Will: 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 launch of a new kind of school, platform, coaching thing — he'll tell us all about it, but it's called Artist Commons. We're super excited to have him on. Haiver's a New York local — we've crossed paths at events many times over the years and just never found the right moment to do this interview until now.

Before we jump in: this is not a sponsored episode, but we do have a referral code for anyone interested in signing up for Artist Commons. Use the code WTBS2026 — it's a way to support the show, and I believe it gives us something like $75. So, you just heard him — that's Haiver. How's it going, man?

Haiver: Great. Thanks for having me on.

Will: We've been talking for almost three years about getting you on the show, and it was never quite the right time — for us or for you. But this is perfect. We were joking before we started recording that out of all our guests, you're probably the one most listeners have actually met face to face. But for anyone who doesn't know you, can you introduce yourself and tell us about your background in art and coding before we get into the specifics of what you've done in the NFT space?

Haiver: Through the jobs I've done in web3, I've gotten to travel a lot and meet a lot of the generative and AI artists in the space. My background is in lens-based art and media — I studied it in college. As a kid, I taught myself to code from a 500-page textbook on BASIC, not even Visual Basic. That's part of why I responded so strongly when I first encountered generative art: it was suddenly this visual thing translated from what I'd loved as a kid, and it brought two sides of my life together.

Will: And lens-based means photography, for us non-art-school kids?

Haiver: Photography and film. I studied filmmaking at Emerson College and worked in production for ten years here in New York. During that time I got involved with several art nonprofits in the city, did artist residencies at a place called the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, and had friends running art publications — so I was adjacent to the art world for a while. Then I started studying photography at the International Center of Photography, ICP, here in New York — an incredible school founded by the brother of Robert Capa, the photographer famous for those D-Day photographs. I took a lot of classes there, then founded my own fine-art photography studio, which I ran for a decade. Then I saw my first piece of generative art on Twitter, and everything changed.

Will: I always love hearing how people got into NFTs. So you came in through art — you weren't a blockchain, crypto, Bitcoin person at all?

Haiver: The closest I'd come was back in the 2010s — Kodak had sold their name rights, and some company made a Bitcoin miner and slapped the Kodak brand on it. I came across it on a photography blog I read, Paid a Pixel, and thought, "Maybe I should get that — that's money coming in every month." Except it cost $5,000 to buy the miner, we'd be paying the electricity, and I had no way of knowing how that would pan out. Big regrets on passing on that now. But that was as close as I got before 2021.

Then my friend Ryan Green — an independent video game developer who made the legendary, award-winning game That Dragon, Cancer — released a piece on Art Blocks in fall of '21 called Beauty and the Herding. I saw it and it stopped me in my tracks: a black background with a glowing orb, and what's essentially a flocking algorithm branching into little firework-like shapes that grow and evolve over about a minute. I saw several outputs pop up in my feed over the course of a month, and then the mint happened and I got to see the full breadth of the algorithm — I understood I was looking at artwork that lives in a parametric space, not a single output but something you visualize across the many. I thought, I need to change my life, I need to go in a different direction.

So I started teaching myself p5 the classic way everyone does — watching Coding Train videos from Dan Shiffman, a legendary teacher. Then November came and fx(hash) launched. I didn't find it on my own — everything comes through community, which is one of the things I love about web3. Ryan said, "Have you seen this piece?" It was one of Piter Pasma's earliest pieces, the second piece of generative art I ever consciously saw. I'm sure I'd seen pieces in museums and galleries before, but I hadn't put those words to it yet.

I started hanging around fx(hash) that November and December, but the moment that really got me was a piece from Estian, an artist I love and miss — he hasn't been active in the space the last two years, and I hope he's doing well. It was an Art Deco cityscape with airplanes and blimps flying overhead, and I thought, this is the piece I want, this is my moment.

I had to DM him because I was still figuring out how to get a wallet, how to fund it, how to deal with my bank not wanting to let me fund it — I had to go to my physical bank branch. It took about three weeks to get actual Tez into my wallet to buy this piece from Estian for something like 7 or 9 Tez, not very much. I was DMing him the whole time, like, "I think I'm going to miss the mint date, is there any way we could work something out?" He said, "I'll pick up a piece for you on secondary and hold it." Then when I finally had my Tez, I said, "I'll send you the Tez, you send me the piece — what's your address?" And he said, "I'm just going to gift this to you. Take the Tez you were going to send me and go buy three or four other pieces instead." That, I think, is the entry point most people need — browsing with a little Tez in your wallet, feeling that chase, that hope, the gambler's joy of watching the perfect piece reveal itself.

Will: You said you learned some p5 and even released a few fx(hash) projects. Was that part of getting familiar with the tech, and also — as an artist yourself — did you find something interesting there as you started building your own parametric art?

Haiver: Absolutely. All the artwork I'd made before this was extremely planned out. On a film shoot you might have anywhere from 10 to 120 people on set, and time is money, so you have to be as efficient as possible — a lot of the creativity happens in the pre-planning, the storyboarding, the rehearsal with actors. My photography was the same, staged narrative tableau. So when I got into coding with p5, I finally experienced what I imagine a lot of painters and sculptors feel — just you and the material, alone in the studio, not dependent on other people.

Because I'm a mediocre coder — or really, just a beginning one — early on I'd set out to make something, get partway there, make a mistake, and that mistake would lead me down the path to the piece I actually ended up making. My first three released pieces weren't the thing I set out to make. The fourth one finally was — my skills were growing.

I released three pieces on fx(hash). Fractured Time was one I was really proud of. Another was inspired by those old Saul Bass movie posters — that 1950s, '60s Hitchcock vibe. The last one I released was on Alba, called Lace Factory. I made it during Piter Pasma's project where you're given 30 prompts over 30 days. The prompt was to make something in ten minutes — I failed on that front, it took me twenty, but still fast. The idea was crystal clear, and the essence of the piece I ultimately released five months later on Alba came from that exact moment.

Will: Everyone listening — January 2026 is coming up. Not that far away now.

Haiver: Get your ideas ready.

