Floor is Rising - Trash Art with Eric Paul Rhodes
Primer: In this episode of the Floor is Rising, Sabretooth and Kizu interviewed Eric Paul Rhodes about the Trash Art movement. Eric is a man of many talents and among his many achievements, he is the creator of Unofficial Punks and also the founder of the blog The Outer Realm. Find out what the Trash Art movement is all about and what they are fighting against.
Who is Eric Paul Rhodes
Founder of Second Realm (Twitter) and Outer Realm (blog)
Trash Art pioneer and historian
Award-winning artist - 2020 People's Choice NFT awards
Creator of Unofficial Punks and The People's Potato
Founded TATR tech - a decentralised art project, a social token and social liquidity mining experiment
Before Second Realm, he was a designer at Twitter, Google and MLBAM
Trash Art
What is Trash Art?
Originally used as a derogatory comment by Whaleshark and other collectors from SuperRare in early 2000
The leadership establishment and other big collectors in SuperRare wanted to kick some artists out of the platform because their art failed to meet a certain standard set by them
That was not supposed to happen because of the idea of decentralisation of crypto. There should not be any gatekeeping
When Robness appropriated a trash can from the Home Depot website, made some changes to it and listed it on the platform as an art, this group of people decided to kick him out
There are other people who are also kicked out, which rallied the support of artists
j1mmy (founder of nft42) was the one who called this particular style Trash Art and this group of artists adopted that name and started calling themselves Trash Artists
Ended up moving to Rarible and putting that platform on the map
Back then, Rarible was known to be a place for selling fakes. When they came in, they set the standard high for its great user interface
Documenting the Trash Art movement
Eric was a Trash Artist who happened to document the movement a year after it existed because he saw the narrative being shifted after the fact
Wanted to give people an overview of what the movement is about, and what issue they are facing and what they are fighting against
His articles:
A Short History of NFT Trash Art :
https://www.theouterrealm.io/blog/a-short-history-of-nft-trash-art
The Origins of Trash Art:
First to document it was Darren Klein (DK), who wrote an article for Cointelegraph, about Robness
How has the movement evolved?
The only ethos for the movement is openness and decentralisation
There is a spectrum of people who identify themselves as part of the movement. Some believed in no copyright protections, while others still want copyright protections but want to do it on open platforms without gatekeeping
The movement has evolved since it started
The core ideal of limiting gatekeeping has permeated beyond the NFT world simply because at that crucial moment, the Trash Artists fought back
The Trash Can meme drives people's attention to what the Trash Art movement is about. It becomes the catalyst for the evolution of the Trash Art movement
The Trash Art movement evolved in 3 areas:
The Idea of decentralisation and the ethos of openness - onboarding as many people as possible
Meme - many people are now creating trash cans and Trash Art to perpetuate the meme
Aesthetic - this kind of photo-mosh, glitch appropriation art style is being experimented upon by other people now in the NFT space
History never repeats but it rhymes
💡 The term Impressionist comes from this work of Claude Monet which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin this term in the satirical review published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari
Historically this had happened to the Impressionists too
Currently, we've accepted Impressionism as an art form now but back then, the artists involved were also battling against gatekeeping by the establishment
They had appropriated the derogatory term used by critics to insult these artists
Seldom do people talk about the historical significance of why the Impressionists came about and the impact they are making on the art world. The same will happen for the Trash Art movement
Eventually, Trash Art will be accepted and this is already happening. SuperRare has lots of Trash Art and glitch art now and nobody is debating about the aesthetics anymore
"And he had called that particular style of art that they didn't want on the platform, Trash Art. And we had taken it at that point. After a very short period of time, we re-appropriated the name, just like the Impressionists did. And we took the name, Trash Art, and just started calling us Trash artists. And it stuck."
Eric Rhodes
NFTs
How did he get into NFT?
Didn't know the NFT world existed even though he had been 'collecting' cryptocurrency for a long time
One day just typed in crypto and art into Twitter and discovered a rabbit hole of NFT world
Introduced to artists like XCOPY, Coldie, Robness, Max Osiris, Jay Delay
Profile Pic (PFP) NFT collections
He likes that the PFP projects are bringing interest to the whole crypto art space and that this evolved into a more consumerist version of collectibility
CryptoPunks at that time were just a novelty - nobody thought they would be valuable
Now owning a punk is about clout. And companies like Visa can also come in and buy one to get instant credibility
However, the downside is that the art has been pushed aside. People who were into PFP art were thinking more in terms of the ROI investment than the artwork
Thinks that projects that can merge collectibility, metaverse utility and IRL utility will be the next big thing
Doxing himself through art
Went from anonymous to doxing himself in an NFT called "Trust this piece of trash art proof"
Decided not to pretend to be anyone anymore
He suffers from anxiety, depression, ADHD and other psychological ailments and being an anonymous persona became too overwhelming
After he doxed himself, the space became more open for him as he opened himself to it
Some artists live their life as performance art and what you know about them is what they wanted us to know e.g. Salvador Dali wrote erotic cookbooks and written a false book about his entire life
No difference between what artists had done in the past and now, except for the anonymity part
Anonymity allows an artist to control a narrative about what their art is and in some ways, anonymity is part of the performance of the art itself
"I really just wanted to be myself. And the best way to be me is to put myself out there. And actually, since doing that, the space opened up to me even more than at the time, there weren't a lot of artists who were willingly doxing themselves. Even today, even those that aren't anonymous, or those that are pseudo-anonymous, don't show their face on screen or don't want to talk about their personal life. That's just not me."
Eric Rhodes
E.g. Eric believes Murat Pak is like a team of people. They don't call themselves artists, but designers. Their anonymity adds to the performance of the art that they do
E.g XCOPY too - his anonymity adds to the performance quality of the art
Unofficial Punks
Wanted to participate in the CryptoPunks excitement but was priced out
Had so many opportunities to pick it up because he saw it as a novelty and not the historical significance, nor their utility as a clout perspective
When CryptoPunks blew up with all the record sales, he decided to just make his own since he is an appropriation artist
Went viral and people started asking him to make more of it until he started a collection of 100 pieces
"When I passed up so many... I could have had hundreds of CryptoPunks had I just bought them at the right time. And I kept passing them up because I never saw their significance, I never saw their utility from a clout perspective. You know, to me, it was just like 10,000 collectibles."
Eric Rhodes
Originally wanted 256 pieces but he found himself trying to make things that other people wanted to buy, so he does not like to be in that space
Started to form a community to bring people together. They also sort of gave people the permission to begin making their own variation of punks
Having a signature style
Does he think that an artist must have a signature style?
There is a narrative that artists should have a signature style, but it is not true at all
There are successful artists who have a single signature style but others who do not as well
Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali are two examples of those without a signature style if you consider the whole aspect of the artist's works and his life in general
Eric does not have a signature style - his mind has to jump from one topic to another because of his ADHD
The overall theme of all his work is Personal Experience - all the art that he did was seen through the lens of his personal reaction to the past or a reaction to the world he is currently living in
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