always interested in hearing about projects.
Speaker: No one has said, don't bother me, you know, fuck off or something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Alex, I think at some point we're going to have to have both Carlo and Matthew on for their own segments because I had so many questions about your individual practices that I just couldn't find the space, nor should we have because it would have been a three-hour podcast.
Speaker: How about we promise a part two or something, especially for your next project?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That would be great.
Speaker: Yeah, I would love that.
Speaker: I think we would love that.
Speaker: I'm speaking for Carlo.
Speaker: He would love that.
Speaker: I'd be happy to come back.
Speaker: I guess given time, maybe what does the future hold?
Speaker: We're working on a couple of projects with artists, currently one which has been ongoing and one which is sort of new and exciting.
Speaker: And a third.
Speaker: So we're just navigating how to get artists to do things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I mean, I'm equally excited about all of these projects for different reasons.
Speaker: I don't know how much we can really say about any of them.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah, it's not that they're a secret.
Speaker: It's more just like, God, some of these things could just fall apart.
Speaker: And it just seems maybe we just don't want to put it on the record and
Speaker: yeah i kind of love that it's just like this is the antithesis of those bigger platforms that they have to put something out yeah like the schedule and it's like this machine and it's like this thing that you're what you're describing is something that has organically happened and just has to has to morph into this is the question i mean i don't know how much i don't know because things are happening that we're missing out on and i don't know what the importance of momentum is in this space it hasn't been made clear yet so um
Speaker: You know, the market was very different when the rope project dropped as opposed to when the Mariah project dropped.
Speaker: So, you know, momentum didn't play much of a role there.
Speaker: So a lot of these things remain to be seen, but yeah, I think we are learning.
Speaker: It's just really hard to get, we have a range of people who contacted us who are excited and people that we reached out to and you kind of end up in the same place.
Speaker: You realize, oh, we should have just started with a deadline.
Speaker: We should have just opened.
Speaker: You almost should have just opened with that.
Speaker: And I think that's something that a lot of people who run spaces, galleries, you know, either they know it already or they learn it very quickly.
Speaker: And, you know, I had always admired the 70s downtown artists run spaces.
Speaker: And you talk to people who run these spaces and they'd say, you know, up into the 80s.
Speaker: What happened to that?
Speaker: And say, ah, God, it was just such a pain in the ass to run this thing with so much work.
Speaker: You think, come on, that's not an excuse.
Speaker: But what happened that you couldn't maintain this thing?
Speaker: Well, now I really get it.
Speaker: Like, oh, it's a huge pain in the ass.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I mean, and then, you know, you didn't have email.
Speaker: You didn't have cell phones.
Speaker: And it doesn't help that I think we're sympathetic to it too, right?
Speaker: Because we're not bringing in legacy projects where these artists are creating new work with us.
Speaker: And so I think we're sympathetic to the fact that it's not nice to have a deadline put on that always, right?
Speaker: That sometimes that project needs to become what it needs to become in order to be fulfilling for everybody.
Speaker: And so I think we're inclined to give people a degree of space, which is hard.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You don't want to bother people.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was just going to say, I think it's also really, you know, you were talking about these projects being creatively satisfying for the artists who are making them.
Speaker: And so because the market is what the market is, sure, of course, you want to put them out there and have them sell out.
Speaker: But if they don't, you know, at least the project was creatively satisfying.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And you got something out of it in terms of in terms of their practice and your experience working with them.
Speaker: And and then who knows what that turns into later, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And there's a learning curve for anybody, too.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that we're in a special place.
Speaker: This is what's kind of unique because we don't have really much of an overhead right now, like a gallery.
Speaker: And we, you know, there are a couple of collectors that we, that are pretty reliable.
Speaker: So if we could, if we keep the production costs down, you know, we, we're still at a point where we can say to an artist, you're, you're not going to forget about your time, but you're not going to lose money.
Speaker: So you do need a wallet.
Speaker: You know, you do need some ETH.
Speaker: You are going to have to pay this developer, but you don't, you don't have to pay us right now.
Speaker: And so to be able to say to somebody participate in this project,
Speaker: hopefully feel fulfilled creatively and you're not going to lose money.
Speaker: Like we can't guarantee that you're going to make real money, but just don't think you're going to lose money.
Speaker: And I really like being able to say that.
Speaker: And that goes, that goes a long way.
Speaker: There aren't that many artists.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I think also, you know, we're in this so far for the love of it.
Speaker: Everything we've done has just been sort of a labor of love from our side.
Speaker: And so I think that also means we're entering it with a different, you know, like I think if we were
Speaker: in this to make some money, we probably would have put a deadline on it.
