Erick Calderon, Founder and CEO of Art Blocks, dives deep into his personal history with digital & generative art—the highs and the lows—and how new technology can inspire artists and collectors to follow their passions.
Erick Calderon. Photo: Rainer Hosh. Courtesy Art Blocks.
What defines good artists and trading platforms in the digital art field?
That is such a subjective question, right? And so, I can put on my collector hat, because I’m also very much a collector of the generative art medium. I believe that there’s a lot of different elements with generative art. Specifically, you have technical complexity, which is something that may not interest anyone beyond the most die-hard collectors. We’ve also seen tremendous success from artists that have taken the time not just to release projects, but also to write commentary on the generative medium and the progression of the digital art revolution that’s happened over the last few years. And seeing someone be able to create something in the generative medium that, when you look at it, it strikes a nerve, or it sends a message, even without having to say words, I think is something pretty powerful, and very, very difficult to do.
I think there’s a lot of introspection to be done, seeing through a lot of the casino culture and financialization, and really trying to put your finger on exactly why this is so powerful. A lot of the artists are able to both contextualize why this is exciting and then create stuff that has a certain sense of collectability. I’m someone that grew up collecting all the things, like Magic: the Gathering cards and comic cards and playing cards and lighters and all the things that I could get my hands on. There’s something palpable about the act of collecting in the digital space, and artists that have truly identified that can use that to their advantage in differentiating themselves, especially to a collector base that appreciates collectibility.
And you know, art is subjective and what people like is subjective. If you’re more on the nerdy side, you might like more space themes, ethereal stuff. Some people seek the figurative work; the generative medium itself is very limited in some ways in what you can do, because everything, at least on Art Blocks, is entirely on the blockchain. And when you see a project where you’re like, “Oh my gosh, like how were they able to do that with just code?”, to me, that’s something that gets me really excited, and sets it apart.
In terms of what defines a good platform, something I’m really proud of about Art Blocks is how we’ve been able to stick to a vision, a plan, and an ethos. You know, there’s been times where we have been told by the community that we have to release a token or do an airdrop or do a membership pass, but ultimately, I created this platform so that generative creators have the opportunity to share generative work with a broader audience, not to create a financialized culture of art, although I recognize the two are often inextricable to parts of the current audience. I really value platforms that have stuck to that desire to be art forward, art centric, and nurture the relationship between the artists and the collector.
In recent years, many NFT artists have shifted from using the term “NFT” to “digital art” and have increasingly focused on real-life exhibitions over virtual ones. What are your thoughts on these changes?
First of all, I do think that the relationship between the digital and the physical is a cyclical one. I think that we as humans will fluctuate based on a bunch of factors. Obviously, the pandemic affected this, but even prior to 2020, even before NFTs, I think that there’s this generation that has been exposed to more and more digital things, and has an increasing appreciation for digital objects as we find ourselves spending significantly more time online. But, we still have hands and feet, and we still like to just walk by an artwork in our home without having to think about all the digital components of it.
What got me excited about the blockchain space, is that for the first time in history, we can prove ownership of a digital object. To me, that is so incredibly powerful and often overlooked amidst the mania that can take over the narrative in Web3. In the early days, the word NFT was so important because it was the main subject of the conversation in terms of what changed in the scope of digital object ownership. While there was a tremendous amount of incredible art in 2018 and 2019 in the crypto space, I was sometimes blinded to the art by thinking about how incredible the technology was, focusing on the technology itself, which I believe happens to many of us as we discover the potential of blockchain powered digital objects.
This is a hot take, and I get a lot of pushback from this with the NFT ecosystem for this, but I do think we will not call these artworks NFTs in the future. We will just call them art. I firmly believe that we will reach a time in history where anything of value, and that can be financial value or sentimental value—I mean, CryptoPunks were free, they were claimed by people because they were excited about the aesthetic, the generative nature, just wanting to tinker with the technology—will be authenticated using blockchain technology to the point where if you ever receive a digital object and it’s not, you would be surprised. I believe that the blockchain will be used for dispute resolution because you will assume that anything digital will be an NFT. In the near future, five years, ten years, the only time anyone’s going to say NFT or go to Etherscan or ask you about Ethereum addresses is if there’s a dispute, and you need to use the authenticity of the blockchain to resolve it. Everything else will be abstracted away to where transferring an artwork will be as simple as attaching a photo to an email is today, but documented and secured using blockchain technology at its core.
