Jennifer & Kevin McCoy on the True Value of Digital Art
What if the art market—what if the whole underlying foundation of the art ecosystem—was a buggy string of legacy code? And, what if you could fix it?
That was the deeper proposition that the artist Kevin McCoy offered up a decade ago when he and the technologist Anil Dash invented the NFT, debuting their breakthrough onstage at Rhizome’s 2014 Seven x Seven conference. By using the blockchain to imbue a digital artwork with unique value and verifiable provenance, they essentially applied a hotfix to a flaw in the art market that until then had made it practically impossible for digital artists to monetize their creations.
Did it work? Maybe all too well.
Quantum, a generative artwork by McCoy that was the first ever registered on the blockchain, resembles a star exploding and imploding: a supernova. For now, that pulsating image has proven prophetic. Three years after the broader NFT phenomenon burst sensationally into the public consciousness in 2021—a crypto annus mirabilis in which digital artworks and collectibles alike seemed to be going money-viral everywhere (including Quantum, which sold at Sotheby's for $1.47 million)—the sector seems to be similarly collapsing in on itself.
Today, many once-high-flying NFT businesses are struggling or defunct, prices have cratered, and just last week tokenized-art platform OpenSea announced that it had received a Wells notice from the SEC—a sign that regulators may continue to view at least some NFT collections as unregistered securities, i.e. illegal in their current state.
So, what happened to the promise of the blockchain for digital art? And are things as dire as the headlines (like "The Overwhelming Majority of NFTs Are ‘Dead,’ Report Says") suggest?
To inaugurate Artwrld’s conversation series, we're pleased to sit down with Kevin and his wife and artistic partner Jennifer McCoy to talk about the evolving nature of value when it comes to digital art, where things may go from here, and the duo'snew show at New York's Ryan Lee Gallery starring an art-making robot.