Speaker: There was definitely, there were definitely deadlines.
Speaker: We had investors.
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: Yeah, if we had investors who were breathing down our necks.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And then outside of Zome.
Speaker: But that's not to say that.
Speaker: Yes, sir.
Speaker: Go ahead.
Speaker: Outside of Zome, I think we also both have projects that we're bringing out in the near future.
Speaker: Do either of you want to shill those projects here to give people a sense of the drop?
Speaker: The final five minutes.
Speaker: In less than five minutes.
Speaker: Show away, man.
Speaker: I mean, I had a show running up to the new year outside of Brussels in Belgium with a gallery that I worked there.
Speaker: But I do, you know, I feel comfortable saying that I think the photo world that I'm used to is just in a very difficult place right now.
Speaker: And so I'm really trying to hustle
Speaker: on some book projects with publishers that I've been talking to and trying to finish those projects and, and trying to talk to galleries about shows that they're comfortable putting on right now with work that, you know, for them is, is not in a financially unstable times and they have a backlog of painters.
Speaker: I think it's, it's really hard.
Speaker: This is part of what sparked my interest in this is I don't feel like I have a, I'm in a, uh,
Speaker: I mean, I'm in a place in my career where it feels stable.
Speaker: So, so yeah, you know, there, there, yeah, there are things coming that I'm working on, but I think that the sort of period when I met Carlo to through 2014, like that was really a recent, those were sort of the salad days for, for photography.
Speaker: People were really interested in process.
Speaker: They were really interested in how it was going to,
Speaker: manage this sort of digital era that we were coming into, how social media was going to affect it, what it meant that more digital photographs were being produced in a year than the whole history of photography up until that point, meaning more photographs were made in that year than an entire history combined.
Speaker: And I just don't think people were like, it just sort of happened.
Speaker: And so people aren't, they're not concerned with photography's
Speaker: role in society and all of that now.
Speaker: It's so much more complex and the technology is moving so much faster.
Speaker: I think, you know, people want to see handmade things.
Speaker: I don't know, I'm going to start going off on a tangent, but anyway, all this is to say that, yeah, it is an unsettling time to be an artist, particularly a photographer.
Speaker: And so I think, you know,
Speaker: being comfortable managing other people's works and being comfortable doing other things, not just on the side, but making those things priorities and and making them feel satisfying.
Speaker: It just seems really, really important for a lot of the artists that I know.
Speaker: And I see them, whether it's making T-shirts or starting their own spaces.
Speaker: A lot of artists I know who are sort of around the same age, the same point in their careers, like they're sort of looking around trying to take stock.
Speaker: And I think this for me is really a part of that is feeling like, oh, the art world isn't really necessarily going to love you back.
Speaker: And it just provides an opportunity to move into other spaces and to still be creatively fulfilled and still be making your own work and maintaining that career, but being involved in other things as well.
Speaker: I think even both Ro and Mariah have kind of entrepreneurial side things going on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well said.
Speaker: Thank you, gentlemen.
Speaker: This was the least effort podcast we had to do.
Speaker: We kind of just let you guys... We just talked to you.
Speaker: That was great.
Speaker: I think we'll hang up.
Speaker: It's like you leave a dinner party and you're like, holy shit, I never asked that person a question.
Speaker: No, it felt like a therapy session.
Speaker: I felt like a...
Speaker: cathartic it felt uh we felt seen i think joe and i felt seen right i i do i do think that that there's an ethos overlap that is is probably the the closest aligned than any people we've talked to so far in in the in the space and in terms of experience and what you're doing and all that kind of stuff so i'm i'm excited to see what y'all do for zone next and also just i'm excited to follow your your own next we're gonna have a zone twitter space and we're gonna host you guys
Speaker: Oh, great.
Speaker: We'll just let you talk.
Speaker: Yeah, really.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: For reaching out to us.
Speaker: Really.
Speaker: I mean, it's, you know, generous of you to give us a slot.
Speaker: I'm sure you have a lot of people lined up.
Speaker: So to give us a slot on your podcast.
Speaker: Yeah, really.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: It's been great.
Speaker: No, we're happy to.
Speaker: I think we enjoy these.
Speaker: We'd love to hang out in IRL as well if you guys...
Speaker: Yeah, I need to come by the gallery.
Speaker: I will do that.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Joe and I decided to show ourselves next, which is great.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: For the next exhibition.
Speaker: It wasn't March 10th.
Speaker: March 10th it opens.
Speaker: I mean, this is what I'm talking about, right?
Speaker: It's like
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: I feel like 15 years ago, you couldn't curate a show and put yourself in it.
