I recently watched Herb and Dorothy (2008), a documentary directed by Megumi Sasaki featuring the Vogels, an incredible husband-and-wife team of art collectors.
The key points about Herb and Dorothy Vogel that I learnt from the documentary:
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The couple amassed a very significant collection of contemporary art with relatively modest means. Living in New York, Herb worked as a postal worker, while Dorothy was a librarian—they lived on Dorothy’s salary and used Herb’s salary to collect art.
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As Dorothy described in the documentary, the couple only had two rules when it came to collecting art: “They had to be affordable, and we had to be able to fit them in our apartment. But other than that, we had no restrictions on what we bought. We never said it had to be a certain size, a certain medium, by a certain type of person. We just bought what we liked.”
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Based on these principles, the Vogels collected more than 4,000 artworks over the course of around four decades since their marriage in 1962. Their collection was primarily known for its works of minimalist and conceptual art, although the couple also collected works from other genres.
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In 1992, the Vogels decided to donate their entire collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The key considerations for the couple were that the National Gallery does not deaccession works, does not charge an admission fee, and they wanted their art to belong to the American people.
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Even though the Vogels lived in a one-bedroom apartment, the number of artworks they collected required five trailers to transport to the National Gallery, where the works were inventoried and stored. At this point of time, their collection contained about 2,400 works, but the couple used the freed-up space and annuity from their donation to collect even more works, which would also be given to the National Gallery. Eventually, their collection came up to more than 4,000 artworks in total.
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The National Gallery was not able to absorb this vast collection in its entirety. Hence, in 2008, the couple worked with the institution to distribute 2,500 of their works to 50 museums across the United States—one in each state. This is known as the Vogel 50x50 collection.
My journey thus far
The Vogels’ story got me reflecting about my own journey collecting digital art, which came about almost as an accident.
Before last year, I had never contemplated the thought of collecting art—any form of art—seriously. I had always assumed that good art was beyond my reach. As a millennial working a normal salaried job, I didn’t have the financial means to even conceive the possibility of buying what I imagined to be “proper” art. I also had no background in art history. Neither did I have any interest to operate within the classy circles of the traditional art world. Sipping champagne at glitzy galleries was not really my thing. Hence, when I got into crypto in 2021, I had no inclination to check out digital art, even as NFTs were all the rage then.
Nevertheless, things changed when I purchased my first home in mid-2022 with my then-fiancée. Wanting to infuse some character in our apartment, as well as to feature things that would be related to my burgeoning interest in crypto, I had the grand idea to buy a couple of affordable art NFTs that I liked and put them up around our house. My fiancée was supportive and so off I went shopping.
With no background in digital art, I started looking at what seemed to be the most popular genre of art NFTs then: long-form generative art, which had seen an explosive boom the year before.
Although I have no experience in coding, learning about generative art has enabled me to appreciate how code can be used as a medium of creative expression. I found that I really enjoyed looking at how different generative artists used code to generate compelling visual (and also musical) forms, spanning the gamut of simple, minimalist compositions to intricately textured and organic-feeling outputs.
Traffic (2022) by Rich Poole is a series of 250 generative artworks launched on the fx(hash) platform, featuring colourful, angular shapes that were “sketched” by code across a canvas. Traffic #170, displayed above, was the first long-form generative artwork that I collected. It reminded me of my habit of doodling abstract compositions on my textbooks and notes while sitting through classes in school.
I thought I would stop once I filled up my walls with some generative art. But if anything, the initial works of generative art that I bought sparked something far larger within me.
I guess I always had a latent appreciation for the visual arts. After all, when I was a teenager, I frequently dabbled with Photoshop to make forum signatures and digital collages. But this interest soon gave way to more practical pursuits—focusing on doing well in high school, getting a university scholarship, and doing well in one’s career.
Whatever creative impulses I might have thus lay neglected over the years. While I did engage in quite a bit of photography in university, I didn’t push it as far as I could have artistically, focusing primarily on documenting my travels. Thereafter, I started working and the thought of nurturing my creative self simply didn’t manifest anymore.
