Speaker A: All right. Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed. It's a special interview episode today. We're joined by Haiver, who recently announced the, uh, founding or the launching of a new kind of school/platform/coaching. I mean, you're— he's going to talk to us all about it, but it's called Artist Commons. We're super excited to have him on. We've— Haiver's a New York local. We've seen him many times throughout the years at events here and have never found the right time to do this interview, but this is perfect. Before we jump in, I just want to say this is not a sponsored episode, but we do have a a referral code for anyone who hears this and is interested in signing up for Artist Commons. You can use the code WTBS2026. That will give us something, right? That, that's like a way that you could support the show. I think it gives us like $75 or something like that. I forget what it is, but which is great. So there, you just heard him. That's Haiver. How's it going, man?

Speaker B: It's great. Thanks for having me on.

Speaker A: I feel like we have really been talking for almost 3 years about how to get you on, and it was never quite the right time for us or never quite the right time for you, but This is perfect. We were just joking before we started recording that you're probably the most, of all of our guests, the person that most people who listen have met face to face. But assuming there are some listeners who don't know who you are, can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background in art and coding broadly before we get more into like the nuts and bolts of what you've done in the NFT side?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's very true. I, through the jobs that I've done in Web3, gotten to travel a lot and meet a lot of the generative artists. An AI artist around the space. My background, I studied lens-based art and media in college. When I was a kid, I taught myself to code just reading a 500-page textbook on BASIC, the coding language, not even Visual Basic. And this is one of the reasons I responded so much when I encountered generative art several years ago for the first time, is it was suddenly this visual thing that I translated from what I loved as a kid. And so it suddenly brought the two sides of my life together.

Speaker A: And lens-based means photography for us, uh, non-art school kids.

Speaker B: Is that fair? Uh, and film. And film. So I studied filmmaking at Emerson College and worked in production for 10 years here in New York. During that time, I got really involved with several art nonprofits here in New York. I started doing artist residencies at a place called the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Friends of mine were running art publications So I had been adjacent to the art world during that time. And then I started studying photography at the International Center of Photography, ICP, here in New York, an incredible school that was founded by the brother of Robert Capa, the really famous— if you've seen photographs of D-Day, they're his brother's. So they founded this incredible school, took a lot of classes there, and then founded my own photography studio doing fine art photography specifically that I ran for a decade. Then I saw my first piece of generative art on Twitter and everything changed.

Speaker A: I am so curious always to hear people's stories about how they got into NFTs. So you got into it through art. You were not like a blockchain, crypto, Bitcoin, or anything like that person.

Speaker B: The closest I had come to dipping into blockchain is that somewhere in the 2010s, Kodak, the film production company, they had sold their name rights. And so there was a company that made a Bitcoin miner and it slapped the Kodak brand on the side of it. I came across it on the photography blog that I read, Paid a Pixel, and was like, oh, maybe I should get that. That's like money coming in every month. Except that it costs $5,000 to buy the miner and we'd be paying the electricity and I had no way of knowing how that would equate out at the time. Obviously big regrets on that now, but that was as close as I came before 2021. My friend Ryan Green, who's an independent video game developer, he made this really legendary award-winning game called That Dragon, Cancer. He was releasing a piece on Art Blocks in fall of '21 called Beauty and the Herding. And I saw it and it just like stopped me in my tracks. It's kind of this black background with a glowing orb shape. And then you see what's essentially a flocking algorithm branching out these little firework-like shapes, but it grows and evolves over about a minute. In time. And I saw several pieces just popping up in my feed before, you know, over the course of a month. And then the release happened and I got to see like the full breadth of the algorithm and understand that I'm exploring artwork that lives in a parametric space, that it's not just one output but visualizing it in your own head in the many. I was like, I need to change my life, I need to go in a different direction. So I started teaching myself p5 the classic way everybody else does, which is watching YouTube videos from Coding Train from Dan Shiffman, just a legendary teacher. And then November came and fx hash had launched and I didn't find that on my own. Again, everything comes through community. That's one of the things I love about Web3. So Ryan was like, have you seen this piece? And it's like one of Piter Pasma's earliest pieces. So that is the second piece of generative art I ever saw consciously. I'm sure there were pieces I saw in museums and going to gallery shows. But I had not put those words to it yet. So I started hanging around fx hash November, December, but it wasn't until I saw a piece on there from Estian, an artist that I love and I miss. He hasn't been active in the space in the last 2 years, and I hope he's doing well out there. He had a piece that was kind of an Art Deco cityscape with airplanes and blimps flying overhead. And I was like, this is the piece I want. This is my moment. And I DM'd him because I started trying to figure out how to get a wallet, how to fund it, how to deal with my bank not wanting me to fund it. Like, I had to go to my physical bank because I did not understand some pieces. And so it took like 3 weeks to get set up with actual Tez in my wallet to buy this piece from SDN for, I think it was like 7 or 9 Tez. It was not very much. So I started DMing with him like, oh, I'm gonna miss the mint date. Is there any way we could work something out? And so he's like, I will pick up a piece for you on secondary and just hold it for you. And then when the day came and I finally had my Tez, I was like, I'm gonna I'll send you the Tez, you send me the piece. What's your address? And he's like, I'm just going to gift this to you. And he's like, take the Tez you were going to use for me and go buy like 3 or 4 other pieces instead. I mean, that is the entry point I think most people need to experience, which is browsing with a little bit of Tez in your wallet and experiencing that chase, that hope and the gambler's joy of seeing the perfect piece reveal itself.

Speaker A: You said you learned some p5 and you even released a few fxhash projects. Project? Was that kind of just part of your getting familiar with the tech and understanding, and like also being an artist yourself, right? Like, did you find a lot of, um, interesting space there, like, as you started actually building your own parametric art?

Speaker B: Absolutely. For me, all of the artwork that I've made prior to this is an extremely planned out piece of work. Like, when you're doing a film shoot, you have anywhere from 10 to 120 people on set, and time is money, so you have to be as efficient as possible. And a lot of the creativity happens in the pre-planning stages, in the storyboarding, in the rehearsal with the actors. The same went for my photography, which was also a form of staged narrative tableau. So when I got to coding with p5, I finally experienced what I feel like a lot of painters and sculptors do when it's just them alone in the studio with material. There's no other people they're dependent on. And because I'm a mediocre coder, if I'm being honest, Or I'm just beginning. I have some skill, but early on in the process, like I say, I'm going to make this and I get a little bit of the way there and I discover something different. I make a mistake and that mistake leads me down the path toward the piece I actually end up making. My first 3 pieces that I released, I did not successfully make the thing I set out to make. The 4th I finally did, like skills were growing, but yeah, I released 3 pieces on fx hash. Fractured Time was one I was really proud of. One was inspired by these old Saul Bass movie posters, like the 1960s, 1950s Hitchcock kind of vibe. And then the last one that I released, I released on Alba, was called Lace Factory. I made Lace Factory at a time when it was January and Piter Pasma's little project where 30 prompts are given, you have 30 days, you know, to make these different things. And the prompt was to make something in 10 minutes. And I failed in that front. I took 20, I took 20 minutes, but still really fast. And I just had the idea and it was crystal clear and the essence of the piece that I released 5 months later on Alba came specifically in that moment.

Speaker A: Yeah, everyone who's listening, January is coming up, 2026. It's not— we're not that far away now.

Speaker B: Get your ideas ready.

Speaker A: Well, let's talk about Alba because I think that was probably the first time we were talking about having you on, and that was probably almost 3 years ago at this point. Like, to think how long it's been. Yeah, 2 and a half. Yeah, 2 and a half. Yeah, so you got into collecting generative art You're on Art Blocks, you're on fx hash, you're multi-chain. You clearly have a passion for the space and for art in general. So like what brought you to trying to make your own platform like that? It wasn't just you, right? We saw a lot of people with their own open-ish, well, I guess Alba wasn't never meant to be open, but yeah, why don't you?

