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Death Retro Journey

Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/the-permanent-collection?collection=0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a461d2430&token=81853&page=4

Source Link: https://rarible.com/token/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a461d2430:81853?tab=overview

Date Minted:  November 20, 2020

Artist Description: Pepe Amazing now escapes death, on his own highway

CohentheWriter’s Commentary:

It was ROBNESS —random— who introduced me to the concept of Vaporwave. Before he told me all about the term and its history, I could probably recognize the movement’s vague outline —the purple-and-blue-dominated color scheme, the heavy-handed allusions to 80’s culture, the stylized words and Tron-inspired polygons/grids— but saw it at a kind of cultural quirk more than an entire artistic movement in its own right. But then I was educated. And the broad stroke of that education included the assertion that Vaporwave, a movement which drew its power from the constant remixing and evolution of its cultural iconography, was a pure and distilled exemplar of meme culture. Of course, that would make it a perfect arena for crypto art —an equally internet-centric art form— to explore. And crypto art has! But nowhere more than in the niche circle where crypto art culture and aesthetics first emerged, that of the RarePepes. Still spoken of with hushed reverence, the ridiculous and meme-obsessed and hyper-hairtrigger RarePepe world spawned some of crypto art’s most vaunted artists, its generally punkish spirit, and some of its most well-known art. Rare Designer, the artist of Death Retro Journey, has been creating RarePepe artwork since 2017, and has an oeuvre stuffed with various renditions of crypto art’s favorite green frog. Death Retro Journey is an homage not just to Pepe, but to Vaporwave as well, marrying two of crypto art’s greatest original influences in one hot-rod riding, pink-skeleton pulsing, sunsetting, title-card flashing, purple and blue paradise of an artwork. You’d be excused for missing the Pepe himself tucked into the very center of the piece, but then again, you’d be excused for missing the greater context of the piece itself. Death Retro Journey is an homage to crypto art’s origin, yes, but it’s more than that. Minted in November of 2020, it was a prediction of where crypto art was headed; and how Pepe himself would always remain, hip as ever, at its forefront. 

Which we see even today, with perhaps the last prominent example being Matt Kane’s recent release of his Notkamoto Rare Pepe card. It’s seen as a badge of honor, in many circles, to have been creating crypto art using the RarePepe imagery and in RarePepe circles. The beauty of the thing is that it’s an eternal wellspring, with all forthcoming artwork further bolstering the lore and reach of the movement itself. 

But now onto Death Retro Journey, and the way it prays at the altar of all these meme movements. In it, a great glowing synthesizer of a highway —blue but matrixed over with pink lines— emerges out of the image’s 4th wall, the lines criss-crossing it moving away from us as if the highway itself is being traversed. And what traverses it? A pink hotrod (A Cadillac perhaps?) driving forever forward, two of its lights yellow and two others blue, driven by a RarePepe, this one drawn into the mold of a Road Warrior type character, spiky hair and oversized sunglasses. Flashing in front of the car every second or so, the name of the piece itself, heavily stylized in red and pink: Death Retro Journey. Behind the car, the highway falls backward, turns up and is consumed by half of a purple skull, a bit of blue sludge on its nose, cracks in its cranium, and a pair of goggles spanning its face. Underneath all this, a shimmering ocean bedecked in sunset hues: sienna, pink, and magenta, with the enormous setting sun which spawned these colors melting into the background. Blocky, polygonal crags of blue and black ripple outwards to the left and right edges of the frame. And above everything, the sky darkens until it’s a total and all-encompassing black.

Vaporwave always struck me as so cool because it artificially and defiantly kept aspects of a dead culture alive. Video arcade culture. Synthesizer culture. Hair metal culture. Things enshrined in the pop culture objects of the 80’s, that became fodder for the childhood imaginations of they who would grow into artists, who would want that childhood forever recorded. And besides that, it’s fun! Only the broad strokes are sacred. Only the spirit of the thing must be preserved. All else is purposefully subject to change.

That same attitude lives in the soul of the RarePepe community, and as such, lives in the soul of the crypto art community as well.  Not necessarily in its strict adherence to the past, but its devotion to the principles that those in the past sought to build upon, for better and for worse. I remember being at NFTNYC a few months ago, where the RarePepe Gallery there was spoken of as a refuge for unpretentious and nonhierarchical art. The free spirit of creation, that’s the rub. And the Pepe community, in concert with the Vaporwave community, have built entire ecosystems and belief systems around that spirit. It practically steams of the surface of Death Retro Journey: the devil-may-care composition, the luscious colors, the objectively ridiculous imagery, and —all wrapped up in that— the way it reaches out and connects so many disparate artists/minds/collectors/innovators, transporting them not just to a time or a place, but to a headspace. More than that, towards an ideal. A forever-rolling highway, never before traversed but always eminently familiar. 

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