This aesthetic deprivation was perhaps why I quickly became obsessed with digital art after collecting a couple of NFTs. All my pent-up creative energies now had an outlet through the crypto art scene, where there was enough contemplative fodder to engage with my other intellectual interests in the humanities, while nurturing an appreciation for creativity and aesthetics at the same time. My Twitter feed soon became dominated by digital art rather than threads about the latest DeFi protocols. The more art I saw, the more I wanted to pierce beyond the surface of the works I saw, to throw myself into the concepts and contexts surrounding them.
This interest naturally led me to collect more works of digital art beyond what my apartment could possibly display. I also bought membership NFTs to join token-gated communities with a nexus to digital art, e.g. GrailersDAO, so that I could be amidst like-minded enthusiasts. In the process, I started to eat into money that would have been used for my long-term financial investments. This was not great, but I really couldn’t help it—I was obsessed.
Some generative artworks that I have printed, framed and put up in various parts of my apartment. Can you guess the artists behind these works?
Following from generative art, AI art became another area of interest as text-to-image generative AI tools came to the fore in end-2022. In particular, I was fascinated by what has been called “post-photography” or “synthography”, after seeing Roope Rainisto’s “Life in West America” and “REWORLD” projects launched in the first half of 2023. The mangled and surrealistic aesthetic of these works resonated deeply, blending together my longstanding interest in photography, penchant for the idiosyncratic, as well as growing curiosity about emerging technologies like crypto and AI.
De La Naught (2023) by PUBLIKFRUIT is a series of 100 animated artworks created with the artist’s own AI models and launched as part of a group show titled “Post-Photographic Perspectives II: Acceptable Realities” on Fellowship. The dreamy and looping sequences in this series intertwine subjects and themes rooted in our realised and unrealised thoughts, revealing captivating and perpetually evolving worlds. “Civil Services” was the first artwork that I had collected from an auction. Its stark portrayal of a city in flames provided a foil against which I reflected on my own career within the public service of my home country, and its critical importance in upholding the public interest.
At the same time, I also began paying attention to blockchain-native art. Since I was already spending so much time looking at digital art NFTs, I thought that I might as well try to appreciate and understand how artists were engaging with the blockchain as a medium. Terms like “onchain art” and “runtime art” thus became concepts that I wrestled with. Here, I felt as if we are on the cusp of an entirely new artistic movement, centred around art that cannot otherwise be created without the blockchain. This is art in which the blockchain is not only used as a means of registering ownership, but to create or embody the artwork itself.
Bit Rot (2023) by Nahiko is a series of 512 artworks, each depicting a fictitious currency note with different denominations of ETH and featuring key individuals involved in crypto, finance and related sectors. The defining feature of this project is that each currency note is made up of hundreds of thousands of NFTs, directly linked to their underlying smart contracts. The NFTs used in this project employ different data storage approaches, i.e. onchain storage, decentralised storage solutions (IPFS or Arweave) or private servers. As the non-onchain data storage approaches may fail over time, these constituent NFTs are likely to lose the link to their underlying media files at some point. This will cause the artworks, i.e. the currency notes, to degrade gradually, providing a real-time visualisation of bit rot in the context of NFTs.
I collected two artworks from these series as I thought that the project served as a witty commentary on the medium of NFTs, and was a timely reminder to understand what we’re really buying when we rush to chase the latest shiny thing in the crypto space.
Of course, there are other categories of digital art beyond generative art, AI art and blockchain-native art. But I simply didn’t have the bandwidth to go through all the different categories. These three were therefore the ones I paid most attention to given my proclivities and priorities.
Personal principles for collecting digital art
Today, as much as I would like to continue buying more digital art, I will have to end my collecting spree for the time being. This is because I’ve just started a year-long sabbatical and am no longer drawing any income. That said, I still intend to continue staying in touch with the space. This is also a good checkpoint for me to think about how I could take my digital art collection further in the future.
Learning about the Vogels provided further inspiration too. Herb and Dorothy demonstrated that collecting art can be fuelled by an authentic, unpretentious love for art. The couple was also proof that there was so much more to collecting art than just the act of buying. One can establish a relationship with the artists, engage with their developing oeuvres over time, and simply just keep showing up and participating in the discourse within the scene.