Will: Let's talk about Alba, because I think that was probably the first time we talked about having you on — almost three years ago at this point. Hard to believe how long it's been.

Haiver: Yeah, two and a half years.

Will: Two and a half years. So you got into collecting generative art — Art Blocks, fx(hash), multi-chain. Clearly a passion for the space and for art in general. What brought you to building your own platform? It wasn't just you, right? We saw a lot of people launching their own open — well, I guess Alba was never meant to be open —

Haiver: Oh, it was. It was.

Will: It was! Okay, take it away — tell us about Alba, the idea behind it, and what it was like starting a generative art platform as the market was cooling across the board.

Haiver: Accurate. We started building at a time when there was no open platform on ETH for minting generative art. That had always been Erik Calderon — Snowfro, the founder of Art Blocks — whose original idea was an open platform, but success kicked off and the influx of work required a curation board. That left a gap in the market. And I think if you spend thousands of hours on anybody's tool or platform, you start wishing it did certain things a little differently, and you start envisioning features that don't exist yet. That's what Alba came out of — building the things I wished I'd had when I was browsing other platforms.

In between releasing my own generative art and starting Alba, I launched a publication called FX Gems — a love letter to fx(hash), which is where I really got my entry point into generative art. At this point they've released something like 32,000 or 33,000 projects. Up until about a year ago, I'd seen every single one of the first 30,000 — hours and hours every day, like you've probably experienced too. There's a real joy in that, and in hearing from artists directly. I started doing studio visits to get to know them, hear what their needs were, and see how we could fill some of those needs.

FX Gems got read by a lot of curators and artists, and it led to an opportunity to do some curation over at Verse — I worked with Aluan Wang on a curated release there. Then Alba came knocking, I paired up with my two co-founders, and it felt like a perfect fit.

Will: I remember — I think you had a Lisa Orth in the mix at some point, and strangerintheq, which I collected. And Whitekross — you definitely had a Whitekross piece.

Haiver: Love that piece.

Will: 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. You probably heard from a lot of people that they wanted an easier way to put stuff on Ethereum. We also know from the collector side that people are still talking about finding ways to bridge Tezos work to Ethereum, whatever their motives might be. So what happened that wound down Alba, and what did you do between then and now? I've been talking to you on and off for two 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 this has clearly been in your head for a while — what I assume is Artist Commons. Catch us up on post-Alba, and how you arrived at this new endeavor.

Haiver: The first summer was great. There were two or three other open platforms that launched around the same time — we weren't the only ones to see that gap in the market. If the money had stayed at that level, we would have been okay. But that fall it quickly dropped off — a noticeable shift almost overnight, right around Thanksgiving of '23. Over the next three group shows we released, there simply weren't enough mints coming in, and sentiment was way down. As a result, my co-founder stepped away to go found another company, about a year into the platform, and I stayed.

That's the untold story of Alba: my co-founder left. He's still the CEO on paperwork — it's still his company, he can do what he wants with it. The site is up and running; he still maintains the artwork and fixes things when they break. But the company he founded, called Eko, sold last month to Coinbase for about $400 million. I'm really excited for him — he's a brilliant tech guy. The crowning achievement of Alba, beyond the art we released, was the smart contracts he built, which were much more on-chain than a lot of the competition at the time. Art Blocks, in their most recent contract update, essentially admitted they weren't as on-chain as they needed to be, and emulated a lot of what we'd done with Alba.

I spent the year and a half after he left trying to replace him — trying to find a tech partner who could keep the platform going — and only gave up that hunt in June. For that whole time I wanted to get back to curating, but my hands felt tied because I didn't have anyone to support the tech. If I couldn't treat the artists' work well and confidently, I shouldn't be releasing it. I didn't realize how hard a sell that would be given market conditions — it's tough to get anyone who really knows their smart contract stuff to come in and support that.

That's what ended up happening with Alba. The whole time, I'd been noodling on what the next thing would look like. A year ago it had a very different form in my head — kind of like a book club for art, because I'm very interested in everyday people and their experience of art. I also spent that year taking art history classes at various schools here in New York, because I felt I needed to shore up my knowledge. I'd like to curate institutionally someday, and for that you need the actual credential. So I started down that path too. But Artist Commons snapped into relief earlier this year — once it did, it was crystal clear exactly what it should be and how it would serve artists. That was an exciting moment for me.

Will: Let me take a shot at explaining what I understand it to be, and you can fill in the gaps. Broadly, it sounds like an educational platform for artists to level up their careers, or turn art into a career if they haven't found that success yet. You're approaching it from a number of directions — one being some kind of market aspect, growing your brand, figuring out release strategies. Not just NFTs, either — this is for artists who release anywhere, so it could include understanding the economics behind galleries and things like that. There's also going to be critique and direct feedback, which we should definitely talk about, since that's an interesting wedge in a space where everyone is so positive all the time. And there's an education component with guest speakers. Am I on the right track?

Haiver: You are. It's kind of like a big art school — designed as a year-long program for artists to level up their practice. Over the last year and a half, going to Marfa for the Art Blocks Digital Art Week, to Berlin for the Generative Art Summit, to the closing city launches for Bright Moments in Paris and Venice, I kept asking artists what they needed right now. What I kept hearing was that they needed feedback on their work. Many of them never went to art school — a lot of artists in our space come from technology backgrounds, computer science, engineering. Generative art, digital art, and the blockchain movement have opened up the possibility for them to be artists in a way many never expected, but it's also left a knowledge gap they still need to fill.

Artist Commons is designed to fill that gap for artists who didn't get an MFA — but it's also for artists who did get an MFA and are missing the cohort-based mentorship of a small group of ten artists together, with someone focused on your long-term growth. In our space it's easy to get really invested in platforms and galleries, but since those galleries aren't signing long-term contracts with artists, they're invested in you through the release. They might check in every six months, but they're not knocking on doors for you. I think that's starting to change with new galleries like HEFT — I'm excited about what Adam is doing there — but by and large, artists don't have that person in their corner.