Speaker B: Oh, it was, it was.

Speaker A: It was. Okay. Okay. So take it away. Tell us about Alba, the idea there and the experience navigating starting a generative art platform. As the market was cooling across the board, right?

Speaker B: Accurate. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: We started building at a time when there was no open platform on ETH for minting generative art. That had always been Snowfro. Erik Calderon, the founder of Art Blocks, his original idea was to have an open platform, but success kind of kicked off and the influx of work required them to put a curation board in place. So they had left a gap in the market that we had seen. And I think if you spend thousands of hours on anybody's tool, anybody's platform, you start to wish that it did this thing or that thing a little bit better or a little differently, or you start to envision features that don't exist yet. And so that's what Alba came out of, was the desire to, yeah, have the things that I didn't have when I was browsing other people's platforms. The thing I did in between releasing my own generative art and Alba is I launched a publication called FX Gems. A tip of the hat, a love letter to fx hash, which is where I really got my entry point into generative art. And I think at this point they've released something like 32,000, 33,000 projects on there. And up until about a year ago, I had seen every single project. Like, I'd seen the first 30,000, just taking hours and hours every day, as you also experienced. And there's a real joy in that. And also just hearing from artists— I started doing studio visits with artists to get to know them. And hearing what their needs were, I could see how we could fill some of those needs. So fx gems as a publication got read by a lot of curators and a lot of artists, and I got an opportunity to do a little curation over at Verse. I'd worked with Aluan Wang to do a curated release there, and then Alba came knocking, paired up with my 2 co-founders, and it felt like a perfect fit.

Speaker A: Yeah, I remember. I'm trying to think back, like, I think you had a Lisa Orth in the mix somewhere at some point. And stranger in the queue. I remember collecting that one. I'm trying to remember because again, this was like a lot of the collecting I did off Alba's and White Cross. You definitely had a White Cross piece.

Speaker B: Love that piece. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. And so I definitely collected some of the stuff there, but a lot of platforms arose at the wrong time, even though they might've been trying to fulfill a need that was there. And I think probably you heard a lot from people that they wanted to be able to put stuff on ETH in an easier way, right? And we also know from the collector side, like collectors even still, and maybe it's gonna happen, talk about like finding ways to bridge Tezos work to ETH for whatever their motives might be. But yeah, like what happened there that wound down Alba and then catch us up to what you did between, cuz I've been talking to you on and off for 2 years whenever we meet up and you're always like, I'm working on an idea. I've got something going on. I'm not ready to talk about it yet. So it's definitely been in your head for a while, what I assume is Artist Commons. So catch us up to post-Alba.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And how you arrived at this new endeavor.

Speaker B: To finish the first half of that paragraph, what ended up happening with Alba, I mean, the first summer was great. There were 2 or 3 other open platforms that launched around the same time. We weren't the only people to see that gap in the market. And if the money had stayed at that level, we would have been okay. But then somewhere that fall, it just quickly dropped off. It was a noticeable shift almost overnight, right around Thanksgiving of, I guess that would be '23. And the next 3 group shows that we released, yeah, there simply weren't enough mints coming in. Sentiment was way down. And as a result, my co-founder stepped away to go found another company at that point, about a year into the platform. And I stayed. I mean, this is the untold story of Alba, is that my co-founder left. I mean, he's still the CEO on the paperwork. So it's still his company, he can do what he wants with it. The site is up, it's running. It's there, the artwork he maintains and fixes things when it breaks on the site still. But the company he founded was called Eko. They sold last month to Coinbase for like $400 million. I'm really excited for him. He's a brilliant, brilliant tech guy and just makes really smart tech. Like the crowning achievement of Alba beyond simply the art that we released was the smart contracts that he built, which were much more on-chain. Than a lot of what the competition had at the time. And Art Blocks, in their most recent contract update, where they kind of admitted they weren't quite as on-chain as they needed to be, emulated a lot of the things that we had done with Alba. So I spent the year and a half since my co-founder stepped away to found Echo working on trying to replace him, on trying to find a tech partner that could keep the platform going, and only gave up that hunt in June. So for the last year and a half, I've wanted to get back to curating, but my hands have felt tied simply because I didn't have somebody there to support the tech. And if I couldn't treat the artist's artwork well and confidently, then obviously I shouldn't be releasing it in that moment. So I didn't realize that because of the market conditions, it would be a hard sell for anyone who really knows their smart contract stuff to come in and support that. But That's kind of what ended up happening with Alba. And like you were saying, the whole time I've been noodling on what the next thing would be, what it would look like. It had a very different form a year ago in my head, kind of like a book club for art, because I'm very interested in everyday people and their experience of art. So that's what I'd been noodling on. I spent that year also taking a bunch of art history classes at various schools here in New York, just because I felt like I needed to shore up my knowledge. I would like someday to be able to curate institutionally, and to do that, you have to have the actual credential to do so. So I started going down that path as well. But Artist Commons snapped into relief earlier this year. When it did, it was like crystal clear exactly what it should be and how it would serve artists. So that was an exciting moment for me.

Speaker A: I can take my shot at broadly explaining what I understand it to be, and then you can correct me or fill in the gaps. So overall, I would say it sounds like it's an educational platform. Meant for artists to help level up their career or perhaps turn art into a career if they haven't found that success yet. You're kind of approaching it from a number of directions. And one of those, I think there is, or I understand there will be like some kind of market aspect to growing your brand or maybe figuring out strategies for doing releases and not just NFTs, right? This is for artists who release anywhere. So it could also be like helping understand the economics behind galleries or things like that. But then there's also going to be like a critique and direct feedback, which we should definitely talk about because that's kind of like an interesting wedge in the NFT space where everyone is so positive all the time. And there's also going to be an education aspect with guest speakers and stuff like that. So am I kind of on the right track here? You are. It's kind of like a big art school.