With this in mind, I thought to outline four principles to help frame my thinking regarding the future arc of my journey as a digital art collector. For those in a similar position as me or who are interested to collect digital art as a hobby, I hope this can be helpful too.
(1) Physical → Digital
We should not treat collecting digital art like physical art. Unlike physical art, digital art is not bound by the laws of physics. It can be readily replicable, malleable and remixable.
We should therefore be wary of our instinctive tendency towards skeuomorphic thinking—to treat digital art in the same way as physical art. Instead, we ought to lean in to the digital nature of such artworks. We should embrace how works of digital art can be easily shared and viewed, as opposed to keeping them private and exclusive. After all, in the context of the internet, the more people “right click save” a piece of digital art, the more valuable it can be.
To support this, we should not constrain our imagination in terms of how digital art should be displayed. Rather than limit ourselves to only showcasing our digital artworks as prints or on digital screens, we should make full use of the inherent fluidity of digital media to elevate the works we collect. We should contextualise and recontextualise them in their native formats, link them to other works of digital art, and release them within the all-encompassing multi-layered simulacra that is the internet—to be scrutinised, pulled apart, and further built upon.
I believe that for a piece of digital art to really come alive over time, it will need to manifest within a digital medium. It is not that the physical medium is not important. But we have tended to pay more attention to the physicality of digital art through prints and digital displays, without as much focus on giving fuller expression to the digital nature of such works. Beyond 2D/3D virtual galleries and posts on social media, are there ways in which we can present and appreciate digital artworks natively within a digital medium? How can we also preserve these artworks within a digital medium, and safeguard them from the seemingly inevitable bit rot? These are questions that we will need to thoroughly consider as collectors of digital art.
The Platonic ideal for digital art in the computing era may very well be artworks that are persistently online, radically networked, permissionlessly programmable, artfully dynamic and discursively open-ended. As digital art ventures more deeply into these aspects in the future, it is our responsibility as collectors to help support this process, by contributing to an environment that can celebrate, elevate and preserve such digitally-native artworks.
Terraforms (2021) by Mathcastles consists of nearly 10,000 parcels on the Ethereum blockchain that collectively make up a dynamically generated 3D world referred to as the "Hypercastle". Each parcel embodies a piece of animated text-based art with different attributes, e.g. colours, character sets and animation styles. “Level 14 at {19, 2}” was the first Terraforms that I bought after learning about this project in detail sometime in mid-2023.
Beyond the deceptively simple visuals of each parcel, Terraforms puts forth an ambitious aesthetic vision expressed through its underlying technical infrastructure. The project’s central premise is that distributed computing can be an art form in its own right, where the artwork is, in the words of Malte Rauch, “endlessly evolving, inherently interoperable, radically networked, and indefinitely open to reinterpretation” all at once.
(2) Price → Presence
Few of us will have the same level of dedication to art as the Vogels, committing to never sell any of our collected art for money. I certainly don’t, and would like to be able to make a profit from some of my collected pieces in the future.
That said, I think it is possible and even desirable to have a more nuanced perspective on digital art as a financial investment. Instead of assessing the value of digital artworks—or art in general—primarily based on their market price, we should also consider other dimensions to ensure that our collecting journey remains meaningful. After all, it seems quite limiting if our impetus to collect is only to make money. In fact, as punk6529 has written, money is fundamentally just “an information processing and coordination system”. By itself, it has no value.
In this regard, we should think about the act of collecting a work of digital art as more than just making a bet on its future price, but also a commitment about its presence. As Herb Vogel said about his collecting habit in a 1987 news programme: “For me, it’s in my head. I know it’s there, and it gives me the greatest pleasure—whether I could see it or not, just knowing that it’s there.” Indeed, the value of collecting art stems from the presence it can take—not only in our own consciousness, but also that of the broader community. We’re essentially investing in the capability of the artwork to capture attention, rouse emotions and expand minds over a period of time. In addition, if a piece of art can sustain or grow its presence in ourselves and others, then it is a matter of time before its price follows.
This notion of presence is especially relevant for digital art, which exists in a context that is inherently ephemeral and volatile, given the velocity of information flows in the digital realm and the evolving nature of the interfaces and platforms that mediate it. This is an environment hostile to cultivating presence, which makes assessing whether a particular piece of digital art has this elusive quality all the more challenging, but also rewarding.