Artist Commons is a way to nurture your practice and get that mentorship and knowledge you might be missing. Even in MFA programs, you learn your craft — how to paint better, sculpt better, code better if you're studying with Zach Lieberman at MIT or Casey Reas in California — but you're not often learning the business side of art: how to interact with galleries, how to pursue open calls and residencies. So we're bringing in guest speakers from the gallery world, the museum world, the auction world, and visiting artists giving you the kind of talk you never really get on a Twitter Space in Web3. Spaces tend to function around a single release, whereas in an MFA an artist comes in, does a craft workshop, talks about their process, and presents the full arc of their career. Seeing their projects in order shows you a roadmap — this was where they showed, this was the open call that got their work seen by this person, which led to this opportunity, which led to meeting the collectors who sustained their career for years. That roadmap is very empowering, and it's one of the things I really miss in Web3 — getting that long-arc story.

Will: The thing I most identify with, and have heard discussed on the side a lot, is that issue of people who are coders or technologists first who came to art and discovered a passion for it. Those who stuck around — and there are plenty who haven't — tend to look back at their earliest work and want to push themselves into things that are more risky, more conceptual, less... it's going to sound bad, but I don't mean it that way... less derivative of things you can already see in a painting. Do you know what I mean? A lot of the earliest work we collected and still love is representative of art history now just being done in code. It's novel, fun to collect, you get all sorts of cool permutations — but I don't know that artists who've stuck around for four years are still so interested in making that. Do you know what I mean?

Haiver: William Mapan is still doing incredible paint-like drawings — the most recent ones he tweeted, that Layla was reposting, are breathtaking in scope. I think part of the difficulty is that we want affirmation as artists. Even the ones marching to their own drumbeat, who are going to go into their studio and create something incredible whether you like it or not — we still need at least one person to affirm we're headed in the right direction. That pushes us toward aesthetics people are responding to, and toward more purely digital-native aesthetics — the kind of work p1xelfool or Nicholas Sassoon does, or Kim Asendorf — natively digital aesthetics that embrace the pixel, that play with light and the experience of motion. There's a group of collectors who respond to that, and if you're happy and satisfied in that lane, you can persevere.

But there's a flip side: we have a real blind spot for art history in our space — both the pioneers who came before us, and simply the fact that when we're making conceptual work, we spend so much time talking about firsts, about what's new. "This person did something new." But so much has already been done before. If we could get a little more art history into our curriculum, into our knowledge bank, we could build on the shoulders of giants. Art history is the through line connecting what came before to what's happening now to what happens after — that's how art history gets written, in museum shows, in books about art. For our movement to be part of those history books and those exhibitions, we have to fit into that lineage, so a curator can draw connections to what comes before and after.

Will: It's the subtlety of reproduction — taking something you see and reproducing it in code, versus what a gallery or museum would call being "in conversation with." And by the way, when I said derivative, I'm holding up my William Mapan art card right now, from his most recent release — I'm not saying it to be critical. I just think there's an appetite for artists to do more. What you said is perfectly phrased: they have to learn this stuff so they can build with it and build on it, not just duplicate it as a coding exercise.

Haiver: Right.

Will: A lot of people 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 their work critiqued and given feedback. The feedback they're used to is the market, and the problem is the market has a lot of confounders in it. Did it not sell because ETH is down? Did it not sell because the Twitter algorithm changed? Did it not sell because people didn't like it? There are a lot of ways to explain away a lack of success with a piece, and very few artists directly reach out to collectors and ask, "Why didn't you go for this one? What didn't you like about it?" So this is a chance for artists to actually get their work critiqued and evaluated, pushed creatively, without taking a financial risk beyond the cost of the class. Once you release a project, it's done — it either sold or it didn't. Can you speak to what that critique experience is like, and how to be a good participant? Because if you've never received a critique, you've probably never really given one either, and I imagine that's a skill these artists might learn.

Haiver: Participating in a crit can be a very vulnerable thing, and I actually steer away from the word "crit" in the language on the artistcommons.art website. I talk about "feedback sessions" instead, because it's meant to be constructive and not intimidating — no matter your skill level, you're going to be nurtured. I describe it as generous feedback and rigorous craft: we want to talk deeply and in detail about the work, but also be generous with one another.

One of the things I love about doing feedback sessions is that not everyone is equipped to do them well. Going to a collector, like you described, 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's constructive, actionable, and meets you where you're at as an artist.

One of the best compliments I got in the last few years came during a studio visit with the artist Fahad Kareem, who released several well-received projects on Art Blocks and was a finalist for the Lumen Prize. We were doing a feedback session around one of his pieces, and he called me an "art whisperer" — said I should put that on my business card. I'm still flattered by that.

I taught college undergrads for seven years — lens-based art: film, photography, media — and that sharpened my ability to give feedback constructively, in volume, until it became a defined skill of mine. When I started curating in web3, I carried that skill in and got to serve hundreds of artists. I did hundreds of studio visits in the six months leading up to Alba, while prepping the release with Verse, and then over the two years I ran Alba on the artistic direction side.

One thing I've learned along the way: it's really important not to say "I think you should do this." The "I should" is language that has to get removed. I talk instead in terms of "perhaps this would work" or "perhaps you could try this" — it opens up a menu of possibilities the artist can choose from, based on what resonates.

There's also the compliment sandwich: say something nice, say the thing that's more critical, then close with something positive about the piece. That skill didn't come naturally to me at first. My assumption was that everyone could already see what was good about a piece, so I'd jump straight to "here's what I don't like, here's what could be better." It took me years to learn that people — myself included, as an artist — are insecure and need some kind of affirmation about what's working, because you don't have clarity of sight right after you've finished making something.

When I was studying at the International Center of Photography, we'd pin our photographs up on a board and each get five to ten minutes of feedback. So intimidating. But just the act of pinning them up, I'd suddenly see my images so much more clearly than I had during days of working on them in the studio. That shift of context alone changed my relationship to the work before anyone even said anything. Finding ways to displace how we're seeing our own work is really helpful.

For the sessions themselves, there are three goals. One is to help you sharpen your craft and your intention — how you're thinking about why you're making what you're making, as well as the technique you use.