Speaker B: It is, it is. Yeah, it's designed as a year-long program for artists to level up their practice. So over the last year and a half, as I've gone to Marfa for the Art Blocks Digital Art Week that it's turned into, as I went to Berlin for the the Generative Art Summit, as I went to the closing city launches for Bright Moments in Paris and Venice, Italy, I kept asking artists, what do you need right now? And the things I kept hearing back were that they needed feedback on their work. They had never gone to art school, a lot of them. A lot of the artists in our space come from technology degrees, computer science, engineering. And so how to do art per se, generative art, digital art and the blockchain movement around art has opened up the possibility for them to be artists in a way a lot of them never expected that they could be, but it also left a knowledge gap that they still need to fill. And so Artist Commons is designed around filling that knowledge gap for artists that didn't get an MFA, yet it's also designed for artists that did get an MFA and are missing the cohort-based mentorship of being in a small group of 10 artists together and really having someone who focuses on your long-term growth. Because I think in our space, it's very easy for us to get really invested in platforms and galleries. But because those galleries aren't signing long-term contracts with artists, they're invested in you through the release. They might check in every 6 months, but they're not there often knocking on the doors for you. And I think that model is starting to change with new galleries like HEFT. I'm really excited about what Adam is doing there. But by and large, artists don't have that person in their corner that they need. And so Artist Commons is a way to nurture your practice and to get that mentorship and the knowledge that you might be missing. Because even in MFA programs, you may learn your craft, you may learn how to paint better or sculpt better or code better if you're studying with Zach Lieberman up at MIT or Casey Reas out in California, but you're not learning the business side of art often. How to interact with galleries, how to pursue opportunities like open calls and residencies. So we're going to have guest speakers coming in from the gallery world, from the museum world, the auction world. We're going to have visiting artists coming in, giving you that talk that you never really get whenever you listen to Spaces in Web3. Spaces are often functioning around a single release, and the thing you get in an MFA is an artist comes in, they'll do a craft workshop, something about their process, they'll do a presentation of the full arc of their career. And really seeing the projects that they've done in order shows you a roadmap. It gives you a sense of, oh, this was where they showed, or this is the open call they applied to that got their work seen by this person, which led to this opportunity showing with this gallery, which led to meeting the collectors who have sustained their career for X number of years. So that roadmap, I feel is very empowering, and it's one of the things I really miss in Web3, getting that long arc story.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. The thing I most identify with and have also heard discussed on the side a lot is that issue of people who are coders first, technologists first, and have come to art and have discovered a passion for it and are just like— I think those that stuck around— there's a lot who haven't stuck around, but those that stuck around, I think, look at their earliest work and reflect on it and want to push themselves into doing things that are more risky, more conceptual, less— it's a word that's gonna sound bad, but I don't mean it in a bad way, but like less derivative of things that you can see in a painting, right? Do you know what I mean? Like a lot of the earliest work we see and have seen and collected and still love is like representative of things from art history now just being done in code. And it's novel and it can be fun to collect and you can get all sorts of cool permutations and outputs, but I don't, I don't know that artists who stuck around now for 4 years are so interested in making that anymore. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker B: I mean, William Aman is still doing incredible paint-like drawings. Yes, like the most recent ones that he tweeted out that Layla was reposting are just breathtaking in their scope. I think one of the difficulties is that we want affirmation as artists. Like, we want to know that we're liked a little bit. Even the ones of us who are marching to our own drumbeat and are the solo artists who just, we're going to go in our studio and create something incredible and you're going to like it when I come out with it. We still need at least one person in our life to affirm that we're headed in the right direction and doing good work. So I think that gears us to try and pursue aesthetics that people are responding to and the aesthetics that are more purely digital native. Like the kind of work that p1xelfool or Nicholas Sassoon does, or Kim Asendorf, like these more natively digital aesthetics that veer toward embracing the pixel, that play with light and the experience of motion. Those ones, there's a group of collectors who respond to, and if you are happy and satisfied in that, you can persevere. But I think, yeah, you're right. There's a lot of temptation to lean on older aesthetics. But there's another flip side of this, which is simply that have a real blind spot for art history in our space, which is both the pioneers who came before, but it's also simply if you are making conceptual work in our space, we spend a lot of time talking about firsts and what's new, like this person did something new. But the truth is so much has already been done before. And if we could get just a little bit of art history knowledge into our curriculum, into our knowledge bank, then we would be able to build on the shoulders of giants, essentially. And art history is this through line that connects what came before to what's happening now and what will happen after. That's how art history gets written in museum shows, in books about art. And for our moment, our movement, to be a part of those history books and to be a part of those kinds of exhibitions, we have to make sure that we're fitting somewhere into the lineage so that a curator can draw connections to what comes before and after.

Speaker A: It's the subtlety of reproduction, right? Like taking something you see and now reproducing it in code versus being, I guess what they would say in a gallery museum setting is like in conversation with.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Right. And by the way, when I said derivative, I mean, I'm holding my— the video is not live, but I'm holding my William Mapan art card here, like from his most recent release. So I'm not saying to be critical. I'm just saying like, I think that a lot of the early stuff that we saw, and again, still like, I do feel like there's just this appetite for artists to do more. What you said is perfectly phrased. Like they have to learn this stuff so that way they can build with it and build on it and not just kind of duplicate as part of a coding exercise. Right.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: A lot of people, like you said, who might hear this, especially coming from the crypto side, the NFT side, if they didn't go to art school, if they sign up for Artist Commons, this might be the first time they've ever had stuff they've presented critiqued and given feedback. Like the feedback that they're used to is the market. And the problem is the market has a lot of confounders in it. Like, well, did it not sell because ETH is down? Or did it not sell because the Twitter algorithm changed? Or did it not sell because people didn't like it? And so there's a lot of ways you can explain away maybe a lack of success with a piece. And very few artists, I think, directly reach out and are willing to engage with collectors and be like, why didn't you go for this one? Like, what didn't you like about it? Or, right. So this is a chance for artists to actually get their work critiqued, evaluated, pushed creatively without taking a financial risk other than the cost of the class, right? Like, because once you release the project, it's done and it's either sold or it didn't. So can you speak a little bit more about like what that experience might be like and how not to like cry or, you know, or how to be a good participant too, right? Because if you've never received a critique, you've probably never really given them either. And I imagine that's a skill that these artists might learn.

Speaker B: Yeah, participating in a crit can be a very vulnerable thing, and I actually steer away from the word crit in the language that's on the artistcommons.art website. Like, I talk about feedback sessions a lot more, and the reason is because it is meant to be constructive. It's meant to not intimidate. It's meant to be something that no matter your skill level, you're going to be nurtured. I describe it as generous feedback and rigorous craft that We want to talk deeply about the work and in detail, but at the same time, we want to be generous with one another. One of the things I love about doing feedback sessions is not everyone is equipped to do them well. Like, going to a collector like you were describing is something that may or may not be effective. It depends on how clear their eye is for assessing work and their ability to put that into language that is constructive and actionable and meets you where you're at as an artist. I think one of the best compliments I got in the last few years, I was doing a studio visit with the artist Fahad Kareem, who released several really well-received projects on Art Blocks. He was a finalist for the Lumen Prize. We were doing a feedback session around one of his pieces, and he described me as an art whisperer. He said I should put art whisperer on my business card, and I'm still so flattered by that. So I taught college undergrads for 7 years lens-based art, so film, photography, as well as media. And that sharpened my ability to be able to give feedback in a constructive way, to do that in volume so that I could really define that as a skill of mine. And so when I started curating in Web3, I simply carried that skill into here and got to serve hundreds of artists. I did hundreds of studio visits in the 6 months leading up to Alba, also when I was prepping the release with Verse. And then the 2 years that I ran Alba on the artistic direction side. And some of the things that I've learned along the way is it's really important that it's not, I think you should do this. The I should is just language that has to get removed. A lot of the way that I talk about it is in terms of perhaps, perhaps this would work, or perhaps you could try this. And it opens up a kind of a menu of possibility that the artist can then choose what resonates with them and what doesn't. The compliment sandwich, right? Saying something nice, saying the thing that might be a little more critical, and then closing with something positive at the end that you like about the piece. And this is a skill that did not come natural to me at the beginning. Like, my assumption is that everyone can see what is good about a piece. And so I would jump straight to saying, oh, this is what I don't like about this, this is what could be better. And it really took me many years to learn. People— me too, being an artist— are insecure. And need some kind of affirmation again about what's working, because you don't have the clarity of sight when you've just finished making something. When I was studying at the International Center of Photography, we would come in and put up our photographs on a board. We'd pin them up, and then we'd each get 5 to 10 minutes to get feedback on our work. So intimidating, but there was something about literally just the task of pinning them on the board that I would suddenly see my images so much more clearly than I had in my studio working on it for days and days. That just a change of context, I didn't even need anyone to say anything yet, and I had already changed my relationship to the work. So finding ways to displace the way that we're seeing, I think, are really helpful. And then for the sessions themselves, I mean, there are 3 goals here. One is to help you sharpen your craft and your intention around your work, how you're thinking about why you're making what you're making, as well as the technique you're using as you do it. The structure of the sessions— so the program being a year long is broken into 4 10-week quarters. And so the cohorts of 10 that you get broken into with a mentor meet every week of those quarters while the lectures get spread out a bit more, different types of lectures over the course of the month, but there's always lectures every week. And then the feedback itself, 2 artists go per week and they get 45 minutes apiece, like a real chunk of time to dig down deep. So if I were an artist thinking about applying to Artist Commons, my first thought would be, well, that means I only get to get feedback on my work every 5 weeks, which is a fair criticism. We've set up a private community app that people are going to be able to share their work and get text-based feedback throughout the week whenever they feel like they've made a step forward or want to share something new or just celebrate a win. But the other part is the days you don't get feedback on your work, you're not the person in the hot seat. Are actually just as rich as the ones in which you're getting the crit, because you are learning to see with more clarity artwork and to think about it more deeply. Like, it's something to walk around a gallery or a fair and see a work and be like, I like that, I don't like that, or I don't like this about it. But you have to put it into language to actually know something. Like, writers know this— you don't truly know something until you put it down in words. So talking about work with your fellow cohort members generously is going to sharpen your own ability to see your own work and your own ability to speak about your art. Because I think that's the other thing you take out of these feedback sessions is that it helps you rehearse how to speak about your art so that the first time you're trying to explain it is not when you're standing in front of a curator or standing in front of a collector who's put you on the spot and you're fumbling with your words. This is a space in which you get to practice how you talk about it So that one, you can be on with those people when you're with them and it really matters. And also it helps you smooth out the difficulty of writing the artist statement, of articulating it in print, because you already have some language that's under your tongue that you can use. So there's a lot of things to get from the feedback sessions, not simply, oh, this is how your piece could be stronger.