I mean, digital art has had recognition for a couple of decades, but not to the level that it has today. The intersection of digital art and blockchain technology has created this new concept of collectorship and community around the world in a 24/7 permission-less ecosystem. That’s a huge unlock that will always remain in my mind, as a beloved part of being an early part of the crypto art movement. In the end, the ability for a digital object that has ownership to be able to be networked is just going to be something that we consider as normal as being able to pick up a cell phone and make a phone call.
There will be a homeostasis that is just about art. And I don’t think that we need to be tied forever to the technology as the selling point. When you analyze a painting, you don’t flip it over and analyze the quality of the canvas that it’s on, because most people won’t even know the brand of the canvas by looking at the back of it. We’re just going to make assumptions that it was painted onto a surface that’s durable for it to be hung in your house and similarly with digital art we are going to make assumptions that you’ll be able to prove authenticity because of the technology that backs it.
How is the relationship between Art Blocks, artists, and collectors different from the traditional gallery-artist-collector relationship?
This goes back to this idea of homeostasis. When Art Blocks started, it could not be more different than a traditional gallery in so many different ways, the way that we spoke and the lingo and the jargon we used. Also, the holding time of digital art, for example, in the crypto space—I’m just throwing out a number, but let’s say it’s like an average of 10 days that people hold an artwork. And in the art world, it’s like 30 years. It’s a huge difference, right? I do think that, over time, we’re going to meet in the middle somewhere where maybe the average hold time for an artwork is not 30 years, but it’s maybe five or six years.
Why? Because there is a market. It’s unreasonable to assume or expect that you would walk into an art fair, acquire a piece of art from a gallery and think that you stood a chance within the next few years, maybe decades, to ever be able to sell that thing for more money. I do understand that there is significant financialization in the traditional art world. We can’t ignore that speculation is equally present in the traditional art world. The difference is the rate at which that speculation is expected to create a return— in that sense, when we compare Art Blocks with a more traditional gallery, we’re facilitating the creation of art that inherits a new potential of velocity and a new networkability that really just did not exist before.
With the concept of “one of one of X”, which is a term that I coined when I first launched Art Blocks, there’s this idea that we have one of ones when you have a painting, a photography edition is a one of 10, and with generative pieces, you have a one of one of 10 in that there’s 10 individual pieces. They’re all unique, but they’re clearly connected. They’re clearly part of the same work.
I think the traditional world might be finding interest or is becoming curious about this idea of community and this idea of interactive on-chain immersive art. If a gallery has a piece of art from an artist, that piece of art could end up in somebody’s home and nobody could ever see it again. Nobody might even know where it is. With blockchain-powered or authenticated art, it’s just a different phenomenon. So, Art Blocks tries to lean into that idea of understanding that the collectorship is critical to the message, to the narrative.
I think the biggest difference between Art Blocks and the traditional gallery is that we facilitate art releases—we do not represent artists. To be clear, we’re a platform, a publisher more than a gallery. But if you take a step back and look at the way that we interact with artists and interact with collectors, we’re always trying to get a dialogue going and people to share and engage with each other as to the work that they collected. Whereas in the traditional art world, it’s a little bit more gatekept. It’s a little bit more behind closed doors.
We see gatekeeping in Web3 too, because as an artist, I would sometimes want to allow-list people that own my art to buy my next piece of art as a token of appreciation for being a collector, but it’s done in a transparent way. I think the future of the art world is going to be somewhere in the middle between the rigidity and opaqueness of the traditional art processes and the accelerated pace of what happens within the digital art ecosystem. And I think everybody wins. I really do think that everybody wins.
How do you think that the happy median could really happen? You sound very optimistic.
I think that there’s also a distinction here in terms of information and then ownership of a digital object. What I’m more specifically talking about is something like this: There’s a traditional artist that is only capable of making seven paintings a year. They’re getting tremendous recognition in the art world. There’s a gallery that gatekeeps and is making very private decisions as to who they’re going to give that work to with potential restrictions that come with it, and I think that’s okay. As a gallerist, I would want to reward my best customers.
In the blockchain space you can still do that, but it’s done in a more transparent way. You see the asset move in the digital space. Even if you attempt some kind of secret arrangement, that asset will change hands in a public way. You may not receive it into an Ethereum address that is identifiable, such as with an ENS, it’s still obfuscated by the fact that it’s being received by an address that’s not human readable, but it is being transferred. That art can be pinpointed as being held by a different account. And so there’s accountability.
