Robert Alice is an alias, if you don't already know. A character created for an established U.K.-based artist after he was captivated by the emerging world of NFT art and wanted to jump into the fray. And in just a few years, Alice has done just that — he has produced a number of hugely admired conceptual art installations — on the micronation of Sealand, at the Monnaie de Paris, through generative AI that chomped through centuries of literary history.
Of course, NFTs have taken a hit financially speaking. Even while the rest of the crypto industry is rallying to new highs, even the so-called "blue chip" NFT collections are still seeing bear market valuations. Although draped in the language of community and brand building, most NFTs served one purpose: tricking the greater fool. Alice, of course, sees more in NFTs than mere speculation, and counts them as part of a wider crypto-anarchic movement.
"As someone deeply interested in art and value systems, there's parallels in that people say art has no intrinsic value and that bitcoin is fake money," he told CoinDesk in an interview. But there's real value in what NFTs represent and what they empower — a shakeup to the legacy art industry where he made his bones and a canvas for anyone with an idea to create. While there are certainly roadblocks, NFTs are an equalizer because no one is born crypto-native, it's something you become.
For the past two years, Alice has been working on a survey of NFT art history — from the ur-projects like EtherRocks and Bitchcoin to artists who only recently exploded on the scene. Notably, "On NFTs" will be the first such effort published by premier art book publisher TASCHEN. Alice himself has a claim to be included as the first to sell a work at auction at Christie's (predating Beeple's much discussed $69 million "Everydays" sale by two years).
Today, Alice is heading back to Christie's for the first time in four years for the launch of a new series, called "SOURCE [ON NFTs]," created by a generative machine learning model he hardcoded. CoinDesk caught up with Alice ahead of the launch to talk about NFT history, how blockchain is changing the legacy art market and his discovery of crypto's anarchy.
Was Robert Rauschenberg right to punch Scull?
It's an iconic moment in the history of the art market. It was 1973 - the first major black-tie evening auction for contemporary art, and Scull made millions off work he'd bought very recently. I don't actually know if it ever really happened. It's kind of a myth.
I swear I've seen a video.
It's more of a push. But it was a punch before the video surfaced. So I quite like to keep it like that. To some extent it underscores this new world we live in, with crypto, NFTs and the liquidity that it brings — it works to expose the economics of the art market in a much more transparent way than it was before. The traditional art market likes to say, oh, no, we don't speculate or trade but they do. They just haven't had to register everything on the blockchain.
How did you get access to France's national mint for your exhibition "BABEL?"
Through a curatorial platform called LaCollection. I like the French, they are provocateurs at heart. They like scandal.
The Monnaie de Paris is the oldest continually running institution in Europe — older than the Università di Bologna. It now does contemporary art shows. It's kind of interesting because if you think about it from the point of view of what bitcoin is trying to reengineer, you start to get an understanding for how closely bound together the idea of the state and money is. It's no surprise the oldest institution in Europe is the institution that makes the money — It's the only thing that has survived since 86 AD4. It's survived the Renaissance, religions have come and gone in that time, whole belief systems have come and gone in that time. People will say oh, bitcoin is volatile. Well, we're not just reinventing food delivery services here. We're up against a 2000 year old architecture. And that's why it'll take a long time.
How do you personally display your NFT collections at home?
So I started in the NFT space as a collector, and have a collection I'm very proud of. And to display it, I use custom screens to fit the size of the work and treat it like a normal work of art. Not in a sideshow. I'll change it every six months. There's always been this tension between the physical display of NFTs because ultimately they are digital artworks that function best in a digital native exhibition context. The idea of scale is tricky to create, especially when you're looking at an OpenSea thumbnail. And there's a limit to how many screens you can have in your home before it looks like a TV store. When we have proper AR and VR enabled experiences where you can experience digital artwork in digital environments, that will be really powerful. You can imagine a three-dimensional algorithmic painting, where you pay a couple of sats [satoshis, the smallest unit of account of bitcoin] or ETH to go and get a completely unique experience.
Do you think Dutch auctions will take off in the traditional manner?
I'm talking to Christie's about this for the [SOURCE [On NFTs]] auction happening. I think it's an experiment. I did the first NFT auction at Christie's [Alice's "Portraits of a Mind"] and now I'm going to come back to Christie's nearly four years later. Seeing how it's changed and how the infrastructure is built. That first sale and auction very much brough the crypto and NFT space into the traditional art market on their terms. Now years later there are market mechanics that have come fundamentally out of crypto and are being adopted by traditional auction houses that have been around for 400 years. The point of the Dutch auction is to re-engineer the idea of what constitutes value and fairness. That says a lot about the continued impact.
Decentraland: overrated, underrated?
Already overrated. But points to an interesting future as most crypto projects do.
OpenSea?
Oh, good question. It's easy to say overrated. I think the whole NFT space went up in arms over OpenSea removing royalties as a market response to what Blur was doing. Somehow Devin {Finzerr], and the rest of the team took a huge amount of flak for that. But what that revealed is that you can write royalties into the metadata of your smart contract, but it doesn't mean anything on an executionable level. It still requires trust. That was one of the central narratives of the first NFT bull run, that artists' royalties were indelible but that just wasn't the case. OpenSea isn't to blame for that, theNFT space is to blame for that. You cannot at one point celebrate open market dynamics and decentralization and then ask players in the space to abide by social principles that are not input into the smart contract or blockchains. That's the whole point in the first place, to take trust out of the equation.
Read the full interview online...
– D.K.
@danielgkuhn
daniel@coindesk.com