Speaker A: Right on. I mean, I have gotten really into collecting music again in the last 2 years, and one of the things I love about hearing people talk about collecting records and doing reviews is like the language that they use, especially when they have more of a music history, or perhaps they, you know, they went and studied and actually played professionally. Like hearing their takes, the words they use, and the way that they understand things. For me, as someone who's not a musician and never did music history, it is really enriching for me just to watch that stuff, and then I can integrate it more into my own thinking about stuff I'm hearing, right? So I totally get that. That sounds like a really awesome way for just anyone to immerse themselves in being an artist, right? Like, that's the, the whole idea. I would kind of want to talk more about the market side because this is waiting to be signed and we've already covered a lot. You know, you're going to have lectures, there's going to be feedback sessions, you're going to have mentorship, there's going to be history, there's going to be reading too, right? And like discussing like reading. So there is a very almost like school aspect of this. But then the part that you're going to help people with too through Artist Commons is the business of art. And that's the thing that I got from your announcement website that like, that's what MFAs don't really tend to cover. And we spoke a little bit, you spoke a little bit about, you know, helping people understand how galleries work and such, but can you talk a little bit more about what you kind of intend to help people with there, because I know a lot of artists on the NFT side at least have felt the struggle the last couple years. And we didn't even really get that cycle this time around. It felt like nothing really came back to art, unfortunately. But we have seen some, for lack of a better term, like graduate into the curated space. You know, they're on Verse, they're in HEFT, they're in Nguyen Wahed, they're going to Art Basel, you know, they're going to all these events. But that's a very difficult halo to get into, right? So would the goal potentially be to help people break in there? Would the goal be to help them find alternative ways to sell their work? What is the business of art in your mind that you're going to be educating on here?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we're going to have guest speakers coming every month and they're going to talk about, like you mentioned, art history, We're going to have an art history lecturer coming in talking about various modern and contemporary movements. We're going to have people from the museum and gallery world talking about the business of art. Those are 2 core pillars in addition to the feedback sessions of what's going to be there. And we're going to have a whole bunch of other activities that we can talk about and how those are structured. But the business side of it for me is, take some simple basics like pricing and editioning is a question that comes up all the time. At times I feel like we're reinventing the wheel in Web3 and there are a lot of disciplines that we can look to. Photography in particular is an editioned medium that has often struggled because of how it's editioned to get market share against painting and sculpture, which are more one-off, one-of-one pieces. So what can we learn from those other disciplines and the history of pricing and editioning from the last 50 years? Another piece of this is how to deal with gallery contracts, like who pays for the framing, who pays for the shipping, This is stuff by being around the art world and the art nonprofits and the residencies I did that I got to absorb at some point and want to pass on to members who apply and get accepted into the program. So for instance, framing. I was really shocked the first time I learned that framing is something that the artist should pay for, not the gallery itself. The gallery may pay for a really marquee artist to have their work framed because they're trying to entice that artist who could go anywhere because they're a marquee artist. But for most of us at the level that we're going to get to work at in our careers, the artist pays for the framing. And this was shocking to me because I was making these large format photographs that were very large and very expensive to frame. And the reason is if you send that work to a gallery and then they show the work and the work doesn't sell, if the gallery paid for the framing, what is the gallery gonna do with that image now? They can't just send it back to you. Like the image belongs to you as the artist. But they paid for the framing, which means technically they have a bill that they need to hand you then to say, oh, sorry, we failed to sell your work. Now you're on the hook for it. That's a terrible situation to be in as an artist. It's a hard lesson to learn on your feet out in the world. And so it's better to have a space where you can learn about these little nuances of how to handle your business practice as an artist and what are the gotchas or the blind spots you have around contracts around dealing with art advisors, whether or not to even go to auction. Like, we've embraced auction houses in Web3 in particular because that's affirmation. We're on the right track. We're doing work that matters to people. A lot of artists from the traditional art world and a lot of gallerists and museum people would tell you that may or may not be the best thing to do for your career, especially in the early stage, to have prices set so visibly. And publicly and then be stuck failing to exceed those expectations in the future. So Artist Commons is a tuition-based program, and one of the things that's really great about doing that is that we're able to pay to bring in really great speakers who are their experts in their field to talk about these topics and help us understand from the inside, no longer guessing the way that we have been.

Speaker A: The auction thing is so interesting to think about, something that we saw so much early on in NFTs, like with fx hash artists who release low, the secondary price gets really high, their work gets really flipped, then they try to raise prices on the primary. And all of a sudden, it doesn't sell out, right. And it's weird how success can cripple you early on in a way. That's a super— I'd never really thought about that in, you know, someone who maybe does traditional painting or photography or something like, yeah, having a successful auction showing, that's it. Like, if you don't hit that mark again, it's like, well, why'd that one sell for less? Or why did that one not— what often could happen is like not sell at all at an auction, right? It doesn't meet the minimum. And the framing thing too is like on the business side of it, not just who gets to keep the piece, but framing being expensive means now you have to do things like calculate your margins. And once the gallery takes the cut and you paid for the framing and then you get your cut, how much now? Like, what are you actually walking away with, right? And doing that math is, and then you're like, okay, and then I gotta pay taxes too. So like doing that math all of a sudden becomes really challenging. And so is there gonna be like a, I don't know if you did this in school, but like when you learned how to write a check, do you know, like, are you gonna have like a little, like how to do your little spreadsheet session with people to figure out what they can actually predictably make if they ever have an opportunity like that?

Speaker B: That's a fantastic idea. So Hunter College is one of the places I've been taking art history classes, and I know that they have a business of art minor that undergrads are able to take. And I just think that's fantastic. Like, it includes taking an accounting class. So yeah, I have the first 2 quarters mapped out in terms of what the sessions are going to cover. So yeah, that definitely is something you've got my brain buzzing here to include.

Speaker A: And like a tax person too, like, okay, you pay for the— you pay for the framing, but can you write that off as a business expense? And like, is that how you can recoup some? Yeah, so there's a lot of stuff there that I think people ask after they have the problem, but not before, or it's not offered to them. Here's another question, and you mentioned this earlier in your introduction, which is that you do aspire to curate again. So do you view like Artist Commons having any path towards being like a feeder for that? Like, do you imagine that the platform in a year or 2 or 3 or however long could also become a gallery or become a way for artists to release work? Like, what is the vision for it beyond year 1?

