“I VOTED $SPAM”
Quote from CohentheWriter on 23. May 2022, 23:49Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/the-permanent-collection?collection=0x9b26616ee0cbd466e072e86a99b4bfa4a3489bf4&token=13&page=3
Source Link: https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x9b26616ee0cbd466e072e86a99b4bfa4a3489bf4/13
Date Minted: November 29, 2020
Artist Description: Incentivized Voting Reward for the $SPAM project’s first NFT/CRYPTOART Governance Vote. CryptoArtists who cast their votes by creating new works of art indicating whether they think a token mistakenly sent to spam.eth should be locked in the wallet or sent back to the user, will receive a share of $SPAM TOKENS and variants of “I VOTED $SPAM”
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
I’ll be honest, I don’t really understand how I Voted $SPAM and its 100 editions made it into the hands of collectors. Artist JayDelay tries explaining it, but perhaps I’m too dense: “Incentivized Voting Reward for the $SPAM project’s first NFT/CRYPTOART Governance Vote. CryptoArtists who cast their votes by creating new works of art indicating whether they think a token mistakenly sent to spam.eth should be locked in the wallet or sent back to the user, will receive a share of $SPAM TOKENS and variants of ‘I VOTED $SPAM’.” Leaving its origin aside, there’s plenty to analyze and admire here, from the glitch construction to the Sarah Zucker-reminiscent analog filter, to the explosive use of color. It should surprise nobody familiar with my writing, or with this space in general, that a piece literally covered in various word-art renderings of the word “Spam” seems to be about as emblematic of crypto art’s collective sensibility as possible. This is a work that clearly comes from the early days of crypto art. It’s a work that is as self-referential as it is deferential to the collected aesthetics of the space. It’s not subtle. It’s a mallet. It twitches, glitchy, in place. It probably deserves its place in the crypto art canon.
Because it just screams, loud and clear, that it is art of this moment, not even just in sensibility but in composition as well. I Voted $SPAM is an absolute mishmash of imagery. Dominated by vaporwave colors —the purples, oranges, greens, and yellows of 1980’s video arcades; makes me think of Miami Vice and Scarface sunsets— and given an analog filter so as to emphasize its relation to a past style of media construction, I Voted $SPAM features the word “SPAM” plastered on the image’s face no less than 25 times, but potentially more, what with the way one version of the word sometimes hide behinds others, hides behind abstract imagery, is physically stretched so extremely in a certain direction that it stops appearing to even be itself. One gets the sense that a relatively cohesive image has been splintered, almost appearing in places like a canvas itself was pierced, by the word “SPAM,” which erupts out like machine-gun bullets and physically punctures the surface onto which the image has been placed.
It seems that I Voted $SPAM was more like a POAP than a designated hi-falutin “artwork,” something doled out to those who interacted with the $SPAM ecosystem and thus emblazoned with the marker of its origin.
As I mentioned before, I Voted $SPAM is a fascinating amalgamation of various crypto art sensibilities, things which are settled in the canon now, from our vantage point in 2022, but which 2 and a half years ago were probably far less set. The glitchy style, for instance, and the very internet-era brand of abstract expressionism which it often suggests. Or the bombastic color scheme, bright and neo-futuristic and neon, reminiscent of the works of Jenisu or Vexx or even the great pop artist Takashi Murakami himself. The tongue-in-cheek harkening back to an earlier era. The Trash Art inspiration to create a piece that is both a marker of a very specific event/time and that can only be understood through the prism of that event/time as well.
Now seems like a good time to reveal that, if we weren’t already aware, that Jay Delay was one of the OG Trash Artists, a founder of the form, a gifted photomosh user and someone who might well be looked back at as one of the pioneers of crypto art’s sensibility itself, in terms of what this movement sought to do and what it was able to accomplish. Trash Art is, deliberately or not, a movement rooted in temporality; many Trash Art pieces are reactions to certain events or attitudes, and its progenitors —ROBNESS, Jay Delay, Max Osiris, Eric Rhodes— are highly-connected to each day’s trappings, either because of memes or because of prodigious social media usage.
I Voted $SPAM isn’t in the business of maligning anyone or anything. And it isn’t really a commentary. It’s a Trash Art aesthetic but removed from the Trash Art ethos, which is highly subjective and highly irreverent and more than a little bratty, certainly dissatisfied. I see Trash Art as the artistic representation of the two old codgers from The Muppets —Statler and Waldorf— sitting off to the side and sharing rude commentary about the world around them. I Voted $SPAM isn’t commentary. It certainly isn’t pejorative. It is visual language unmarried from origin point.
Which, alone, asks some interesting questions. Like can an art movement be encapsulated in visuals that lack its motivation? Can an artistic style then be stumbled upon by accident? Is, foe example, surrealism created in complete ignorance of capital-s Surrealism (and the surrealists themselves) really connected to the movement it seems to harken back to (not that that’s what’s happening here)? Trash Art is adept at asking questions it doesn’t seem to have been created to ask. Those issues of temporality I mentioned, for instance, arose from a collective retrospective on Trash Art as opposed to any one piece. And I Voted $SPAM is one with such accidental luminariness. It asks questions it doesn’t seem to have wanted to. It encapsulates an wide style, but doesn’t seem to have done so purposefully. Perhaps, in hindsight, Crypto Art will be dominated by these pieces of accidental greatness. The subconsciously-crafted pillars.