Structurally, the program is a year long, broken into four ten-week quarters. Cohorts of ten, paired with a mentor, meet every week of those quarters. Lectures are spread out across the month in different formats, but there's always a lecture every week. For feedback itself, two artists go per week and get forty-five minutes apiece — real time to dig deep.

If I were an artist thinking about applying to Artist Commons, my first thought would be: that means I only get feedback on my own work every five weeks. Fair criticism. So we've set up a private community app where people can share their work and get text-based feedback throughout the week, whenever they've made a step forward or want to celebrate a win.

But the weeks you're not in the hot seat are just as rich, because you're learning to see artwork with more clarity and think about it more deeply. It's one thing to walk around a gallery or a fair and think "I like that" or "I don't like that." But you have to put it into language to actually know something — writers know this, you don't truly know something until you put it into words.

So talking about work with your cohort members generously sharpens your own ability to see your work and to speak about your art. That's another thing you take from these sessions: it helps you rehearse how to talk about your art, so the first time you're explaining it isn't when you're standing in front of a curator or collector, fumbling for words. This is a space to practice, so you're on point when it really matters — and it also helps you write your artist statement, because you already have language under your tongue to draw from. So there's a lot to get from feedback sessions beyond just "here's how your piece could be stronger."

Will: Right on. I've gotten really into collecting music again the last two years, and one of the things I love about hearing people talk about collecting records and reviewing them is the language they use — especially when they have music history, or actually played professionally. Hearing their takes, the words they use, how they understand things — for me, someone with no music history, it's really enriching, and I can integrate that into my own thinking about what I'm hearing. That sounds like a really awesome way for anyone to immerse themselves in being an artist.

I want to talk more about the market side, because this is Waiting to Be Signed. We've covered a lot already — lectures, feedback sessions, mentorship, history, reading and discussion. There's almost a school aspect to this. But the part I want to dig into is the business of art, which is what I got from your announcement — that's the thing MFAs don't really cover. You touched on helping people understand how galleries work, but can you talk more about what you intend to help people with there? A lot of artists on the NFT side have felt the struggle the last couple of years — 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 artists, for lack of a better term, graduate into the curated space — they're on Verse, they're in HEFT, they're in Nguyen Wahed, they're going to Art Basel, all these events. But that's a very difficult halo to get into. Is the goal to help people break in there? To help them find alternative ways to sell their work? What is "the business of art" in your mind, as something you're going to educate on here?

Haiver: We're going to have guest speakers coming every month. As you mentioned, we'll have an art history lecturer talking about various modern and contemporary movements, and people from the museum and gallery world talking about the business of art. Those are two core pillars, in addition to the feedback sessions. We'll also have a whole bunch of other activities we can talk about.

On the business side, take something as simple as pricing and editioning — a question that comes up all the time. At times I feel like we're reinventing the wheel in web3 when there are disciplines we could look to. Photography, for instance, is an editioned medium that has often struggled to get market share against painting and sculpture, which are one-off pieces. So what can we learn from those disciplines and the history of pricing and editioning over the last 50 years?

Another piece is how to deal with gallery contracts — who pays for the framing, who pays for shipping. This is stuff I absorbed from being around the art world, art nonprofits, and residencies, and I want to pass it on to members who apply and get accepted into the program. Take framing: I was shocked the first time I learned that the artist pays for framing, not the gallery. A gallery might pay for a marquee artist's framing because they're trying to entice someone who could go anywhere. But most of us, at the level we're working at, pay for our own framing. This was shocking to me because I was making large-format photographs that were very expensive to frame. The reason is simple: if you send work to a gallery and it doesn't sell, and the gallery paid for the framing, what are they going to do with it? They can't just send it back — the image belongs to you. But they paid for the framing, which means they hand you a bill: sorry, we failed to sell your work, now you're on the hook for it. That's a terrible position to be in as an artist, and a hard lesson to learn on your feet.

It's better to have a space where you can learn these nuances — how to handle contracts, how to deal with art advisors, whether to even go to auction. We've embraced auction houses in web3 because it feels like affirmation, like we're doing work that matters. But a lot of artists from the traditional art world, and a lot of gallerists and museum people, would tell you that's not necessarily the best move for your career, especially early on — having prices set so publicly and then getting stuck failing to exceed those expectations later.

Artist Commons is a tuition-based program, and one of the great things about that model is we're able to pay to bring in real experts to talk about these topics, so we're no longer just guessing.

Will: The auction thing is so interesting — we saw so much of it early in NFTs. An fx(hash) artist releases low, the secondary price gets really high, the work gets flipped, then they try to raise prices on the primary, and suddenly it doesn't sell out. Success can cripple you early on in a strange way. I'd never really thought about that applying to someone doing traditional painting or photography too — having one successful auction, and if you don't hit that mark again, people ask why that piece sold for less, or why it didn't sell at all, didn't meet the minimum.

And the framing thing, on the business side — it's not just about who keeps the piece, it's that framing being expensive means you have to calculate your margins. Once the gallery takes its cut, and you've paid for framing, what are you actually walking away with? And then you've got to pay taxes on top of that. That math gets complicated fast. Is there going to be a session on that — like, did you have this in school, learning how to write a check? Are you going to walk people through a little spreadsheet exercise so they know what they can actually, predictably make?

Haiver: That's a fantastic idea. Hunter College, where I've been taking art history classes, has a business-of-art minor that undergrads can take, including an accounting class — I think that's fantastic. I've got the first two quarters mapped out in terms of what the sessions will cover, but you've got my brain buzzing on this one.

Will: Right, like a tax person — okay, you paid for the framing, but can you write that off as a business expense? There's a lot of stuff people ask about after they've already hit the problem, not before. Here's another question, going back to something you mentioned in your introduction — you do aspire to curate again. Do you see Artist Commons as a feeder for that? In a year or two or three, could it also become a gallery, or a way for artists to release work? What's the vision beyond year one?

