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In 2017, Mitchell F. Chan had been an artist for over a decade, incorporating technology into his artwork in order to make commentary on our technology-driven society. Then, he decided he
wanted to make an artwork about our economic system. Half his career was spent doing big public artworks — “12-foot-tall sculptures that would sit in a park and never move and never be
resold” — and the other half was gallery work focused on the “parts of our society that are invisible,” as he put it in the latest episode of my podcast, Unchained. Although he was
interested in our economic system, because it “is everywhere .. and seems to inform every aspect of our lives,” he realized, “It’s very difficult to mold it into an artwork.” That’s when he
discovered crypto, which he learned was a programmable form of money. Since he knew a bit of programming, he realized he could program this money to turn it into a sculpture. But first, he’d
have to think deeply about what it all means. Chan considered the criticisms of crypto — that there’s nothing there, it’s not tethered to anything, it doesn’t represent an amount of gold in
a vault — and decides, “its untetheredness and its free-floatingness is what could give it power.” In his quest to take that idea and make it into an artwork, he wondered if there could
ever be art created or transacted on a blockchain. At that time, the idea seemed preposterous (and he didn’t know about earlier works by Rhea Myers, a previous guest on my show, in which
she’d done that) due to the data storage issues (the files would be too big and blockchains need to be somewhat lightweight data-wise), so he decided “all you can do really is have a pointer
to something.” (If this sounds exactly like what an art non-fungible token, or NFT, is — well, you have a good grasp of NFTs.) He decides to research if this has ever been done before in
art. He decides to explore artists who used “nothingness” as their medium and comes across a work by Yves Klein called “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” from 1958. The way Chan
tells it, Klein, by that point in his career was quite famous for his International Klein Blue paintings but was also trying to create things that were more real than artistic
representations of physical objects, such as paintings of houses. “He wants to create a real feeling,” says Chan. So Klein creates an exhibition at a small gallery in Paris. Three thousand
people line up to see it, and when they walk in, it’s completely empty. However, Klein claims he’s imbued he gallery with “the pure sensibility of the color blue,” as Chan puts it. Then, he
sells pieces from it. “He’s very interested in, just as I was as a young artist, the idea that actually the immaterial is more powerful than the material,” says Chan. “The promise is more
powerful than the gold bar in the vault. He says you can buy these things but you will have to give up a quantity of pure gold.” And in return, you will get a paper receipt. As Chan
describes it, “It indicates exactly which invisible artwork you have, which artwork you own that has no physical aspect. It’s just an empty amount of space imbued with an idea. You get this
piece of paper.” This gets Chan thinking, “If I’m going to sell artwork on blockchain, that’s what I’m doing. I can make these currencies…I can make a currency very easily. I just have to
imbue faith, imbue a sense of myself into it and essentially make a promise that there is something here.” TUNE IN TO THE FULL EPISODE — ONE OF THE MOST FASCIANTING INTERVIEWS RELEASED ALL
YEAR — to find out how Chan did that, plus: * how Yves Klein’s “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” even contained what crypto/NFT people would call a “burn” function * how almost no
one took interest in Chan’s blockchain-based artwork for three-and-a-half years — until many people did in 2021 * why, despite the bull market for art NFTs, Chan hasn’t released anything but
one drop this year — and that was based on a 2014 work of his * why he believes NFTs are already changing art * how he thinks NFTs are changing access to the art world for artists * what he
thinks of the knee-jerk negative reaction many non-crypto people such as artists have to anything blockchain-related _THANKS FOR READING! IF YOU LIKED THIS ARTICLE:_ * SIGN UP for my daily
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