28 Oct 2023/84 min/Jason Bailey (Artnome)
MLow X Jason Bailey (Artnome)
Crypto art's working art historian on the forgery database that started Artnome, why half of NFT art is not on chain, and the case that early crypto art was a revolution.
Jason Bailey is the founder of Artnome and Club NFT and publisher of Right Click Save, and this is the longest unpublished conversation in the archive. He opens with his DNA: raised in a family of engineers, lousy at math and science, rewarded in art for arriving at different outcomes as long as he could explain the process. After art school left him jobless he went into tech, taught himself Photoshop overnight, then took a master's at the Dynamic Media Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2007 to 2010), learning Processing and decades of generative art history. A book on forgery, claiming ten to fifteen percent of art at market is forged or misattributed, sent him calling the Smithsonian and the Getty for a database of complete works. None existed, so he built the largest analytical database of twentieth century artists' complete works, and started the Artnome blog so anyone would ever know.
That blog made him one of the earliest NFT collectors and writers: a first XCopy for a dollar (later broken by a custodial marketplace's collapse, with million dollar offers on the table), the first SuperRare NFTs, Robbie Barrats for a hundred bucks. When 2021 investors begged him to start a marketplace he refused and instead attacked three unglamorous problems: Club NFT, because roughly half of NFT art sits on marketplace servers and 40 percent on IPFS that collectors do not know how to back up; Right Click Save, an editorial outlet treating NFT artists with contemporary art world respect; and a discovery algorithm with no sales cut, so it can surface unloved artists instead of pushing whoever is pumping.
The historical spine is the strongest passage: for decades an artist's odds were near nil without Yale, Paris or New York, and whiteness and maleness besides, so a revolution was needed, and early crypto art, above all Rare Pepe Wallet in 2016, was one. He names Moxarra's three dollar thank you tweet as his founding moment, calls himself the king of the paper hands without regret, traces the lineage Refik Anadol to Casey Reas to John Maeda to Muriel Cooper, and pleads for the space to keep its sense of humor about spending money on images anyone can see for free.
What this episode teaches
- The five year rule for buying art
Bailey's standing advice: buy art you love, from artists you want to see succeed, at prices you can afford, assuming you will never resell it. It sidesteps all gamesmanship, because the people most frustrated by the market are the ones asking other people what to buy.
- Half of NFT art is not where you think
Most NFT art is not on the blockchain: roughly 50 percent sits on a marketplace's private server, leaving collectors with broken images when it folds, and about 40 percent is on IPFS, which most collectors cannot pin or back up. His Lamborghini analogy: buying the car but never driving it home from a dealership that later burns down.
- Build discovery without perverse incentives
Marketplace recommendation engines earn a cut, so they push what already sells. Club NFT's algorithm takes no money on a sale, so it can steer collectors away from everyone loving the same two rising artists and toward a broader, more equitable spread.
- Bear markets build, bull markets shill
When money is easy, the smartest minds work on convincing you the golden goose still lays eggs; infrastructure, onboarding, and preservation only advance when things slow down. He treats the bear as the space's productive season.
- Judge exits case by case
Robbie Barrat leaving deserves respect: the space stopped talking about his art and became a casino, so he left a place that did not reflect his values. Big name artists who mocked NFTs, dropped once for cash and vanished are different, and collectors owed themselves the due diligence to see the drop never fit the artist's actual work.
- Art is a bad investment and a great one
Asked for 45 years whether art is a good investment, he says no: countless things return more. As a lens from history's most creative minds on how to understand the world, it is the richest part of his life. Buy the ten dollar piece with the same seriousness as the five ETH one.
- Heart first, head second
His filter for art: it must stop him in his tracks and make him feel before he researches anything. He wants gross, twisted Otto Dix war horror as much as comforting beauty, and argues the NFT space over indexes on pretty because pandemic era collectors wanted comfort, not challenge.
- Keep the sense of humor
We are all spending money on images we can see for free, and when skeptics call that ridiculous he agrees: is it not great? Losing the humor about the absurdity, he warns, would kill the soul of the thing; a proposal ring is a shiny rock too.
- The purchase is the signal
Self described king of the paper hands, he sold the first SuperRare NFT for around five or six thousand dollars and his Pepes to fund Club NFT, without regret, because for him the initial purchase, the nod to the artist, already did its job.
The conversation, topic by topic
Why the show exists
MLow opens with his origin story: as a curator he was already interviewing artists about technique and philosophy for collections he was assembling, realized he was learning from every call, and began recording. He names Grant Yun, Jake Fried, Bryan Brinkman, Colborn, Coldie, AC The Collector and Bharat as prior guests, and says the space lacks enough serious crypto art content beyond creators like (roughly) Schilly and Deeze. He is at NYU for impact investing.
An artist in a family of engineers
Bailey grew up with math and science at every meal, both brothers becoming engineers, while he showed paintings at his town hall gallery at fifteen or sixteen. Rules based fields punished his different answers; art rewarded them when he could explain the process. He studied painting, printmaking and sculpture in the late 90s, unimpressed by that decade's low polygon digital imagery.
Tech job, then the Dynamic Media Institute
Jobless after art school, he went into the family trade, tech, half bluffing illustration skills and teaching himself Photoshop and Illustrator overnight. That exposure led to art made with code and a 2007 to 2010 master's at MassArt's Dynamic Media Institute, learning Processing and decades of generative art history from a program he calls way ahead of its time.