Haiver: Artist Commons is built around my favorite part of web3, which is community first and foremost. We'll be running many cohorts of ten at the same time, and they'll spill together into larger sessions — it's built to scale. I'll personally be mentoring the first six to eight cohorts, and after that I'll bring on additional mentors to work with artists. As we grow, we'll start doing more IRL events. In the meantime, we're planning quarterly meetups — going to museum shows, gallery hopping together. We'll have so much content and lecture material from the remote sessions that when we do get together, we just want to be together in person.

I have a dream for what it could become in a year or two to support more IRL events, and that may include showing members' work, but I don't know that it would turn into a gallery or a gallery brand. That said, in 2026, once Artist Commons is on its feet, I'm definitely going to get back to curating under my own gallery brand — I'm so excited for that. I've spent the last year and a half with my hands tied on curating, trying to figure out where and when to do it again, and at this point it makes the most sense to do it under my own power. I've been keeping my ear to the ground, watching work in progress come through the feed — I make lists on X, bookmark things, and I have an account where I literally DM myself images with notes like "check in with this artist in a few months." So I've been thinking about that for the broader space, but I don't think it'll be a fundamental part of why an artist signs up for Artist Commons. This is really about community, sharpening your practice, building your knowledge base so you're not making mistakes out in the world on your own — prepping for the moment your sails fill with wind and you're ready to go.

That said, we'll definitely be featuring artists' work from the community and celebrating wins. Two things that'll live in the private community app: a quarterly list of opportunities — open calls, residencies, grants to apply to — and workshops on how to apply and sharpen your submissions, because that's how we grow beyond the space we're already in.

Right now, success for artists means selling, because money in your pocket buys time and space to make more work, and I'm all for getting artists paid. But there are a lot of opportunities that may not pay much, or pay only a small stipend — not the same money as selling out a collection for $20,000, because traditional art-world spaces don't traffic in that kind of money until you reach the larger galleries. But they're the things that get your work in front of critics and writers at publications. Who doesn't want their work written about in a major art publication? It gets your work in front of gallerists and curators. You've planted seeds, and you don't know where they'll go a month or a year from now — they may have a show later and remember that piece that stood out to them. Curators are always looking for what's new, and there's a real crisis right now in contemporary art about where the field is going, what makes a piece matter. We're part of a movement that's vibrant and incredible, and when people see it, they respond. I show generative art on my phone to my mother-in-law and her friends at the holidays, and they get excited and ask how they can collect it — especially when I tell them I'm selling pieces for $60. Then I get sad, because I think about the hoops they'd have to jump through to actually buy it. But there's this vibrant movement that people respond to once they see it, and we simply have to give them other avenues to engage with it, and find ways to put it in front of them.

That means applying to traditional art-world spaces and getting comfortable sending out ten applications to get one yes back. I don't want to call the other nine "rejection," because it all comes down to who's on that particular review board at that particular moment — it has nothing to do with your work. Here's a story on that point: in 2022, during the Omicron wave, a lot of film festivals went online. Sundance was supposed to be in person that year but had to move online. I sat on the couch next to my wife, who's a film critic, and watched movies with her — she'd watch three, four, five a day, and I'd watch six or seven after she went to bed. I ended up seeing every movie that played at Sundance that year, all 80-some films plus the shorts. When the judges announced the awards at the end, it was liberating, because I disagreed so strongly with so many of their choices, and I trust my own taste — I've been engaging with film for a long time. Realizing how wrong the judges were on so many fronts taught me that awards are great, but they're not any kind of indictment of your practice. You can just let that go. The point is to send as many seeds out into the world as possible — some will take root, some won't, but you have to send a volume of them if you want the traction you're hoping for.

So those are some of the things I'm hoping we can equip members to do for themselves — to get their work in front of people who will respond to it. We just have to get it out there, out of our corner of the internet.

Will: So do you feel strongly— and this is a narrative we've heard since the very beginning — that artists making digital art, algorithmic art, AI art need to find pathways off of NFTs? We had our moment in 2021, it never really came back this cycle, and platforms are consolidating to the point where it's very challenging to make survivable money. How do you feel about the technology side of it? If someone makes parametric art and wants a 1,000-edition piece, how would you even do that in a traditional art setting? Would you have to do it the way HEFT does, putting the emphasis on the art and making the token secondary? What's your take on the last four years, given how close you've been to the market and how you've built a platform?

Haiver: Yeah.

Will: And you still have it. I'm sure if someone came along and said "I'll be the tech person," you'd hook it back up and try to get it going in parallel. So what do you think for artists who've become reliant on NFTs only? We always talked in this space about trad art eventually coming to us, putting their stuff on the blockchain. But instead we kept hearing about artists trying to get out of the blockchain and into the trad world, maybe still with NFTs attached. Those two things do feel like they're cohering a bit in New York with HEFT and Mimi's gallery. What's your take on it overall?

Haiver: I love this question. I take a lot of inspiration from other art disciplines for making sense of how to move through this space — music in particular. You see musicians turn into moguls with multiple revenue streams they're pursuing simultaneously, and I think visual artists could get a lot better at that: giving different types of people different ways to enter into their work. If I suddenly fall in love with Taylor Swift, I can stream her music, buy the record, buy merch, attend a live event, join a fan community — there are multiple ways to enter into her ecosystem. For visual artists in our space, it tends to be "come mint on this day at this hour and be there right at the opening gun." That's not enough. We live in an attention economy competing with so many other types of content and media, so we have to design multiple entry points for our careers: selling prints on your website and marketing that through Instagram, doing a joint release with a gallery of a 1,000-edition generative piece while recognizing it's not about the mint-out day but about showing up and selling that work over time.

If a gallery does on-demand prints right there in the space — I've talked to a couple of gallerists in New York about doing this with generative art — I think that's a fantastic idea. Someone off the street walks in, pushes a button a few times, goes "oh, that's the one I love," and gets their piece right there in that moment at a very competitive, affordable price point.

Will: Yeah.

Haiver: That's one of the joys of large edition sizes — it makes art affordable and accessible to people who've felt excluded by the gallery world for so long. And obviously, if you have a physical space, you need large works on the walls to keep the lights on, pay the rent, pay your staff. Running a gallery is incredibly expensive, and I've gotten so much more comfortable over the last few years with the 50% cut galleries take — they're taking a real risk on you.