You also have what are more provably fair auction mechanisms, for example, the Dutch auction which is technically a fair mechanism. You can see the entire auction on-chain and that the person that acquired the work is the person that was willing to put in the bid, not because of some prearranged agreement that was made ahead of time. So there is an important democratization feature there. There’s no intimidation factor for the participants.
You do have the technological intimidation factor, if you’re not used to using a Metamask wallet and you have to participate in a dutch auction with a refund. That’s your own personal learning curve. That’s not dependent on your societal status. This art is available to all, and that’s something really core to Art Blocks. I fight hard for the value that anybody that wants to participate in the world has a chance to acquire that artwork, exactly the same chance as anybody else in the world, and that’s really important. That’s one of the unlocks of blockchain technology as a whole that I’m most excited about.
Installation view: Snowfro: Chromie Squiggles, Venus Over Manhattan, New York, 2022. Courtesy Art Blocks and Venus Over Manhattan.
You have collaborated with traditional galleries like Venus over Manhattan and Pace. What insights and lessons from these collaborations can you share? Do you think such collaborations are a positive strategy during the “crypto winter”?
Art Blocks spiked some early curiosity from important people in the traditional art world. Venus over Manhattan and Pace, for example, demonstrated very early on an acute awareness and understanding of what was happening in the crypto space above and beyond many galleries that existed. And also established generative art galleries like Kate Vass Galerie, a gallery in Switzerland that had been representing the generative art field for a really long time and bitforms gallery out of New York were deep into the medium. They saw these things coming together.
In my opinion, collaboration with galleries was a positive thing, and what might have brought Venus over Manhattan and Pace in is just the insane numbers that were being thrown around in 2021. Their artists were curious as well. And I think that there’s this opportunity for symmetrical leverage, where I was desperate—and continue to be excited about—understanding more of the traditional art world and to gain a sense of validation from the broader traditional art world because the artists I work with are my favorite artists in the world and I think they deserve it. On the other hand, the gallery has this opportunity to get involved with the crypto space because of my personal relationships and Art Blocks’ reputation. So I think that there’s a mutual benefit and overall a positive experience for both.
One of my strongest beliefs is that the single most important thing that Art Blocks can do is create experiences that are compelling for people outside of crypto. Pace and Venus did an excellent job of emailing every one of their collectors, not just their crypto collectors, and saying, “Hey, we’re doing these cool drops with this new technology.” And as a result they released some wonderful things. But merely with the difficulty of transacting and crypto, and the anxiety of participating in a Dutch auction, the vast majority of the sales went to the existing crypto collector which over time was unsustainable for the existing crypto collector that was being hit up from all angles to buy things. There’s only so much water you could squeeze out of the rock at the time and I think between the regular releases within our community and intense inbound from external opportunities many of us, as collectors, became just flat out fatigued.
Any collaboration that we entered in at Art Blocks was done in hopes of attracting interest from an external audience, as I think that it’s most critical is to make what we do interesting and compelling to a broader audience. I do think that the galleries have an opportunity to do that now and in the future too. The future will see a confluence of both the crypto-native approach to releasing art and the traditional gallery approach, and it’s all just going to be art in the end.
Installation view: Loie Hollowell: Contractions, Art Blocks x Pace Verso, Miami Art Week, 2022. Courtesy Art Blocks and Pace Verso.
What is your view on the popularity of AI in the art world this year? How do you see the dynamics and differences between AI generative art and the generative art that Art Blocks focuses on, both artistically and in the market?
First of all, what we do at Art Blocks is labeled as generative AI all the time, and it’s understandable especially when someone doesn’t have a clear understanding of the difference. And AI is a much broader topic and conversation beyond just art. But there’s no AI in the vast majority of releases at Art Blocks, with the exception of a coder, for example, utilizing AI to help them refine a function in an algorithm. To me, the biggest distinction is that every step of the way of releasing a generative work on Art Blocks is a deliberate, kind of handmade, public, transparent process.
With LLM-based works where you prompt and you get a beautiful artwork—to clarify, I’m a huge fan of the creative unlock that has happened there—it’s sort of a black box. This new tech accelerates the ability to produce beautiful things but I think to this day, society puts higher value generally on things that are palpably handmade, even if they are equal looking to things that are made by machine. The efficiency of AI can make it significantly more accessible to both creator and collector. And I think there’s a place for all of it.
