12 Oct 2023/21 min/Patrick Amadon
MLow X Patrick Amadon
The glitch artist behind the 404 Catalog on broken discovery, conceptual glitch, the Sotheby's walkout, and why art and artist cannot be separated.
Recorded weeks before it aired, this conversation catches Patrick Amadon fresh off two firestorms: his protest work taken down in Hong Kong, with the Chinese government allegedly trying to hack him and jail threats if he ever returns, and his very public withdrawal from Sotheby's first glitch only auction because it featured no women. He tells both stories plainly, saw something, said something, and traces his whole path: an art history degree, a day painting in a Hollywood courtyard that clicked, and the discovery that deleting random lines of a low res file in WordPad warps an image. Glitched versions of his paintings, hosted on Tumblr for Twitter, became the practice; a February 2021 article pulled him into NFTs.
The center of the episode is the 404 Catalog, his answer to broken discovery. Each artist submits exactly one piece a month, sales history and follower counts stripped out, so a stranger scrolling 45 minutes of flat entries judges on taste alone: 1,366 artists the first month, 1,912 the next, around 1,442 the month of recording. MLow arrives as a beneficiary, having made his first digital art sale ever through it, a piece shot in 2016, minted in 2021, priced at 0.038 ETH, and Amadon congratulates him on exactly the outcome the catalog exists to produce. From there the critique widens: Twitter is a tapestry of bubbles, the space's canon was set in a rush by a handful of influential collectors, and the market is obsessed with subject while ambivalent about content, the exact reverse of the wider art world.
The rest is a masterclass in conviction. Glitch, for Amadon, is conceptual before it is aesthetic: seeing a system and finding where it fails, which is why disobedience is honesty. He warns that platforms will happily build Spotify 2.0 for artists, dissects protocol rewards as a fake free mint where the platform keeps 60 percent, defends anonymity while condemning secret alt accounts as product manufacturing, and torches the fake Banksy open edition artist who answered his criticism with a one of one of Amadon walking to a guillotine. The best exchange belongs to MLow: when Amadon dismisses skulls and apes as uncritical trend work, MLow asks whether Sam Spratt's Skulls of Luci hold up, being both at once, and Amadon concedes the point.
What this episode teaches
- Flatten the inputs to fix discovery
The 404 Catalog forces one piece per artist per month and deletes sales history and social proof, so taste is the only variable and different work pops for different people. Amadon found artists like Ken Luno and nftp this way, and an artist at his weekly Thursday session reported Snowfro collecting them through it.
- Ask why it is worth a mint
The space obsesses over subject and ignores content; the traditional art world is the reverse, where nobody is impressed that something looks cool and everyone asks why you made it. His one line editorial filter for any release: what do you want to say with this piece, and why is it worth a mint?
- Art does not reward one hit wonders
Music has a term for it; art does not, because a career is a sequence of successes that survive criticism. A medium and style exist to deliver a specific message, so the questions never stop: what is your next message, your next style, your next medium?
- Longevity is a design decision
Fully on chain is best, IPFS and Arweave workable, but embedding iframes, HTML, and live internet infrastructure into an immutable contract is a recipe for a broken NFT in 20 years, a short term novelty bought at the collector's long term expense.
- Glitch is conceptual before it is visual
The movement spans bent TV tubes to hex editing, but Amadon curates for artists who see a system and find where it fails, where the thing you are told holds together actually falls apart. That reframe decouples glitch from its visual cliche.
- Disobedience is honesty
Most people entered this space because some system excluded them; without a Yale MFA or relatives at a top gallery, the traditional art world gives no real shot. Being disobedient means asking whether the rule book was written by somebody who benefits from how it was written, and kicking back when it was.
- Strategic silence erases you
Artists hide opinions to avoid offending collectors, but nobody gets to know an artist they cannot hear. Opinions, through the art and through the feed, are how you separate yourself from the pack; a touchy artist who antagonizes but cannot take pushback should, he jokes, go make still lifes.
- Go deep until nobody else is there
Find your style and go as deep as you can; if your work is comparable to someone else's, like the XCOPY derivatives, start over or go deeper. Ignore sales, many are faked to bump floors anyway, and trust that unique work plus survival eventually meets its moment.
- Anonymity yes, alt accounts no
Anons matter because artists in Iran, Russia, and elsewhere cannot be public, and a track record of words, mints, and behavior establishes trust without a face. But secretly running multiple art accounts in different styles is manipulation, making product instead of art, and owning your past work beats burying it under a new name.
The conversation, topic by topic
From courtyard paints to WordPad
Amadon studied art history, then bought paints with friends on a whim and painted in a Hollywood courtyard; something clicked and he returned the next day for more. Photos of physical work felt lost in translation online, and oils dry slowly, so he taught himself to glitch: open a low res file in WordPad, delete random lines of code, and compile the warped results into gifs, hosted on Tumblr because Twitter could not handle them. A February 2021 article revealed digital art could sell, and he jumped in.
Lowered barriers
He credits the space with real accessibility gains: you no longer have to hustle a gallery to get seen, a Twitter account and a simple mint reach a whole community of collectors. MLow matches the origin story: he found Photoshop in seventh grade on his art teacher's computer, and layers were his practice a decade before PFPs made layers a business model.