Speaker B: Artist Commons is built around my favorite parts of Web3, which is the community first and foremost. And the cohorts of 10, like, we're going to be running many of those at the same time and they're going to spill together into larger sessions. So it's built to scale, it definitely is. And I'll personally be mentoring the first 6 to 8 cohorts And after we pass that mark, I get to bring on additional mentors who are working with artists. And as we get to a certain size, we'll be able to start doing more IRL events. In the meantime, what we are going to do is quarterly meetups. So this includes going to museum shows, gallery hopping together. Like, we're going to have so much content and lecture material from the front that when we get together, we just want to be together in person. And I have a dream for what it could be in a year or 2 to support more IRL events in that way, that it may include showing members' work, but I don't know that we would be turned into a gallery or gallery brand. But I would say in 2026, after Artist Commons is on its feet, I'm personally definitely going to get back to curating under my own gallery brand. So I am so excited for that. I mean, I've spent the last year and a half with my hands tied to be able to curate. Trying to solve that problem and where and when to do that again. So at this point, it makes the most sense to do it under my own power. I've been keeping my ear to the ground, seeing work in progress that's coming through the feed. I've got a really good process of making lists on X and bookmarking. I have an account I just literally DM myself images that I'm like, oh, go check in with this artist in a few months. So I've definitely been thinking about that from the broader space. But I don't think that's going to be a fundamental component of why an artist would sign up for Artist Commons. Like, this is very much about, I want community, I want to sharpen my practice, I want to build my knowledge base so I'm not making the mistakes on my feet out in the world. Like, I'm prepping for that moment when suddenly my sails fill with wind and I'm ready to go. But we'll definitely be featuring artists' work from the community and celebrating wins. Like, 2 of the things that'll be in the private community app, one is there'll be a list of opportunities every quarter that are helping you find the open calls and the residencies and the grants to apply to. We'll be doing workshops on how to apply and how to sharpen what you're sending in, because that's how we grow beyond the space that we're in. Right now, success for artists is selling because money in your pocket means time and space to make more work. And I am all behind getting artists paid. At the same time, there are a lot of opportunities that may or may not pay. They may pay a small stipend. They're not the same money as like selling out a collection for $20,000 because they're traditional art world spaces and they don't traffic in that kind of money often until you get to the larger galleries. But they are the things that get your work in front of art critics and writers who are writing at publications. Who doesn't want their work written about in a major art publication? It gets your work viewed by gallerists and curators. Well, now you've planted some seeds so that you don't know where those seeds are going to go a month, a year from now. They may have a show and remember that piece that really stood out to them. Like, curators are always looking for what is new. There's a real crisis right now in contemporary art about where is the field going, what helps a piece matter right now. And we're part of a movement that is so vibrant and so incredible. And as people see it, like, I show generative art pieces on my phone to like my mother-in-law and her friends at the holidays, and they get excited and they say, how can I collect this? Especially since I'm showing them work that I'm selling for $60 apiece. And then I get really sad because I'm like, oh, I probably can't sell this to you, the hoops you would have to jump through. But there is this incredible vibrant movement that people, when they see it, they do respond to. And we simply have to give them other avenues to engage with it. And we have to find ways to get it in front of them. So that means applying to these more traditional art world spaces and being comfortable sending out 10 applications to hopefully get one yes back and getting comfortable with that level of effort that's required. I don't want to call it rejection. Because again, it all comes down to who is on that particular board of people reviewing at that particular moment and has nothing to do with your work. And I'll insert a story here on this point, which is that in 2022, during the pandemic, that was like Omicron phase. My wife is a film critic and a lot of the film festivals had gone online. Sundance was supposed to be in person that year and it suddenly had to go back to being online because of Omicron. And I got to sit on the couch next to her and watch all the movies. She would watch like 3, 4, 5 movies a day. I would watch 6 or 7, like after she went to bed. So I saw every movie that played in Sundance that year, every single one, which was like 80, 82 movies plus all the shorts. So when the judges finally announced all the awards at the end of Sundance that year, it liberated me. In that moment because I disagreed so strongly with so many choices. And I trust my taste. Like, I've been watching, engaging with film for a long time. So the moment I realized how wrong the judges were on so many fronts, I was like, awards are great and wonderful, but they are not an indictment in any way of your practice. Like, you can just let that go. The point is to send out as many seeds out into the world as possible, and some will take root and some won't. But you have to send a volume of them if you want to get the traction that you're hoping for. So those are some of the things that I'm hoping we can equip members to be able to do for themselves and empower them to start getting their work out to people who will respond to this type of work. We just have to get it out there and out of our corner of the internet.

Speaker A: So do you feel strongly— and this is a narrative that we've heard so much, I mean, since the very beginning— which is like Do you feel strongly that progressing artists who are making digital art, who are making algorithmic art, making AI art, to find pathways off of NFTs? Just because, like I said, like we had our moment in 2021, it never really came back this cycle. Platforms are consolidating to the point where it's very challenging to put yourself in a position to make the type of money that would be survivable off of. It feels. So how do you feel about the technology side of it? And like, the ability for someone to, yeah, I make parametric art, like, I want there to be 1,000 of these. But how would you do that in a traditional art setting? Like, you'd kind of have to do it the way HEFT does, where you put the emphasis on the art, and then the token is secondary? Or like, how do you feel of the last, you know, the last 4 years, right? Because you've been so close to the market, you've, you've built a platform. And you still have it, right? You're still, still, I'm sure if someone came along and said, I'll be the tech person, like, I'm sure you would hook it back up and try to get that going in parallel. So what do you think for a lot of these artists who have become so reliant on NFTs only? We always talked about in the space too, like, well, they're going to come to us and actually trad art's going to come and they're going to put their stuff on the blockchain. But then we'd always hear artists trying to get out of the blockchain and into the trad world, maybe still with NFTs. So like, Those 2 things do feel like they're cohering a little bit in New York with like HEFT and Mimi's Gallery and stuff. But like, what is your take on it overall?

