Outland

Commentary by Claudia Hart June 28, 2024 On January 10, 2024, the US securities regulator approved the first US-listed exchange traded funds (ETFs) to track bitcoin. The next day, 4.6 billion USD worth of ETFs were exchanged—a watershed moment for the cryptocurrency industry. I viewed these enactments as a kind of ritual performance, endowing Bitcoin with the aura already inherited by the US dollar when the gold standard was broken in 1971.

Collections by Outland June 26, 2024 The founding mission of Morrow, a collective based in the UAE, was to improve the level of curation in the crypto art space. Over the past three years they have explored various approaches to this task, making the case that there isn’t one way to do things in web3. Initially they worked with gallery partners but later they branched out into direct collaborations with artists.

Commentary by Alexander Iadarola June 20, 2024 Where did NFTs come from? If you return to Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2009 Bitcoin whitepaper, you will notice that it doesn’t include the word “art.” While Nakamoto specifically proposes a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash,” the text addresses itself to a wider conceptual scope.

Commentary by Kevin Buist June 17, 2024 We can think of the blockchain primarily as a kind of clock. Bitcoin and other blockchains are stores of value, but they cannot store value without first delineating and recording time. As the original 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper explains, the basis for a decentralized digital currency relies on an accurate and indisputable record of the order of transactions. This ever-growing chain of records functions as a replacement for the authority of a bank or government.

Commentary by Brian Droitcour June 16, 2024 “Technology: Expanding or Erasing the Art World?” This was the title of a talk on the program of Art Basel Conversations at the fair’s current edition. Critic Ben Davis and artist Cecile B.

Conversations by Outland June 12, 2024 Rare Pepes was a community of meme-makers who traded their art on the Bitcoin-based protocol Counterparty (XCP) from 2016 to 2018. As Blake Finucane writes in a recent essay for Outland, they established many of the standards and values of the NFT ecosystem.

Criticism by Blake Finucane June 6, 2024 To truly appreciate crypto art, you have to embrace certain assumptions. One is that rarity is of the utmost importance. Another is that memes exert a huge influence on aesthetics. Rare Pepes marked a watershed moment in the formation of these norms.

Conversations by Outland June 4, 2024 What kind of critical language can be used for understanding crypto markets? What are the ideological foundations of these technologies and communities? Do the critiques developed by theorists to address dominant institutions apply to phenomena developing at the margins? These are some of the questions that the writers and thinkers Wassim Z.

News by Brian Droitcour May 22, 2024 The Ordinals protocol is a work of art. It can be used to inscribe works of art onto the Bitcoin blockchain, putting the data of media files directly into the code of a block. This functionality partly masks its nature—it’s not only a vehicle for the storage, distribution, and exchange of art, but also an artistic intervention that opens up new ways of seeing a data structure designed for transacting cryptocurrency.

Commentary by Kevin Buist May 16, 2024 The Bitcoin blockchain was made to record transactions, not messages. Relatively recent changes to the Bitcoin protocol support the creation of Ordinals, or Bitcoin NFTs, but there is also a history of scrappier, clandestine inscriptions that goes back to the very beginning of the blockchain. There are jokes, poems, conspiracies, links, and ASCII art forever embedded in the logs.