One of the things I learned curating with Alba is that you have a limited number of artists whose name you can hold in your head at any one moment. Committing to an artist isn't just about physical space — it's my cultural capital spent whispering to collectors, my social time with them spent on your name rather than someone else's. If that's my livelihood, I'm giving up other revenue to try to make revenue for you. So the work happens constantly, at all strange hours. That's why I go to so many events — to build relationships with collectors as well as artists I love. All I want to do at events is stand in a corner and talk with the artist, but to actually serve them, I have to break away and go have all the other conversations that nurture their practice and help them flourish.

Will: I love the idea of walking into a gallery and getting a 1-of-1 print for $50 or $100 — something simple, like picking from five options, or pressing a couple buttons to choose a palette and one other variable, and that's your random piece. A lot of people who walk into the moneyed older galleries — not HEFT, since it's so new — know the reputation: you couldn't buy something off the wall if you wanted to. You could walk in with $50K or $100K cash and they probably still wouldn't sell it to you, because they don't know you, you have no reputation, you bring no value to them as an unknown collector.

Haiver: Mm-hmm.

Will: But at this smaller level, we have the opportunity to create experiences where someone can walk into a gallery and actually leave with a piece of art. It becomes Instagrammable, it can go viral — for the gallery to post, or for the collector to post individually: "here's my piece getting printed, I just got this, and you can get this too." There's so much low-hanging fruit there, minus the cost of getting the printer set up.

Haiver: Mm-hmm.

Will: But that's just a technical hurdle. I'd love to see that.

Haiver: The cost of printing is about a dollar per square foot. For a small 8x10 or a 4x4 square print, production and materials are very cheap if you're not selling framed prints. The other thing I really want artists to embrace — and you and I both came up on open generative art platforms in this moment — is that 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 we did for those early group shows — we weren't chasing marquee names, we wanted artists who'd experienced other tech on other platforms to come see what we'd built on the backend, things collectors never experience because they're not logging in as an artist and trying it out.

I think the hope for those artists, at some point, was: this is like YouTube, I put up my work and it will be found, the algorithm will surface it, it'll spread on social media, maybe I'll go viral. That's how we treated open platforms for a long time. But the model, at least with the web3-oriented galleries and platforms at this point, has moved in a much more curated direction — because you need to know your collectors, know who you're selling to, have relationships with them. The idea that you can simply throw something up and hope it sells still happens, and I think it's important for artists to give that a swing, but it's much better to have someone in your corner whispering about your work to a collector.

For the money to have left the space the way it did — that was the wrong money to begin with, and I think that gets overlooked. The money that was here was based on pure speculation, treating art as a financial derivative you take a risky bet on and then strike it big. When I went to Marfa for the third time back in October, for Art Blocks' digital art week there — I call it that because so many other galleries and art companies are showing there now too, lots of pop-up events — it feels like a broader community has rallied around this very inconvenient but magical place to get to. You see 500, 600 people who are true believers. We found a collector base that didn't exist five years ago, and they've coalesced into a powerful group of people who are accessible, friendly, and love the weirdest art. The artists are accessible too — you can DM them. That's how I got my first piece on fx(hash), DMing an artist and starting a relationship 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 a big chapter in the history books someday.

My big fear right now isn't the success of this movement for us today — it's how we get written about 50 or 100 years from now. AI art has kind of overshadowed algorithmic generative art, the code-based work we love, and that's clearly going to be the big chapter when people talk about this first quarter of the century. But will Art Blocks, fx(hash), and Verse be a sidebar, or can we make sure the art they've championed stays a core chapter of this moment? I think we're at a real critical juncture for making sure that happens.

Will: The open platform question is a huge discussion right now because of fx(hash) and what they're doing with the $art coins. In some ways, hearing about Artist Commons, I think they're trying to solve the issue from a totally different direction. They saw artists come onto an open platform, build an audience, build collection value through secondary sales, and then find success over on Art Blocks and later Verse. A lot of those artists traveling the world at some point had an fx(hash) release. For whatever reason we haven't had that next wave of new artists come in, but there were a lot of artists a couple years ago who could have really used that kind of coaching and mentorship, if Artist Commons had been around then.

Haiver: I'll add that this was one of the goals for Alba. I spent three years on fx(hash) looking at work, seeing 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. Those were the artists I wanted to pursue for Alba — I wanted to platform them in a way that put them on the same level, because they'd leveled up their practice over those three years that we'd gotten to know them.

Will: Yeah.

Haiver: They weren't ready for the major leagues at the beginning, but they definitely felt ready in the last six months to a year. That shaped how I designed the programming there and who we brought in, and I keep looking for who those artists are now. The difficulty is persuading a collector to put them into their memory bank of who to collect. There's a limited number of slots in anyone's brain for how many names they can hold on to, and they're pretty full at this point — you have to clear a pretty high bar to bump some memory slot out and think, "oh, I should add that person to my mental list."

Will: If I wasn't making this podcast, there's no way I'd remember a tenth of what I can recall — and only because I sit every week, take notes, read Discord, browse the collections, build the run of show. That's way more dedication than the average collector puts in, so it's not surprising at all that people just become forgotten.

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

Will: Don't worry, I'm backing up the podcast offline. 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 still isn't there to make it that much easier, unfortunately. Maybe in a couple years it'll be simple.

Just to circle back on fx(hash) and $art coins: you don't think that's really an open platform, or you just don't feel it's the wisest place for someone like... Actually, an artist I've been throwing out in Discord as someone I'd love to see come back and do an art coin is Landlines.

Back in the day, Landlines was so prolific — not just because he had ten projects ready to go on day one, but because he was so into the practice of churning out a project every ten weeks or so. He released really frequently for a long time. And he was a very experimental artist — there was a series where it was lettered.

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

Will: That wasn't Landlines. That was Ippsketch.

Haiver: Oh, Ippsketch.