Source Link: https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x9b26616ee0cbd466e072e86a99b4bfa4a3489bf4/13
Date Minted: November 29, 2020
Artist Description: Incentivized Voting Reward for the $SPAM project’s first NFT/CRYPTOART Governance Vote. CryptoArtists who cast their votes by creating new works of art indicating whether they think a token mistakenly sent to spam.eth should be locked in the wallet or sent back to the user, will receive a share of $SPAM TOKENS and variants of “I VOTED $SPAM”
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
I’ll be honest, I don’t really understand how I Voted $SPAM and its 100 editions made it into the hands of collectors. Artist JayDelay tries explaining it, but perhaps I’m too dense: “Incentivized Voting Reward for the $SPAM project’s first NFT/CRYPTOART Governance Vote. CryptoArtists who cast their votes by creating new works of art indicating whether they think a token mistakenly sent to spam.eth should be locked in the wallet or sent back to the user, will receive a share of $SPAM TOKENS and variants of ‘I VOTED $SPAM’.” Leaving its origin aside, there’s plenty to analyze and admire here, from the glitch construction to the Sarah Zucker-reminiscent analog filter, to the explosive use of color. It should surprise nobody familiar with my writing, or with this space in general, that a piece literally covered in various word-art renderings of the word “Spam” seems to be about as emblematic of crypto art’s collective sensibility as possible. This is a work that clearly comes from the early days of crypto art. It’s a work that is as self-referential as it is deferential to the collected aesthetics of the space. It’s not subtle. It’s a mallet. It twitches, glitchy, in place. It probably deserves its place in the crypto art canon.
Because it just screams, loud and clear, that it is art of this moment, not even just in sensibility but in composition as well. I Voted $SPAM is an absolute mishmash of imagery. Dominated by vaporwave colors —the purples, oranges, greens, and yellows of 1980’s video arcades; makes me think of Miami Vice and Scarface sunsets— and given an analog filter so as to emphasize its relation to a past style of media construction, I Voted $SPAM features the word “SPAM” plastered on the image’s face no less than 25 times, but potentially more, what with the way one version of the word sometimes hide behinds others, hides behind abstract imagery, is physically stretched so extremely in a certain direction that it stops appearing to even be itself. One gets the sense that a relatively cohesive image has been splintered, almost appearing in places like a canvas itself was pierced, by the word “SPAM,” which erupts out like machine-gun bullets and physically punctures the surface onto which the image has been placed.
It seems that I Voted $SPAM was more like a POAP than a designated hi-falutin “artwork,” something doled out to those who interacted with the $SPAM ecosystem and thus emblazoned with the marker of its origin.
As I mentioned before, I Voted $SPAM is a fascinating amalgamation of various crypto art sensibilities, things which are settled in the canon now, from our vantage point in 2022, but which 2 and a half years ago were probably far less set. The glitchy style, for instance, and the very internet-era brand of abstract expressionism which it often suggests. Or the bombastic color scheme, bright and neo-futuristic and neon, reminiscent of the works of Jenisu or Vexx or even the great pop artist Takashi Murakami himself. The tongue-in-cheek harkening back to an earlier era. The Trash Art inspiration to create a piece that is both a marker of a very specific event/time and that can only be understood through the prism of that event/time as well.
Now seems like a good time to reveal that, if we weren’t already aware, that Jay Delay was one of the OG Trash Artists, a founder of the form, a gifted photomosh user and someone who might well be looked back at as one of the pioneers of crypto art’s sensibility itself, in terms of what this movement sought to do and what it was able to accomplish. Trash Art is, deliberately or not, a movement rooted in temporality; many Trash Art pieces are reactions to certain events or attitudes, and its progenitors —ROBNESS, Jay Delay, Max Osiris, Eric Rhodes— are highly-connected to each day’s trappings, either because of memes or because of prodigious social media usage.
I Voted $SPAM isn’t in the business of maligning anyone or anything. And it isn’t really a commentary. It’s a Trash Art aesthetic but removed from the Trash Art ethos, which is highly subjective and highly irreverent and more than a little bratty, certainly dissatisfied. I see Trash Art as the artistic representation of the two old codgers from The Muppets —Statler and Waldorf— sitting off to the side and sharing rude commentary about the world around them. I Voted $SPAM isn’t commentary. It certainly isn’t pejorative. It is visual language unmarried from origin point.
Which, alone, asks some interesting questions. Like can an art movement be encapsulated in visuals that lack its motivation? Can an artistic style then be stumbled upon by accident? Is, foe example, surrealism created in complete ignorance of capital-s Surrealism (and the surrealists themselves) really connected to the movement it seems to harken back to (not that that’s what’s happening here)? Trash Art is adept at asking questions it doesn’t seem to have been created to ask. Those issues of temporality I mentioned, for instance, arose from a collective retrospective on Trash Art as opposed to any one piece. And I Voted $SPAM is one with such accidental luminariness. It asks questions it doesn’t seem to have wanted to. It encapsulates an wide style, but doesn’t seem to have done so purposefully. Perhaps, in hindsight, Crypto Art will be dominated by these pieces of accidental greatness. The subconsciously-crafted pillars.