AI art, to me, is always just going to be this bigger, spongy, more fluid and ever evolving concept because there’s generally less direct reliance on the creator/human. The poets of prompts today are regularly blowing my mind with the things that they can have the models return, but I think there’s an important distinction there. The generative artist, the one that writes thousands of lines of code to create something visual with meaning, is having a very different experience in the creation, a very different relationship and connection to their work than utilizing AI to generate the final result. Again both have a place and I love them both, but I just continue after all these years to be fascinated by the deliberate generation of outputs created with code.
Initially with Art Blocks, people were like, “Oh my God, there’s too much art, too many editions. The editions are too big.” And a lot of times we tried, and the artists tried, to kind of shape the edition size based on the capability that the algorithm had for individuality, how much this algorithm can support in terms of how many variations you have, where they still feel unique and distinguishable, etc. The LLM AI unlock is exponentially bigger and the most natural human thing is to be excited. I think that this technology can actually catalyze a new generation of people being interested in art and expressing creativity, because it’s just so much more streamlined and so much less intimidating to create.
People often refer to you as Snowfro in the “metaverse.” What are your thoughts on the relationship between digital art and the metaverse? How do you view people’s understanding of the metaverse today, after its recent popularity?
That depends on how you define the metaverse. Some people define the metaverse as 3D worlds where you walk around with your mouse or keyboard, or maybe even a headset. Obviously, Facebook changed their name to Meta and started creating a metaverse. And so I think there is a public perception of the metaverse as being this 3D space.
I’m excited about the 3D world version of the metaverse because it allows me to have an immersive way to display the digital art that I am collecting in the digital space. I don’t have any more room in my house for more art, but I can have a screen on my wall. That opens up the ability to share hundreds of thousands of works of art. But I see the metaverse more-so as the interconnected nature of digital object ownership, participation and creation in a 24/7 permission-less world that goes beyond the 3D immersive spaces.
I to some degree kind of regret that, the immersive 3D space version of the metaverse became the default definition, although that word was created in 1992, by Neil Stephenson in the book Snow Crash. I think that there’s an opportunity to define—instead of calling it Web3, instead of calling it the NFT space, it’s the metaverse. It’s this interconnected nature that allows all of us to be in a room together across the world, but still feel as near to each other as possible. You extrapolate that to art and we can all own a piece of art across the world but somehow still connected, and with 1 of 1 of x works like what Art Blocks specializes in the works are all unique, but we’re all still part of the same family.
When discussing digital art, policy regulations are frequently mentioned. What improvements in regulation do you hope policymakers will provide to support your art platform and artists?
I mean, number one, clarity. Clarity would be really good. We’re talking about art and this beautiful upgrade of technology that allows you to authenticate the art and transfer the art and all these things that blockchain technology facilitates for artists and collectors. There’s a world one day where we wake up and somehow that is illegal. And while I don’t think it’s likely, it’s possible. It weighs so heavily on me, daily and a little bit of regulatory clarity would be great.
I don’t want to start an offshore company. I recognize consumer protection stuff, people get hurt in crypto all the time, but there’s this beautiful little corner of the internet that is unlocking the ability for digital creators to share their work in a way that has never existed before. Yes, some of those things have been speculative, but the positive unlock here is impossible to ignore.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a special project with the Chromie Squiggles. The last Chromie Squiggle, #9999 is being minted to LACMA’s permanent collection in LA. I created a simple contract that enabled anyone to sign it, allowing them to participate in the final mint as a send-off, to say, “Hey, I’m still here and was here for the last mint.” That contract is going to trigger the last transaction directly in a way where anyone that signed the contract will be forever recorded as participating in the last transaction. I also minted the penultimate Squiggle, #9998, into that smart contract locking it there permanently. Everybody that signed that contract is also a partial owner of Squiggle #9998, owning 1/3149th of it. You simply can’t pull something like this off on a centralized server in such a meaningful way. It’s crazy to me that we sometimes can’t see past the bad actors to recognize the power of the technology, and the openness and transparency of what we’re doing here.
I just want to know that what I’m doing and passionate and excited about is not frowned upon by the government that I’m sending my taxes to. In the end, if the government decides that this is illegal, or that they need to control it, look, I’m not going to break the law around it. Ultimately, maybe Art Blocks has to KYC, which is a really unexciting thought and route I really don’t want to go down. But in the end we’ll do what we need to do to keep empowering creators in the generative medium to put their work out into the world.