Speaker B: Yeah, I love this question. I mean, I take a lot of inspiration from other art disciplines for helping me make sense of how to move through this particular space. And in this case, music in particular. Like, you see a lot of musicians turn into moguls that have multiple revenue streams that they're pursuing simultaneously. And I think visual artists could definitely get better at doing this, at giving different types of people who might encounter their work different ways to enter into it, right? If I fall in love with Taylor Swift suddenly and discover her music, right, I have the ability to stream her music, I can buy it on record, I can buy merch, I can attend a live event, I can join a fan community. Like, there are multiple ways to suddenly enter into her ecosystem. And for visual artists in our space, like, it tends to be come mint on this day at this hour and be there right at the opening gun. And that's not enough. We live in an attention economy where we do have to compete with so many other types of content and media. So we have to have designed for ourselves, for our careers, ways of giving those different entry points. That can be selling some prints on your website and marketing that through Instagram to your followers. That could be doing a joint release with a gallery of a 1,000 edition generative piece, but recognizing that this is not about the mint out day. This is, I'm gonna keep showing up and selling this work over a period of time. And if that gallery may on-demand prints right there in the space, like I know I've talked to a couple of gallerists in New York who've talked about doing this with generative. And I think that's just such a fantastic idea to have someone off the street walk in push a button several times, be like, oh, that's the one I love, and then they just get their piece right there in that moment at what is a very competitive and affordable price point. Like, that is one of the joys about these large edition sizes, is it makes art affordable and accessible to people who felt excluded by the gallery world for so long. And obviously, if you have a physical space, you need to put large works on the walls to be able to keep the lights on, to pay the rent, to pay your staff. Running a gallery is incredibly expensive, and I have gotten so much more comfortable over the last few years with the 50% cut that galleries take. Like, they are taking such a risk on you. One of the things I learned curating with Alba was that you have a limited number of artists whose name you can have on your tongue at any one moment. And so for me to commit to an artist isn't just about physical space, It's about my cultural capital being spent whispering to collectors and my social time with them being spent on your name rather than someone else's name. And so if that is my livelihood, then I'm giving up the chance of other revenue to choose to try and make revenue for you. So the work happens constantly at all strange hours. That's why I go to so many events, is to build these relationships with collectors in addition to artists who are my favorite. Like, all I want to do at events is stand in a corner and talk with the artist. And I know that to serve the artist, I have to break away from them and go do all the other types of conversations so that I can nurture their practice and help them flourish.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love the idea of walking in and getting a 1 of 1 of X print for like $50 or $100. And yeah, having some kind of very simple, like, you get to pick from these 5, or You press 2 buttons, you can pick palette and maybe one other thing, and then that's it. And you get your random piece. 'Cause a lot of people who go into galleries, and I know that we're not talking about like HEFT necessarily because it's such a new gallery, but like, if you think of like the moneyed older galleries, they have this reputation for, you couldn't even buy something off the wall if you wanted to. You could walk in with like the $50K cash or $100K cash, and they just probably wouldn't even sell it to you because they don't know you. You don't have reputation. You don't bring any value as a collector to them as an unknown. Right? But we have an opportunity at this smaller level to like create experiences like that where someone can come into a gallery, actually leave with a piece of art. It becomes an Instagrammable thing too. It can become very viral, like both for the gallery to post or for them to post individually. Like, here's my piece getting printed and I just got this and you can get this too. And like, there's so much low-hanging fruit there, minus, you know, the cost of getting the printer set up and all of that. But like, that's just a a technical hurdle. I would love to see that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, the cost of printing is like a dollar per square foot. Like, if you're doing a small 8x10 print or a 4x4 square print of some kind, like, yeah, the cost for production and materials is very low if you're not selling framed prints. I mean, I think the other thing that I really want artists to embrace in their own practice, because you and I both came up on open generative art platforms in this moment, like The open model is a real hard sell to me these days. Alba was designed to be open. It's why we pursued the artists that we did and curated who we did into those early group shows. Like, we weren't chasing these huge marquee names because we wanted artists who'd experienced other tech on other platforms to come and see what we'd built on the backend, the things that collectors never got to experience because they're not logging in as an artist and trying it out. And those artists, I think at some point, The hope was, this is like YouTube, I put up my work, and then it will be found, the algorithm will help surface it, it'll spread on social media, maybe I'll get to go viral. And that's how we treated open platforms for a long time. And the model, at least with the Web3-oriented galleries and platforms at this point, have moved in a much more curated direction. And that's because you need to know your collectors, you need to know who you're selling to and have relationships. With them. And the idea that you can simply throw something up and hope that it will sell, it still happens. The artists that want to give that a swing, I think that's really important, but it's much better to have someone in your corner whispering about your work to a collector about why it's important. Like, for the money to have left the space the way it did, like, it was the wrong money. I think that gets overlooked, that the money that was here was here based on pure speculation, treating art as a financial derivative that I can take a risky bet on and then strike it big. When I went to Marfa for the 3rd time back in October for Art Blocks' kind of digital art week there, and I call it that because there are so many other galleries and art companies showing there over the last few years, there are a lot of pop-up events now. Like, it feels like a broader community has rallied around this very inconvenient place to get to, but magical for that. And you go and you see 500, 600 people who are the true believers. We found a collector base that did not exist 5 years ago, and they have coalesced into a powerful group of people who are accessible and friendly and love weird stuff, just the weirdest art. And the artists are accessible. You can DM artists. That's how I got my first piece on fxhash was DMing an artist and starting a relationship with them as I struggled to set up a wallet, and they talked me through it. The collectors here are passionate about making sure digital art is this big chapter in the history books someday. My big fear, if I had one right now, isn't about the success of this movement for us right now. It is how we get written about 50 years from now, 100 years from now, and AI art has kind overshadowed algorithmic generative art in a lot of ways, the code-based work that we love. And that's clearly going to be the big chapter when we talk about this first quarter of the century. But is Art Blocks and fx hash and Verse going to be a sidebar, or how do we make sure that the art that they're championing stays as a core chapter of this moment? And I think we're at a real critical juncture for making sure that happens.

Speaker A: Yeah, obviously the open platform thing is a huge discussion right now because of fx hash and what they're doing with the art coins. And in some ways, you know, hearing about Artist Commons, I think they're trying to solve the issue from a totally different direction. They saw and experienced the ability for artists to come onto an open platform, build an audience, build collection value through secondary market sales, And then find success over on Art Blocks and then Verse when it came. A lot of those artists who are traveling the world at some point had an fxhash release. And for whatever reason, we haven't had that next tranche of like new artists come in, but we did have a lot of artists who perhaps, you know, 2, 3 years ago, if Artist Commons had been around, could have like really used some of that coaching, like used that mentorship.

Speaker B: I'll add here that, I mean, that was one of the goals for Alba. I had spent 3 years on fx hash looking at work, seeing these small artists that a lot of people were ignoring. You and I love Estian, for example, but most people on ETH have no idea who he is. So those were the kinds of artists that I wanted to pursue for Alba. I wanted to platform them in a way that put them on the same level because they had leveled up their practice over those 3 years that we had gotten to know them. Were not ready for the major leagues at the beginning, but they definitely felt like that in the last 6 months, a year. And so that was how I had designed the programming there and who we wanted to bring in. And I continue to look for who those artists are. I think the difficulty is persuading a collector to put them into their memory bank of who I should collect. There's a limited number of slots in anyone's brain of how many names they can hold on to, and they're pretty filled up at this point. Like, you have to exceed a pretty high bar to bump some memory slot out and be like, oh, I should add that person to my mental list of who to collect.

Speaker A: Yeah, if I wasn't making the podcast, there's no way I'd remember a 10th of what I can recall. And only because I would sit every week and take notes and read Discord and browse the collections and build the run of show and stuff like that is way more dedication than the average collector would do. And so it's like not surprising at all that people just become forgotten.

Speaker B: I mean, I hope you play a large role in writing the history of this moment someday. Like, you have those notes. I have my notes from writing FX Gems. There are a handful of us who have seen every project. I know Bre Pettis up at Bantam Tools is another, and Lonliboy, who's now back at fx hash. There are a handful of us, and this is really important work. It is one of the largest repositories of a certain type of generative art at a particular moment in history. And that matters.

Speaker A: Don't worry, I'm backing up the podcast offline. It's— and I always say I aspire to get at least the interviews up onto a website, but transcription is a hell of a job and AI is still not there, unfortunately, to like make it that much easier. So maybe in a couple years it'll be super simple. Just to circle back, like on fx hash and art coins, so you don't think that really an open platform, or you just don't feel that that's maybe the wisest place for someone Like an artist that, that I've been throwing out in Discord as someone who like I would love to come back and do art coin would be Landlines. You know, back in the day, Landlines was so prolific and not just because they had 10 projects ready to go on day one, but I think just because they were so into the practice of like churning out a project every 10 weeks or however, you know, they, he released really frequently for a long time and then And also very experimental artists, like the series where it was lettered.

Speaker B: I forget what the name of that project was, but like, here's A, B, C, D. As the project evolved, it was the same piece.

Speaker A: That wasn't Landlines. That was, um, that was, um, Jeff. That was Ippsketch.

Speaker B: Oh, Ippsketch.

