Cryptoart, History & Perspective

Perspective matters. A lot.

On the internet though, there is zero native perspective. Perspective here is emergent, and is only added later, by those who use it.

Anyone who has taken part in the emergence of cryptoart over the past 5 or so some odd years on the internet has for sure felt the bubbling kinetic energy that’s powered a tidal wave of artists creating new art works that’ve landed in the collections of collectors all over the world.

We’ve all felt it. Maybe we’ve been lucky enough to see fragments of this growing thing we call cryptoart here and there at conferences or different irl & url meetups.

For me, personally, it wasn’t until last year that the full, beautiful scope of cryptoart – the growing number of exciting and important and impactful yet unique and divergently different artists – and what it was growing into came into sharp relief when the Argentinian artist Panter Xhita released the first wave of A HISTORY OF CRYPTOART on Nifty Gateway featuring the portraits of 90 unique artists arranged in a style inspired by Mexican muralism.

Artists are seers, after all, so it’s quite poetic that an artist and their work helped us finally see what we’ve all felt.

Visual perspective isn’t the only thing that artists help provide though; often times an artists living, breathing experience provides much needed contextual perspective.

A HISTORY OF CRYPTOART was made for the screen on a screen by an artist located literally at the bottom of the world that was collected and talked about by hundreds of folks who reside on every continent save for Antarctica.

That is the perspective of cryptoart. And it doesn’t stop at this work.

The cryptoart space is dynamic, and despite the best efforts of the bear market, we’ve continued to grow. Many more artists, collectors, and builders have appended themselves to the blockchain that is recording the history of cryptoart in the interim.

What started with a few wayward pioneers who started minting work using tools originally created to breed digital cats, grew into a small village of interconnected artists-collectors-builders captured in A HISTORY OF CRYPTOART (2022), and today the cryptoart space feels like a mini-metropolis set atop a digital pangea, ready to split off into its own uniquely divergent directions.

But we’re still all here together. For today at least.

Before this moment passes, Panter has again captured the Perspective of this very special, particular moment in time in her new collection A HISTORY OF CRYPTOART – SECOND WAVE featuring the portraits of 110 artists (and some easter egg signs of important projects and builders) who are all a part of the history of cryptoart.