Hoopism and the forgery database
His basketball analytics project hoopism drew a quarter million viewers in a month and pickup from Sports Illustrated and ESPN, teaching him nerdy projects travel. Later, reading that ten to fifteen percent of art at market is conservatively forged or misattributed, he asked the Smithsonian and Getty where the database of complete works was. There was none, so he built the largest analytical database of complete works by twentieth century artists.
Artnome and the case for digital art
The blog existed to share the database's insights and got him into Sotheby's and Christie's conferences, where he asked why digital artists were absent from mainstream contemporary art. His argument: computing is what separates this generation from all prior ones, so artists using computing to examine that should be front and center, and crypto art is a logical progression of art history, not an alien to it.
Early collecting and the broken XCopy
He bought his first XCopy for a dollar and Robbie Barrats for about a hundred, mocked in 2017 and 2018 for paying for free images. His first NFT sat custodied at Rare Art Labs, which had introduced credit card buying; the marketplace died and the token effectively never reached him, despite later million dollar offers. He holds no grudge: early builders were inventing the foundation.
Club NFT, Right Click Save, discovery
Refusing 2021 offers to launch yet another marketplace against friends, he built for three gaps: a backup tool simplifying IPFS preservation for non technical collectors, the Right Click Save publication for editorial respect, and a no commission discovery algorithm designed to recommend artists you might love rather than whoever is already rising.
Gamesmanship and disappearing artists
On market opacity MLow notes you never know who is paid from a separate wallet or shilling a friend; Bailey answers that many complaining about gamesmanship came for it. On artists who cash out and vanish he splits the field: Barrat's principled exit, opportunistic big names doing collector plate drops, and natively digital artists for whom the space genuinely fits.
Editions, Tezos, and collecting the unloved
He likes editions because they make art affordable, not because open editions perform. When his early names got big he stopped spending and moved to Tezos, buying decades honed generative artists for single and tens of dollars. His self summary: missing the gene that collects what others collect, drawn to what nobody wants, immune to drawdowns because he never expected profit.
Rare Pepe, and who art history excluded
He argues NFTs peaked early, at Rare Pepe Wallet in 2016: untrained creators making memes the high art world would never admit, no fees taken from artists, curation limited to a tongue in cheek team of scientists filtering the not safe for work. That decredentializing promise mattered because his research found an artist's odds were near nil for decades without Yale, Paris or New York, and whiteness and maleness besides. A revolution was needed; early crypto art was one, later watered down by commercialization, and he hopes history remembers how radical those first projects were.
Memes, Pepes, and the floppy disk
He sold his Pepe collection when an offer bought him the freedom to start Club NFT, keeping only an invisible Pepe Joe Looney put on a floppy disk for him, which is why his meme praise is not bag pumping. He ranks this generation's meme culture among its most important art: anonymous images with their own sublanguage traveling worldwide at unprecedented speed, sustained by a community as unflinching as Bitcoin diehards.
The Moxarra moment and what he would hold
In 2017 he spent three or four dollars on a Moxarra piece and got a grateful tweet back; he realized artists lacked not just income but recognition, a lonely space of making work and hoping anyone cares. His forever holds ignore market value: early Joe Looney counterparty assets, at least one Manolo (possibly the greatest generative artist of the generation, a view MLow notes AC The Collector shares), and the Moxarra. MLow reveals Moxarra is in a twelve artist collection he is curating.
The lineage and late recognition
Against the idea that digital art was born yesterday, he traces Refik Anadol to Casey Reas to John Maeda of the MIT Media Lab to Muriel Cooper, and celebrates Vera Molnar getting recognition in her lifetime. MLow adds Cherniak and Hobbs moderating the generative art subreddit pre Art Blocks, and describes returning six times to Anadol's machine hallucinations piece in the MoMA lobby to watch newcomers react. Bailey notes NFT collectors carry no anti technology bias, finally giving photography and computer art fresh eyes after decades of shunning, even death threats, recorded in the book How the Machine Made Art.
What is missing and what is next
His underappreciated project: the Club NFT backup tool, which people avoid like the dentist until an NFT breaks. He defends NFT archaeology of dead marketplaces as heritage, wants the space to laugh at its own absurdity, and hopes the next wave taps computing's interactivity instead of static 2D images. He names favorites (Manolo, Jared Tarbell, Operator, Osinachi, Carlos Marcial, Robbie Barrat, Vera Molnar, plus Rothko, Goya, Otto Dix, Odilon Redon) and wants more art that challenges and even offends; MLow answers with Lauren Lee McCarthy, Die With The Most Likes, and a multi artist doppelganger contract collab he is building with Transient Labs where every step of the collaboration lives in the token's array.
In their words
“Buy art you love from artists you want to see succeed, for prices you can afford, with the assumption that you'll never be able to resell it.”
Jason Bailey“If you didn't go to Yale, you weren't in Paris or New York City, and you weren't a white male, your chances for a long, long time were just next to nil.”
Jason Bailey“It's a lonely, lonely space to be in, making work and kind of hoping anyone cares about it.”
Jason Bailey“I'm missing the gene that collects things because other people collect them.”
Jason Bailey“We're all spending money on images we can see for free. If we ever lose our sense of humor about how absurd this is, it'll kill the soul of the beauty of NFTs.”
Jason Bailey“Heart first, head second. If I don't have that gut punch upon first seeing it, then I'm not gonna put in the effort to do much research.”
Jason BaileyCite this conversation
Jason Bailey (Artnome) in conversation with MLow, "MLow X Jason Bailey (Artnome)," The MLow Show, unaired recording, 28 Oct 2023. https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-28-mlow-x-jason-bailey-artnome.html. Quoted from a machine transcript.
Quotations come from machine transcripts. Check wording against the audio before republishing.