It’s just all about the art, the artists, the unlock for collectors. I’ve said this many times: a lot of people that came to Art Blocks were sneakerheads, or gamers, people that would never have cared about art in their whole lives, and they truly found an appreciation for art. I think Art Blocks and the NFT ecosystem as a whole has ushered in a whole new cohort of art appreciators and collectors, as well as creators, and it would be a shame to lose that momentum over lack of regulatory clarity. As with just about any other technology and innovation in the world, I hope that our government can see the value of the good things past the value of the bad.
Snowfro, Chromie Squiggle #9999. Courtesy Art Blocks.
What’s next for digital art?
The duty that I’ve taken upon myself over the last two years is trying to present a compelling use case for NFTs beyond the casino culture and speculation. It’s harder than anything else that I’ve tried to do over the last few years. I didn’t expect it to be this hard.
Concurrently, there is technology that is evolving within our ecosystem that is making it easier for people to participate in the blockchain powered digital art space. Privy, for example, is a company that allows anyone to sign up for an Ethereum address with an email, and it’s actually a fairly decentralized way of creating a seed phrase and a wallet that abstracts away a lot of the pain points. Coinbase Smart Wallet is another example of reducing the barriers to entry, and has onboarded, last I checked, around 5 million people. That’s a lot of people, right? Like, there’s only 50,000 people that own an Art Blocks artwork so we’re seeing a tremendous inflow in participation in the crypto ecosystem. There are also L2s that allow you to interact in a way where you’re not thinking “What, I have to pay $17 in just transaction fees to buy this thing?” Things like this can lead to new art appreciators, possibly ones that come with a new approach to collecting digital art not just for purely investment purposes, but to participate in the long term success of an artist building a career.
So, my work to attract outsiders to our tech becomes exponentially easier with the advent of these and other innovations all starting to make an impact right now. If I can succeed in onboarding more folks it’s likely going to be by making the technology recessive, or taking a backseat, something I think is also going to be really important for the future user, and I think there’s few people in this ecosystem that are well enough positioned to do that.
I ask folks in this ecosystem to take it upon themselves to try not to extend the Thanksgiving dinner table meme, where you’re like, “Ooh, look, I’ve made a million dollars in crypto,” and that becomes the main draw. And then your parents buy into it and lose money and then the next Thanksgiving is really awkward.
Instead we have an opportunity to rally around the beauty of the experience that comes with this tech, and I think people will be delighted and inspired to do even more exciting and creative things. And I think that’ll be the unlock for more people to come in. And when more people come in, we have more people talking about art. Yes. We have more people talking about the casino too. That’s fine. 5 percent of the people that come in can care about art and that would be a huge win for the artists that are creating and collectors that are participating in this ecosystem.
So what’s next is fighting that hard fight towards expanding outside of the echo chamber of Web3, and at the same time, really digging into our roots of innovation, creativity, tinkering to figure out a way of how to reignite the fire within the Web3 community that has been demoralized and hurt over the last few years. That’s hard to do, but they deserve it. They’ve been supporters from day one. I think if we do those two things together, everything will come together to create the most beautiful explosion of digital objects on a scale far wider than what we saw in 2021.
Will you ever consider writing a book about crypto art and your life?
I’m not a good writer, but I do have an initiative to tell the story from the moment I started creating generative art, way before I knew what a blockchain was, through the moment of claiming a CryptoPunk through the ups and downs of Art Blocks, through the bear market, through the little things of joy that we’ve been able to do to get people excited about it.
I think that the outside world just looks at the crypto space like a mafia, this space of depravity, and I think that we can tell the normal human storyline in a compelling way. I think if you just write all the bad stuff, no one’s going to care. If you only say all the good stuff, people will be like, yeah, whatever.
We need to make sure people understand that true human emotion has been at stake here. Personally, I’m 43 years old. Over the last three years, I’ve had the highest highs of my life and I’ve had the lowest lows of my life, and a lot of people have had that same experience and we’re still here because we see something powerful and exciting around us.
It’s not just financial and it’s not just technology. I see a higher calling for the world to come together around something that we really didn’t have a way to do before. So yeah, I’d love to write a book. I also would like to do a new generative art project too, but time is one thing that I never have. Maybe one day.