Speaker A: Yeah, of course. But Landlines did do one where you had to like mint one and then evolve the code and you mint another. And he did a bunch of stuff that was like on-chain, and he did the original art cards project back before fx hash even opened that was kind of like you can collect the traits and combine them to mint something. So yes, like he had experimentation in mind a lot, but that's someone who I think for whatever reason never got curated and maybe could have really used mentorship to like level up their art thinking about how to get to those levels is not here now, but could be well served by an art coin if you could get your thousand true fans type of thing, right? You don't need a gallery. In theory, you can just keep releasing work on an open platform and build— like, I feel like that's the intention of art coins is to get that next decile of artists like a way to earn. You're kind of approaching it from a, no, like, let's actually slow down. Let's educate, let's get like hyper-focused. And then together, we're all going to tackle these problems of like how to turn this into a career. And we're not going to rely on the ups and downs of the crypto market. More or less, right?

Speaker B: Expanding your collector base, I think, is what most artists need to be doing on some level, and the art coins is a really creative solution to the problem of not enough collectors, right? That is what every platform in the space has run into, and this is a swing at how to solve that. I think if I were to critique platforms overall over the last 4 or 5 years, I'm disappointed in the efforts that they made to onboard new types of collectors into the space. At the same time, I go back to what I said like a paragraph ago, which is that the community we have built and the collectors I see when I go to Marfa or Bright Moments events when those were running, those true believers did not exist 5 years ago. They created an entirely new set of collectors and the art world would be envious of that on a certain level. I think the difficulty is that we we in Web3 built something that's kind of like a Segway. It looks cool to a handful of people, but it doesn't quite solve a particular need that they have. They saturated their early adopter market of users and never succeeded in crossing over into the mainstream. And I'm worried that working in crypto and releasing art in this space is kind of like a Segway that looks cool to the people on the inside, and the people on the outside are like, oh, that looks kind of dumb to be a part of. The difficulty is figuring out how to bridge that chasm. That's always a startup's problem is how to bridge the chasm between the early adopters and the mainstream. And you actually have to build a different type of product to appeal to the mainstream. What attracts early adopters is not the things that attract the mainstream audience. And what art coins do is they decide to double down on the audience that is already in crypto. Which may or may not be the right decision. I'm really excited to see what all the new different types of minting, the types of art beyond generative that they're empowering, open up. But it's still an admission that we didn't do well at onboarding new users who wanted to collect. And some of that might just simply be we went to a lot of ETH events and Tezos events and spoke to people who were already on our side of the fence, and we didn't figure out how to go to more of the events outside. Like, I know Tezos did a booth at Art Basel years ago, but how are you following up with those collectors? What were the calls to action that you could actuate on with collectors in that moment? How are you building email lists to follow up later? I mean, that's what open platforms don't do. They want to be a platform, they don't want to be a gallerist. And the model that we've seen start to succeed here with Mimi's gallery and Adam's gallery HEFT, I mean, even SuperRare at this point has several curators, Each of these galleries are putting together a PDF of here are the pieces, like it looks like a very nice booklet if you were to get it in your hands, and you get to see the pieces that are going to be sold before the release day. So they're already courting collectors leading up to the day that you or I could normally collect. And it's not hard to get added to an email list, if we're being honest. They're not being exclusionary, they simply identified who are the people most likely to buy and reaching out to them personally. Making an appeal and explaining why this art would be good for their collection, why this artist is important. Those are the people that you need in your corner, and those are the kinds of relationships that I want to foster if I get back to doing gallery work. I've been building my list, so I feel ready.

Speaker A: The most recent thing I've bought is a Jeres piece that HEFT was showing.

Speaker B: Great piece.

Speaker A: The way I bought it was Adam DM'd me, and he's like, I know that you have been a fan of Jeres for a long time. We talked about Jeres probably way back in 2021 on the show or 2022. And he was like, here's the booklet. Yeah, here's the PDF. Let me know, is there one that you want? And I got, just because of that personal relationship. And I think that that is something that might, some crypto people would bristle at, right? Because it does feel anti-crypto to like have this insider, like, oh, I got to make an early pick of a piece I wanted. But that's kind of where the business is at now. Like that, that feels unimaginable 4 years ago that you'd be like soliciting individual pieces out to like a preferred collector or customer. But now that's how you sell out a show right now, right? Is by reaching out like that. That's where we're at. Like you have to sell out your show.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, part of this is definitely that momentum builds momentum. And so it's not about being exclusionary here by reaching out to some collectors that, you know, are faithful in the space to support the artists that we care about here. It's much more convincing to me, or someone who just comes across the project, to see that it's already half sold by the time it opens. I don't love when a show is entirely sold out by the first day. I think that is kind of a bummer, but great for the gallery, like fantastic for them. And it— if you're committed to the type of art these galleries are showing, then you're reaching out to the gallerists and getting on those lists and getting to see the PDF pre-show of what work is available. But yeah, if I show up on a page and I see it's already 50% sold, I'm much more inclined to buy right now. But I think you and I had the experience on fxhash where you would be flipping through the daily releases and you would see a piece that had only minted like 2 or 3 editions and it's just like not moving at all. Like you're much less inclined to collect that piece in that moment.

Speaker A: Yeah. If it has no anticipation and buildup and if it's not like an instant 3-block mint out. It is almost like, well, that's a failure, right? And that's so weird because that's not how art would normally work. It's not about that burst of minutes. It's like, it should be more of a slower burn kind of experience. And it's Adam doing his job too, right? Like, this is what the gallerist is supposed to do. Notwithstanding, like, knowing Adam for a long time, like, he knows, like, Will will probably get a Jeres piece. That's, that's what the gallerist's function is in this sense.

Speaker B: He sees you clearly, which Yeah, I think for the artist takeaway here, for artists that don't have a gallerist, that don't have that person in their corner yet, you have all this incredible data in Web3 to be able to build up your own collector list. Like, who are the people that have collected the most number of pieces? Have you DM'd them? Have you asked them, given them a nudge? Have you checked in to see how they're doing at this moment, what they're excited about? It's an authentic relationship. It's not just about dropping into DMs and trying to sell. It's following them back on X if they followed you and you never did. It's commenting on posts that they listed and being engaged in the conversations around the things that they're interested in so that you don't feel like an extractive person to the collector as well. I think it's very easy for every type of person in this space— collector, artist, gallerist— to engage in some kind of extractive behavior by accident. Just because we're all busy people and there's a limited amount of time we can apply to doing any of these tasks. But I really admire the artist Brian Brinkman, who I know mostly as an animator and illustrator, but he released some really well-received projects on Art Blocks like NimBuds, which is like this cartoony cloud piece that I adore. And Brian is just an incredible marketer. And he said recently in a space that he divides his time 1/3 to making the art, 1/3 to planning the marketing, and then 1/3 to actually executing on that and doing collector outreach. And it's why he's extremely successful at this.

Speaker A: A lot of like the reason that I collect or have stayed collecting is because of like personal connection and meeting people. And a lot of the artists, even artists that I haven't had in the show but know from DMs and know from Discord and stuff, there's a part of me and like my collector psychographic that I want to support my friends. And like, I feel like a lot of the Like you said, the whole space is like so community driven. And like, when I feel these artists are my friends, I'm much more likely to collect, even if it's not even like my favorite piece, but to like be one of the dominoes in helping that get to 50% sold so that way it can complete. It is satisfying to me and it's just a thing that I like to do. But yeah, Haiver, I mean, we've gone for a while now. I have one rapid-fire question for you. So is there anything that you feel like we didn't cover that you want to talk about with Artist Commons?