Will: Of course. But Landlines did do one where you'd mint one, evolve the code, then mint another. He did a bunch of on-chain stuff, and he did the original art cards project, back before fx(hash) even opened, where you could collect traits and combine them to mint something. So yes, he had experimentation in mind a lot, but for whatever reason he never got curated.

And maybe could have really used mentorship to level up his art thinking, to get to those next levels. He's not here now, but could be well served by an art coin — if you could get your 1,000-true-fans thing going. You don't need a gallery; in theory, you can just keep releasing work on an open platform and build. That feels like the intention of art coins — to give that next decile of artists a way to earn.

You're approaching it more from a "let's actually slow down, educate, get hyper-focused" angle. And then together, tackle the problem of how to turn this into a career without relying on the ups and downs of the crypto market.

Haiver: Expanding your collector base is what most artists need to be doing on some level, and art coins are a really creative solution to the problem of not enough collectors — that's what every platform in this space has run into, and this is a swing at solving it.

If I were to critique platforms overall over the last four or five years, I'm disappointed in their efforts to onboard new types of collectors. At the same time, the community we've built, the collectors I see at Marfa or at Bright Moments events when those were running — those true believers did not exist five years ago. They created an entirely new set of collectors, and the art world would be envious of that on some level.

I think the difficulty is that we in Web3 built something kind of like a Segway. It looks cool to a handful of people, but it doesn't quite solve a particular need for them. We saturated our early adopter market and never crossed over into the mainstream. I'm worried that working in crypto and releasing art in this space is like a Segway — it looks cool to the people on the inside, and the people on the outside think it's kind of dumb to be a part of. The difficulty is bridging that chasm. That's always a startup's problem: how to bridge the chasm between early adopters and the mainstream. You actually have to build a different type of product to appeal to the mainstream — what attracts early adopters isn't what attracts a mainstream audience.

Art coins double down on the audience that's already in crypto, which may or may not be the right decision. I'm excited to see what new types of minting, and types of art beyond generative, they empower. But it's still an admission that we didn't do well onboarding new users who wanted to collect. Some of that might simply be that we went to a lot of ETH events and Tezos events and spoke to people already on our side of the fence, and never figured out how to reach the events outside. Tezos did a booth at Art Basel years ago — but how were they following up with those collectors? What were the calls to action? Were they building email lists to follow up later? That's what open platforms don't do — they want to be a platform, not a gallerist.

The model that's started to succeed is what we've seen with Mimi's gallery, Adam's gallery HEFT, and even SuperRare at this point with several curators. Each of these galleries puts together a PDF — here are the pieces, like a very nice booklet — so you get to see the work before release day. They're courting collectors ahead of the day 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've simply identified who's most likely to buy and reached out personally, making the case for why this art would be good for their collection, why this artist matters. Those are the relationships I want to foster if I get back to gallery work. I've been building my list, so I feel ready.

Will: The most recent thing I've bought is a Jeres piece that HEFT was showing. Adam DM'd me — he said, "I know you've been a fan of Jeres for a long time." We talked about Jeres way back in 2021 or 2022 on the show. He sent me the PDF and asked if there was one I wanted, and I bought it just because of that personal relationship.

I think some crypto people would bristle at that — it feels anti-crypto to have this insider thing, like, "oh, I got an early pick." But that's kind of where the business is now. It would've felt unimaginable four years ago that you'd be soliciting individual pieces to a preferred collector. But now that's how you sell out a show.

Haiver: Part of this is that momentum builds momentum. It's not about being exclusionary by reaching out to collectors who are faithful in this space and support the artists we care about — it's much more convincing to someone who comes across the project to see it's already half sold by the time it opens. I don't love when a show sells out entirely on the first day — that's kind of a bummer, though fantastic for the gallery. If you're committed to the type of art these galleries show, you reach out to the gallerists, get on those lists, and see the PDF pre-show.

But yeah, if I land on a page and it's already 50% sold, I'm much more inclined to buy right now. You and I both had the experience on fx(hash) of flipping through daily releases and seeing a piece that had only minted two or three editions and just wasn't moving — you're much less inclined to collect that piece in that moment.

Will: If it has no anticipation, no buildup, if it's not an instant three-block mint-out, it's almost treated like a failure. Which is so weird, because that's not how art normally works — it shouldn't be about that burst of minutes, it should be more of a slow burn. That's Adam doing his job, too — that's what a gallerist is supposed to do. Knowing Adam for a long time, he knows Will will probably get a Jeres piece. That's the gallerist's function in this sense.

Haiver: He sees you clearly. For artists who don't have a gallerist yet, that person in their corner — you have all this incredible data in Web3 to build your own collector list. Who are the people who've collected the most pieces? Have you DM'd them? Given them a nudge? Checked in on how they're doing, what they're excited about? It's an authentic relationship, 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 the pieces they've listed, being engaged in the conversations around what they're interested in, so you don't feel like an extractive person to the collector.

It's easy for everyone in this space — collector, artist, gallerist — to engage in extractive behavior by accident, just because we're all busy and there's limited time for any of these tasks. But I really admire the artist Brian Brinkman, who I know mostly as an animator and illustrator. He released some really well-received projects on Art Blocks, like NimBuds, this cartoony cloud piece that I adore. Brian is an incredible marketer — he said recently in a Space that he divides his time a third to making the art, a third to planning the marketing, and a third to actually executing on that and doing collector outreach. That's why he's extremely successful.

Will: A lot of the reason I collect, or have stayed collecting, is personal connection and meeting people. A lot of artists — even ones I haven't had on the show but know from DMs and Discord — there's a part of my collector psychographic that wants to support my friends. This whole space is so community-driven, and when I feel these artists are my friends, I'm much more likely to collect, even if it's not my favorite piece, just to be one of the dominoes helping it get to 50% sold so it can complete. It's satisfying to me, and it's just something I like to do.

Haiver, we've gone for a while now — I have one rapid-fire question for you. Is there anything you feel like we didn't cover that you want to talk about with Artist Commons?