To do so, we have to rely on a more comprehensive range of signals. Beyond quantitative parameters like floor prices or bid prices, we will need to go back to study the characteristics of human culture that have stood the test of time. Being a collector and investor in digital art thus requires one to be a student of history, philosophy, economics, psychology, anthropology, religion, and all the varied disciplines that try to shed light on the bewildering human condition. This is the best way that we can optimise for presence, and evaluate the ability of an art piece to provide insight or inspiration to others over time.
Do Nothing for a Century (2024) by 0xfff.eth is a unique work of conceptual art based on the idea of an endlessly growing list of tasks, most of which involve the transfer of the artwork on the blockchain under specified conditions. In this work, the first task is for the token to do nothing (i.e. not be transferred) for 100 years, with subsequent tasks also defined on the scale of decades and centuries.
Statistically speaking, the first task is unlikely to be completed within the lifetime of the owner or the artist. If the owner would like to complete this task and subsequent ones, they would have to coordinate with future owners of the artwork. In this regard, the art functions somewhat like a family heirloom, with the current owner having to pass on the work to another owner and so on and so forth. With a timescale measured in generations rather than days, “Do Nothing for a Century” brings to the foreground the notion of longevity and raises important questions about how we can create digital art that stand the test of time. It certainly provides a welcome breath of fresh air in a space that is often characterised by its volatility and ephemerality.
(3) Identity → Relationships
Collecting art is often also regarded as a way to express one’s identity. Our collection provides a foundation for us to construct our personal narratives and showcase our sense of taste. In fact, in the Art Basel and UBS’ survey of 2,828 active high-net-worth art collectors around the world in 2023, self-identity was ranked as the top motivation in purchasing a work of art by the most number of collectors (37% of survey participants), exceeding financial investment (28%) and building relationships with others (14%).
Similarly, I was drawn to collecting digital art on the blockchain to showcase who I am. The works I have acquired reflect not only my interest in crypto and other emerging technologies such as AI, but also the values that I seek to embody—curiosity, creativity, as well as independent and long-term thinking.
Nevertheless, humans are intrinsically social creatures, and it is no different when it comes to collecting art. I have realised that the collector journey is much more enjoyable and fulfilling when we situate ourselves within a broader community, vibe with artists and fellow art enjoyers, and pontificate about the latest happenings and nascent trends. It is also natural that collecting art gives us a sense of connection with others. After all, if our art preference reflects our personal taste and values, then it is not surprising that those who share an interest in similar types of art are likely people with whom we can more easily connect with, regardless of our background or where we’re from.
Collecting art for self-identity and connection with others are actually two sides of the same coin. Our identities are in constant dialogue with those of our peers, given that our tastes and values have always been influenced by our social environment, even if we may not be conscious of it. As Erin Thompson, an art historian, wrote in an essay about what drives people to collect art:
Serious art collectors often talk about the importance not of competition but of the social networks and bonds with family, friends, scholars, visitors and fellow collectors created and strengthened by their collecting. The way in which collectors describe their first purchases often reveals the central role of the social element. Only very rarely do collectors attribute their collecting to a solo encounter with an artwork, or curiosity about the past, or the reading of a textual source. Instead, they almost uniformly give credit to a friend or family member for sparking their interest, usually through encountering and discussing a specific artwork together. A collector showing off her latest finds to her children is doing the same thing as a sports fan gathering the kids to watch the game: reinforcing family bonds through a shared interest.
With the backdrop of the decentralised and relatively open nature of the internet and the crypto space, digital art also lends itself well to facilitate more flexible communities that can transcend our physical world. Through collecting digital art, I’ve gradually become acquainted with more people—many of whom I would have never come across in real life, and a number of whom are still pseudonymous or anonymous to me.
It remains to be seen how cohesive and enduring such virtual communities can be amidst the volatility and ephemerality of crypto. But as long as digital art can provide a space for meaningful connections in whatever form they take, I am certain that collecting digital art can and will remain a highly social activity, no different from other more “physical” activities.