Speaker B: The ways to get involved with Artist Commons at this point is to, one, check out the website, which is artistcommons.art. We're on 6 different social media platforms as @artist_commons, so follow us on there. There's an email subscription list on the website. Sign up there. You'll get additional info about program details, about when new cohorts are launching. We're going to onboard new members 2 to 4 times per year, depending on how this first round goes. At most, it's once per quarter. So it's not gonna be that often. We really wanna spend most of our time focusing on the artists that are in the program rather than spending time out here marketing it and spreading the word. The hope is that the artists that sign up for it, they quickly realize how much material they're getting by being a part of it. Like we're doing a whole bunch of additional things. Like we mentioned discussion groups earlier, reading groups. We're gonna do portfolio reviews, website reviews. Like if you haven't built your artist website, Curators are looking for art to champion, art to get excited about, and it's very hard when I scroll X or Instagram sometimes to get an overview of an artist's growth and body of work and what they're about, especially if you're mostly just retweeting other people. I find it so difficult to get to know a new artist. Like, that's great, you're championing artists you care about and your friends, and that's amazing. Like, please keep doing that, but there need to be ways, links I can click, or repositories of a body of images. So we're going to do website reviews, we're going to do close-looking exercises, which is something big in museum education for, again, learning how to see art more clearly and what that's about, as well as like writing clinics to be able to focus on developing your voice as a writer, how you talk about your work. That's really important once you start getting outside Web3, like I remember some FX projects where the artwork description is just a sentence at best, or a bunch of emojis. And if we want to expand our collector base and be a part of the narrative of art that's happening right now in the contemporary scene, we have to be able to write artist statements, which is just being a good host. Like, someone walks up on your art, they don't know what you're about. Like, you're just welcoming them into your practice and giving them a couple handholds so that they can make sense of what they're seeing more quickly, which enables them to go deeper on their own when they're looking at work. So we'll do writing clinics. And again, like I said, opportunity list is going to be a big part of this as well. So sign up for the email list, check out the website, follow us @artist_commons. Those are the ways. And then next week the applications open. Applications are open for 8 weeks. It's a couple pages, but not very long. We're like I say, rooting for you all the time. Curators, myself and my partner Laura, who is the program administrator, are rooting for you in your application. Like, we're not trying to block people out. We simply want to get to know who you are so we can make an enthusiastic yes.

Speaker A: And you can use the referral code WTBS2026 if and when you go sign up.

Speaker B: Yeah, so the program is tuition-based, and next year it'll be $2,400 for the year, which is 40 weeks of material for what is essentially less than the cost of most college classes, one college class. This year we're doing a founding membership of $1,850. We put that as absolutely low as we can go. So the referral code isn't a discount this year. It will be in future years. But yeah, it supports Waiting to Be Signed by using that code. As well as we're going to keep the people who have acted as referrers. We're gonna try and put the members who sign up with those referral codes into cohorts together, because obviously you're aligned with the mission of Waiting to Be Signed, and keep Will and Trinity up to date on how those cohorts are doing.

Speaker A: Nice. Wow, I didn't know about that part. Just know if you sign up with our code, we're gonna see what you're doing. So Santa's watching, you know. Well, Haiver, that's all amazing. I love the writing stuff too. I'm glad you mentioned that at the end, because I think it's super relevant to NFTs too. And a lot of the time, When we're trying to make our show, back when we were making it more, it was so hard sometimes to just scrape together like any information about what this release is. And I'm still sometimes almost offended at how little can be written, you know, on even a curated platform, the releases they put out that they're putting a lot of time behind. It's like, this is it? This is like 2 paragraphs and most of it is like no information. So yes, super, super important stuff. I wanna hit you with a rapid fire before we go here, 'cause you talked about movies and Sundance and stuff. Did you or your wife go to Sundance this year? I asked because there's a movie this year that I don't think is going to make it into any kind of wide distribution. I'm curious if either of you saw it, called Nirvana: The Band, The Show, The Movie.

Speaker B: You know, I— so I'm part of Alamo's like MoviePass plan, so I get their emails and it came into my feed.

Speaker A: Are they going to show it there?

Speaker B: They are, yeah.

Speaker A: Oh my gosh, okay. I don't know if you're familiar with that creator or they do, but I'm not—

Speaker B: tell me, please.

Speaker A: I mean, I actually haven't seen nearly enough of his stuff, and it's on my list of things to try to like dig into more. So the thing that you might know him best for is he did the BlackBerry movie. Oh yeah, from a couple years ago. But prior to that, he had made a couple movies. Matt Johnson and Jay McCarroll are the 2 co-writers and actors in a lot of the stuff. Um, they're Canadian, and a lot of what they do, they actually get funded by the Canadian government, but it's very small funding, and they take advantage of a lot of, uh, legal rights, especially in Canada, which is a lot more lenient on like what you can do in public and film, and that you don't need releases from people and stuff like that. So they do like a lot of, I guess, guerrilla filmmaking, if you will. And they have a show called Nirvana: The Band: The Show, where like the whole conceit is that there are 2 people in a band called Nirvana, but spelled with 3 N's instead of 2, and they're trying to get booked. And like every episode is more or less like a scheme for them to try to get booked at a local bar. A lot of it's very improvised, and it's just, it's just a very— he's a very interesting filmmaker. He made another film called The Dirties that was, yeah, yeah, very, I think, very polarizing because it was about school shooting. But apparently the things that they do in this new movie are really wild. And I know that the reaction coming out of Sundance was like, because a lot of it was made in America, like it might be illegal to release it. But I guess they found a way around it. So I don't know, it's— his whole thing is like skirting the law.

Speaker B: I mean, there's a good model for doing that kind of film, like the Borat movies. I mean, right, again, you don't have a right of image in the US the way you do have in, say, the EU. So making an image of somebody in public like a documentary would, or a mockumentary, it falls under First Amendment. Making an image of someone is just like whispering to my friend my opinion about them. What I choose to include in the frame or not, what moments I pick to include. Yeah, that's really fascinating. No, it's been a great year for movies. There have been some really fantastic things. I think One Battle After Another and Hamnet are probably gonna go the distance here. Oh, okay.

Speaker A: Did you like them?

Speaker B: I did, yeah, tremendously. Uh, they had filmed One Battle After Another in VistaVision, which is a film format that hadn't been around since the 1950s. So I went to a screening of that negative. They basically take the film canisters on the camera and turn them sideways to make a bigger, wider image. Oh, this was really important in the 1950s because television was on the rise. And so cinema started trying to figure out how to differentiate itself from television to justify why would you go to a theater. I think that's really instructive because even, you know, 75 years ago, they're worried about the shrinking of the market that they're a part of. And so they're turning it into an event. And I don't think in that way anything has changed in 75 years. I think it's really helpful as a digital artist to realize that we're part of an ecosystem of fine art, which is affected by macroeconomic conditions as well, right? Because people buy art out of their expendable income, generally speaking. So the situation that we're here in at this moment in crypto, trying to sell art there, is not that different in a lot of ways from the broader traditional art world and the struggles. Like, a lot of galleries have closed this year. And if we hear all the doom and the naysayers speaking, that doom and gloom might just be the same doom and gloom that was being said 20, 50, 75 years ago. Just like with this movie format, trying to find ways to differentiate yourself. I mean, I think that's one of the biggest things an artist can do is try to figure out what is my differentiator here? What am I saying that is unique to me that's coming from my voice and my experiences? And how can I connect that with collectors, connect that in an emotional way that they resonate with that.

Speaker A: Right on. I think that's the perfect way to end it, to be honest. So, Haiver, thanks so much for coming on. I'm glad we finally had a way to get this done. Sorry that Trinity couldn't make it. I know it was a close call there. Again, it's Artist Commons, WTBS 2026. Follow on the socials, sign up for email, get your application in order, you know, and thanks, man. I hope you enjoyed.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me. I love this show so much and love supporting you guys, so thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Right on. All right, well, that's it for this one, everyone. We'll be back again at some point with another episode, I'm sure. Hope you all enjoyed. Bye-bye.

Speaker B: We're waiting. Always set. We're waiting to be signed.