Speaker: I still think you're not supposed to, but we're just doing it anyway.
Speaker: You're not supposed to, but I think at this point, I would be like, you know what?
Speaker: Go for it.
Speaker: Do you know who told us to do it?
Speaker: Do you know who told us to do it?
Speaker: Who?
Speaker: The artists that we represent.
Speaker: One of them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Many of them.
Speaker: Well, then everybody else was like, yeah, of course.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it wasn't like, uh, we're pushing to do it, but it was just like, yeah.
Speaker: Is this the first time you've done it in our space?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it was never, that was never, we've had conversations about it.
Speaker: It was never the plan, but because we have the sanctioning of all the artists that we're working with, then it seems like a no brainer.
Speaker: And we think of ourselves as an artist run space.
Speaker: So it's like, put it out there.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: If it was a collective,
Speaker: If you are a collective, then you're all allowed to show each other and also run the space and share those responsibilities.
Speaker: But if you're, you know, a gallery in the conventional space and you guys are the owner operators, then yeah, then it's like for a while that was sort of frowned upon.
Speaker: But that was the conversation.
Speaker: I was like, it's going to get I was like, as long as everybody's OK with it being a little muddy and we're a collective ish, then let's go for it.
Speaker: And yeah, nobody cares about this stuff anymore.
Speaker: Nobody cares.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I feel like conventions have gone out the window and rules are being rewritten.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, even the way that, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, this particular year that we actually decided to go and we did a subscription model for the actual gallery.
Speaker: So we had, we're working with seven artists that we've already worked with previous that we know have already been introduced to the NFT space, make work that translates.
Speaker: So we already knew who was going to be showing when.
Speaker: And we kind of like, they asked if we were going to do or participate.
Speaker: And we're like, sure.
Speaker: And we are.
Speaker: Yeah, when you guys mentioned having deadlines, it took us a year to realize that we needed to have a calendar for 2023.
Speaker: So now we do.
Speaker: And it's nice.
Speaker: It's nice to know what's coming up for sure.
Speaker: Not that it's perfect.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Things come up.
Speaker: So between your art practices and running the space and everything you're now doing in the NFT space, do you guys have other day jobs or is this, this is, are you teaching as well?
Speaker: I teach, yeah.
Speaker: And I've taught ever since I graduated from grad school as a day job, yeah.
Speaker: And I manage the audio visual at the Fotografiska Museum in New York.
Speaker: Oh, okay, yeah.
Speaker: busy guys huh yeah yeah you need you need at least a calendar yeah yeah we need a calendar and we need to go we need to go we need to go snowboarding upstate we need somebody to run our discord channel well yeah it's good to talk to you because you're a good model for us then um i feel like it's good it's good to see people who are making a go of it i i
Speaker: inspiring for us so hopefully we'll get there yeah yeah good luck for march march the 10th it's my mother's birthday good luck oh i won't be in new york but uh if if i am i'm gonna look you guys up and if you ever come out here um come by the studio
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Oh, wait, wait, since we're talking about birthdays, your son's birthday is September 20th.
Speaker: Is that right?
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: That's my birthday.
Speaker: So I was looking at your site.
Speaker: I was excited that I had a fellow Virgo.
Speaker: Oh, that's funny.
Speaker: That's funny.
Speaker: That project has connected me with a lot of people who were born on September 20th.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm sure they're all assholes, except for your son, who's probably very nice, but everybody else, all the Virgos.
Speaker: Matt, please tell me you're a tourist.
Speaker: My birthday is tomorrow.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: Happy birthday.
Speaker: Glad I was here for that.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: We got to end this thing.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: Thank you guys.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: Let's definitely stay in touch.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: I'll see you in New York.
Speaker: I'll see you in Queens.
Speaker: Sounds good.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Bye.
Speaker: Night.
Speaker: Arranging Tangerines is recorded, edited, and produced by Lydian Stater, an evolving curatorial platform based in New York City with a focus on the intersection of contemporary and crypto art.
Speaker: You can learn more at lydianstater.co, find images at Lydian Stater NYC on Instagram, and follow us at Lydian Stater on Twitter.
Speaker: Thanks to Matthew and Carlo for taking the time to speak to us this week.
Speaker: If you'd like to learn more about their work, check out our show notes for their website and social media accounts.
Speaker: Big thanks to Tall Juan, who graciously provides our intro music.
Speaker: His albums are available at tallwan.bandcamp.com.
Speaker: And thank you to you, listener, for spending your valuable time with us.
Speaker: I don't know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to be like you.
Speaker: I don't know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to be like you.
Speaker: I know what to do.
Speaker: I know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I know.