BasePaint is a collaborative digital art initiative on the Base L2. Community members with specific brush NFTs will be able to paint on a shared pixel canvas in a 24-hour window, after which the combined artwork can be minted as an open-edition NFT for the next 24 hours. This is done daily, and at the time of writing, more than 260 artworks have been created. While the use of a shared pixel canvas that people can collectively paint is not new (e.g. r/place on Reddit), BasePaint enables community members to get remunerated with the revenue from the NFTs sold, pro-rated by their individual contribution. It is an example of how cryptoeconomic structures can be harnessed to facilitate collaborative behaviour within a community, as well as ensure that people are rewarded fairly for their contributions.
(4) Ownership → Stewardship
I have to end off by acknowledging that I would never have considered collecting digital art if not for the unique affordances enabled by NFTs and blockchains more broadly.
In my previous essay on the cultural potential of crypto, I wrote about how blockchains can serve as custodians of the necessary information required to prove ownership over a token, thus enabling tokenised digital assets to be owned and treated as property. Without this function, I would not have dared to commit a significant sum of money to purchase digital art, as such digital objects are infinitely replicable and spreadable. With NFTs and ordinals, however, I now feel comfortable in doing so, as such digital objects can only be owned by a single blockchain address, while still retain their ability to be distributed widely and readily.
This unique capacity for tangible ownership and infinite distribution is what opened my mind to the possibility of collecting digital art on blockchains in the first place. But my optimism for this tokenised digital art goes beyond this technical capacity. I believe that ownership of digital objects will encourage people to care for such objects far more deeply. Owners are a natural fit to play the role of stewards, as I wrote in my previous essay:
By serving as the custodians of the necessary information required to demonstrate ownership, blockchains enable digital cultural objects to not only be easily transacted online, but also to more readily accrue value as digitally-native property. And just as how property in the physical world has undergirded the tremendous build-up of wealth in our society, the equivalent of property in digital culture will likewise be the foundation upon which we can grow, sustain and distribute value on the internet.
When we can enjoy more robust and secure ownership over our assets thanks to the custodial capabilities of blockchains, you can be sure that we will do our utmost to maximise the value that can be built on top of them. With blockchains as custodians of digital culture, the owners of its constituent cultural assets—at least those with a long-term mindset—will naturally be incentivised to become its stewards.
As I reflect on my short experience as a digital art collector and contemplate the future arc of this journey, I am inclined to start thinking about my actions and involvement in the space beyond just the lens of ownership, but stewardship as well. I see this as the most value-accretive and meaningful way for me to continue participating in this space, and to grow together with it.
So what does it mean to be a steward of digital art then, especially as a small collector without big pockets? As with most things in life, especially in the digital realm, this is more a journey than a destination—one that I’m still trying to figure out. But even as I FAFO, I think the principles I’ve laid out earlier can provide useful direction to guide my thinking and actions.
To be a credible steward of digital art on the blockchain, I will need to understand and appreciate the mediums of computing, the internet and crypto natively, and how these mediums can offer novel and meaningful ways of seeing, thinking and creating. I should also prioritise presence over price, and focus my attention on artists and artworks that have the potential to provide insight and inspiration over time. Finally, I seek to be more mindful of the social aspects of collecting art, and be more intentional at cultivating quality relationships with artists and fellow collectors.
It is with these principles in mind that I hope to continue my journey here and contribute—in my own little way—to broaden appreciation for art that I believe will define this particular moment in time.
I’ve created a simple conceptual diagram to reflect the four principles above, and published it on Zora as a free mint. If these principles resonates with you, you can go here to mint a copy. The mint period is a year, the planned duration of my sabbatical.
Disclaimer: I have collected works by some of the artists featured in this essay, partly for investment, partly for personal enjoyment. Nevertheless, nothing in this essay constitutes investment advice. Please do your own research or consult your own advisers concerning any potential investment decision.
Credits: The header image of this essay was made with Midjourney v6.
Note: This essay was published with the blockchain address represented by the ENS subdomain “travel.buffets.eth”. This is one of the addresses that I will use while travelling during my sabbatical, as I will not bring along my hardware wallet that controls the address represented by my primary ENS domain “buffets.eth”.