MLow's first sale
MLow reveals he made his first ever digital art sale through the 404 Catalog that month: a piece photographed in 2016, minted in 2021, priced at 0.038 ETH, sold while he waits for Transient Labs' Lab tooling to mint new work on his own contract. Amadon beams: that is exactly the whole purpose of the entire thing.
How the 404 Catalog works
One piece per artist per month, chosen by the artist as their best foot forward, presented flat with no sales data or hype. Participation ran 1,366 the first month, 1,912 the second, about 1,442 the current month; scrolling the whole catalog takes 45 minutes to an hour, and excellent one of ones surface at 0.1 or 0.2 ETH from artists the algorithm never serves.
The tapestry of bubbles
Twitter traps every artist inside their own circle, releasing work slightly wider only when it performs, which builds relationships but strangles reach. Meanwhile the space's hierarchy was set in a rush: one influential collector bought someone early because they liked it, and everything else followed, a canon built on momentum rather than artistic merit that he predicts will not survive five years of maturing criticism.
Skulls, apes, and the Spratt counter
Amadon dismisses skull and ape work as pandering that will read as winter hysteria in hindsight, and MLow lands the best challenge of the archive: do Sam Spratt's Skulls of Luci hold up, being skulls and apes at once? Amadon admits he had not considered it, allows that capturing a moment has value, then pivots to whether such heavily annotated work is even constructed to last technically.
The broken NFT in 20 years
Traditional collectors ask whether a thing will last, and he answers as an engineer of permanence: on chain is best, IPFS links are questionable over 50 years, and iframes or live web infrastructure inside immutable contracts guarantee breakage. Short term spectacle, long term loss.
What glitch actually is
The movement runs from analog artists bending TV tubes to hex editing, WordPad, and data bending. His own interest is digital because his subject is digital reality versus physical reality in an ever more connected world, and his guiding influence is Banksy, needling a problem with every piece, especially the Gaza Strip wall works; MLow points out the Banksy girl with balloon print hanging behind him.
Digital disobedience
Asked to define his signature phrase, he frames the whole space as an escape built by people who saw something wrong: broken finance, gatekept art. Disobedience is an active state of mind, questioning why things are the way they are and whether the rules deserve to apply, and therefore, in his telling, a form of honesty.
Hong Kong and the Sotheby's walkout
The week his work was pulled from a Hong Kong billboard, making global press and bringing hacking attempts and jail threats from China, a friend tweeted asking how he and XCOPY felt about being in an all male glitch auction. Sotheby's first glitch only sale had excluded the women and non binary artists central to the movement, so he messaged the team, pulled his work, and tweeted why. The resulting firestorm forced Sotheby's to pause the auction and re curate it with 17 women and non binary artists.
Spotify 2.0 and protocol rewards
Platforms are corporations with no guiding philosophy for artists, and relying on them ends with artists maximally extracted, Spotify 2.0. His example: protocol rewards, a fancy way of saying free mint except collectors pay and the platform keeps 60 percent, marketed through artists bribed with a little bread to parrot talking points that undermine the whole ecosystem.
Auction houses as billboards
He feared Sotheby's and Christie's would become the new gatekeepers, but it never played out: so many artists have passed through that a sale there is now like a billboard in Times Square, seen by everyone and connecting with no one. Their real value is presenting digital art to collectors outside the space, which he has seen work for a handful of artists.
The recipe for good art
Mastery of technique and medium, a reason the work is digital rather than physical, and a story you have more authority to tell than anyone else. His example is the nftp piece he collected from the first catalog: teepees and cowboys in an alien futurist landscape reading as commentary on Western expansion, which hits precisely because she is an indigenous woman. You cannot understand the art without understanding the artist, and if you think you can, that is a red flag.
Fake Banksy and the guillotine
MLow asks about the anonymous artist who rode the open edition and burn meta to a fortune. Amadon was their loudest critic: another imposter playing the fake Banksy game, stacking FOMO mechanics and charity donations into manipulative theater. The artist responded by naming him their biggest critic and minting a one of one of Amadon walking toward a guillotine. The exchange flows into disagreement culture: he cites Dmitri Cherniak calling Chromie Squiggles low effort, disagrees, but defends the right to say it, and by the end MLow says Amadon's framing of alt accounts genuinely shifted his own view.
In their words
“Twitter is a tapestry of bubbles.”
Patrick Amadon“We're very obsessed with subject right now, and pretty ambivalent about content. In the regular world, it's absolutely the reverse.”
Patrick Amadon“It's more about seeing a system and seeing a failure in the system.”
Patrick Amadon“If you're being disobedient, you're being honest.”
Patrick Amadon“If we rely on them, we'll end up with Spotify 2.0 for artists, yet another system where we're maximally extracted.”
Patrick Amadon“You cannot understand the art without understanding the artist.”
Patrick AmadonCite this conversation
Patrick Amadon in conversation with MLow, "MLow X Patrick Amadon," The MLow Show, 12 Oct 2023. https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-12-mlow-x-patrick-amadon.html. Quoted from a machine transcript.
Quotations come from machine transcripts. Check wording against the audio before republishing.