Haiver: The ways to get involved with Artist Commons right now: check out the website, artistcommons.art. We're on six different social media platforms as @artist_commons, so follow us there. There's an email subscription list on the website — sign up there for additional info about program details and when new cohorts are launching. We're going to onboard new members two to four times a year, depending on how this first round goes — at most once per quarter, so it won't be that often. We really want to spend most of our time focusing on the artists in the program rather than out here marketing it and spreading the word. The hope is that artists who sign up quickly realize how much material they're getting. We're doing discussion groups, reading groups, portfolio reviews, website reviews. If you haven't built your artist website—curators are looking for art to champion, art to get excited about, and it's hard to scroll X or Instagram and get an overview of an artist's growth, body of work, and what they're about, especially if you're mostly just retweeting other people. It's great that you're championing artists you care about and your friends, please keep doing that, but there need to be links I can click, or repositories of a body of images.

So we're doing website reviews, close-looking exercises—which is big in museum education, learning how to see art more clearly—and writing clinics to help you develop your voice as a writer and how you talk about your work. That's really important once you start getting outside Web3. I remember some fx(hash) projects where the artwork description is just a sentence at best, or a bunch of emojis. If we want to expand our collector base and be part of the narrative of contemporary art right now, we have to be able to write artist statements. It's just being a good host: someone walks up to your art, they don't know what you're about, and you're welcoming them into your practice, giving them a couple handholds so they can make sense of what they're seeing more quickly—which lets them go deeper on their own. So we'll do writing clinics. And like I said, the opportunity list is going to be a big part of this too.

Sign up for the email list, check out the website, follow us @artist_commons. Applications open next week and stay open for eight weeks. It's a couple pages, not very long. Curators, myself and my partner Laura, who's the program administrator, are rooting for you in your application. 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.

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

Haiver: The program is tuition-based—next year it'll be $2,400 for the year, which is 40 weeks of material for less than the cost of one college class. This year we're doing a founding membership of $1,850; we put that as low as we can go. So the referral code isn't a discount this year, though it will be in future years—but it does support Waiting to Be Signed. We're also going to try to put members who sign up with those referral codes into cohorts together, since they're aligned with the mission of Waiting to Be Signed, and keep Will and Trinity up to date on how those cohorts are doing.

Will: Wow, I didn't know about that part. Just know if you sign up with our code, we're going to see what you're doing—Santa's watching. Haiver, that's all amazing. I love the writing stuff too, glad you mentioned that at the end, because it's super relevant to NFTs. Back when we were making this show more regularly, it was so hard sometimes to scrape together any information about a release. I'm still almost offended at how little gets written, even on a curated platform, about releases they've put a lot of time behind—two paragraphs, and most of it's no information. So yes, super important stuff. I want to hit you with a rapid fire before we go, since you mentioned movies and Sundance.

Haiver: Please.

Will: Did you or your wife go to Sundance this year? There's a movie I don't think is going to get wide distribution—I'm curious if either of you saw it—called Nirvana: The Band, The Show, The Movie.

Haiver: I'm part of Alamo's MoviePass plan, so I get their emails, and it came into my feed.

Will: Are they going to show it there?

Haiver: They are, yeah.

Will: Oh my gosh, okay. I don't know if you're familiar with that creator—I'm not, really.

Haiver: Tell me, please.

Will: I actually haven't seen nearly enough of his stuff—it's on my list to dig into more. The thing you might know him best for is he did the BlackBerry movie.

Haiver: Oh yeah, yeah.

Will: From a couple years ago. But before that he'd made a couple movies. Matt Johnson and Jay McCarroll are the two co-writers and actors in a lot of it. They're Canadian, and a lot of what they do is funded by the Canadian government—very small funding—and they take advantage of legal rights in Canada that are a lot more lenient about what you can do in public, filming without needing releases from people and so on. So they do a lot of guerrilla filmmaking. They have a show called Nirvana: The Band: The Show, where the whole conceit is that there are two people in a band called Nirvana, but it's spelled with three N's instead of two, and they're trying to get booked. Every episode is basically a scheme for them to get booked at a local bar. A lot of it's improvised—he's a very interesting filmmaker. He also made a film called The Dirties that was—

Haiver: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Will: —very polarizing, because it was about a school shooting. But apparently the things they do in this new movie are really wild. The reaction coming out of Sundance was that because a lot of it was made in America, it might actually be illegal to release. But I guess they found a way around it. His whole thing is skirting the law.

Haiver: There's a good model for that kind of film—the Borat movies. You don't have a right of image in the US the way you do in, say, the EU. Making an image of somebody in public, like a documentary or a mockumentary, falls under the First Amendment. Making an image of someone is like whispering to my friend my opinion about them—what I choose to include in the frame, what moments I pick to include. 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 going to go the distance.

Will: Did you like them?

Haiver: I did, tremendously. They filmed One Battle After Another in VistaVision, a film format that hadn't been around since the 1950s. 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. This was important in the 1950s because television was on the rise, and cinema was trying to figure out how to differentiate itself to justify why you'd go to a theater. I think that's instructive: even 75 years ago, they were worried about the shrinking of their market, so they turned it into an event. Nothing's changed in that way in 75 years.

It's helpful for a digital artist to realize we're part of an ecosystem of fine art that's affected by macroeconomic conditions too, because people generally buy art out of their expendable income. The situation we're in right now trying to sell art in crypto isn't that different from the struggles in the broader traditional art world—a lot of galleries have closed this year. If we listen to all the doom and the naysayers, that gloom might just be the same gloom that was being said 20, 50, 75 years ago. Just like with this movie format, trying to find ways to differentiate yourself—I think that's one of the biggest things an artist can do: figure out what your differentiator is, what you're saying that's unique to your voice and your experiences, and how you can connect that with collectors in an emotional way that resonates with them.

Will: Right on. That's the perfect way to end it, honestly. Haiver, thanks so much for coming on—I'm glad we finally got this done. Sorry Trinity couldn't make it, I know it was a close call. Again, it's Artist Commons, code WTBS2026. Follow on the socials, sign up for the email, get your application in order. Thanks, man—hope you enjoyed it.

Haiver: Thanks for having me. I love this show so much and love supporting you guys.

Will: Right on. 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.

Haiver: Always. We're waiting to be signed.