The future of cryptoart as art

Back in April of this year, I found a job posting that caught my eye. The MoMA was looking for a Web3 associate. No word on if they filled the position (if you’re MoMA’s Web3 associate, hit me up), but the role itself struck me as important–an institution as integral to the trad art world as the MoMA searching for someone who knew a thing or two about NFTs pointed to a shift: The influence of underdog cryptoart was finally going mainstream. 

As more institutions like the MoMA dip their toes into the cryptoart waters, even art that isn’t digitally native may increasingly come to live on-chain. The separation between cryptoart and art looks more arbitrary to me by the day, and maybe it always was; cryptoart is still art, after all. Does the crypto qualifier even devalue artwork by assigning it to a category separate from “real” art? It depends on how you look at it. Artists who mint their work on-chain are already smacked with false accusations by the technophobic and ignorant–it’s not real art, those critics say, embarrassingly unable to differentiate between an XCOPY and a Bored Ape clone. It’s just a cash grab–they never thought of digital art as art to begin with, NFTs or otherwise. But then again, photography wasn’t considered art for years, either. Eventually, figures like André Bazin (in his 1960 essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”), would argue that photography is the most important artistic innovation to date. Look how far we’ve come. There’s something exciting and subversive about the reclamation of the word “art” by the cryptoart community, an assertion of identity and legitimacy outside the purview of museums, MFA programs, and brick and mortar galleries where artists don’t even earn royalties. Now, the artists who deserted those ineffective institutions for Web3’s greener pastures get to watch the trad art wardens crawl back, their tails between their legs, begging for a piece of the action. It’s their turn to assimilate.