Came for the Money, Stayed for the Art
Kate Vass in conversation with the art collector, aka chrisroc.
You Are Here: Decentralization, Agency, and the Politics of Participation
On the cover: 0xfff, You Are Here, 2024
★attention economy: Beeple’s Regular Animals — Who’s a Good Dog? Whoever Gets the Most Attention.
A deep dive into how attention—not art—creates value in Web3. Featuring a case study on Beeple’s Regular Animals and the psychology behind engineered virality.
236.4 Million Reasons to Worry
Kate Vass examines Gustav Klimt’s record-breaking $236.4 million sale at Sotheby’s, arguing that such events signal market anxiety rather than confidence. The essay contrasts the traditional art world’s obsession with rarity and spectacle with Web3’s original promise of transparency, shared authorship, and cultural preservation.
The Future Has No Walls
The Future Has No Walls explores how Art Basel Miami’s new Zero10 “digital-first studio” marks a symbolic shift in the art world, challenging long-standing gatekeeping systems while revealing deep contradictions in how institutions approach digital culture. Borrowing its name from Malevich’s radical 1915 exhibition 0,10, the initiative claims innovation but risks reducing Web3 to a marketing gesture inside the very walls it was built to dismantle.
This article examines how major art fairs — Art Basel, Paris Photo, and others — increasingly display digital and blockchain-native art, yet still segregate it into “digital corners” and “new sectors” that strip context and flatten networks into objects. While the art market faces ethical and geopolitical scrutiny, including the recent Hauser & Wirth sanctions case, traditional power structures continue to rebrand themselves in Web3 language, selling old hierarchies under a decentralized banner.
The piece argues that Web3 was never designed to fit into legacy formats. It is a system of continuous provenance, transparent authorship, on-chain memory, and community-driven value. True innovation cannot be contained by the economic architecture of art fairs. Instead, the future of digital culture depends on building decentralized frameworks that preserve meaning, expand participation, and resist the return of taste-making gatekeepers.
When the protocol becomes the curator, the exhibition becomes continuous.
