The luxury to be able to commission the greatest masters of the arts to create something at your command used to be reserved for Cardinals and Kings. But even they could only summon the visionary eye and the craftsmanship of artists that happened to be alive at the time.
The NFT project Eponym by Art AI, has flipped all that on its head. Through their art generating algorithms they have resurrected all the great masters from their graves to let them paint again. And thanks to the democratizing properties of Blockchain and Ethereum they are now yours to command.
“Make copies, young man, many copies. You can only become a good artist by copying the masters.”
Pablo Picasso
Picasso knew that the knowledge and the secrets of groundbreaking art was hidden in its history. Hidden in the work of the old masters. Studying their work and their lives, copying their efforts to get into their rhythm, was his advice. There are many other examples of this. Musicians learn how to perform works of other composers before they create their own. Many famous writers have said that in their early days they used to sit by the typewriter and copy Shakespeare’s, Hemingway’s or Tolstoy’s work word for word, just to get into their groove.
Learning by doing. Training the muscle memory by copying the past to then be able to unleash the future.
In a way, Art AI has done exactly that. The world’s largest gallery of AI generated art, based in London, UK, have worked for two years developing algorithms that generate new art derived from the collective work of the masters past.
Speaking about the algorithms as though the strings of code were artists themselves, the team behind Art AI state the following: “While drawing inspiration from the art they are exposed to, they create each piece from scratch, using their creative “mind” and their own distinct style. The result is otherworldly images of novel styles and contents.”
No shit.
Here’s “pale blue dot” from EponymNFT to prove it:
Art AI began as a project at Cambridge University. The art loving and tech savvy team behind the effort were inspired by a public auction that took places in New York in October 2018 where the first ever AI generated portrait called “Edmond de Belamy” was sold for $432,500.
But Art AI had a different goal in mind. Their aim was to “democratize art by allowing more people to become owners of original, one of a kind artworks.”.
Merging their vision, technology and purpose with Ethereum in the NFT project “Eponym” you have to say that they knocked that one not only out of the park, but out into the cosmos. 10,000 new original, one of a kind artworks were printed on Ethereum for only 0.08 ETH each. Which in turn yielded the project around $3.2M.
One of my favorite minted pices, “mozart” by EponymNFT:
But that’s just the starting point. It gets much, much more spectacular when you begin to scratch the surface.
Not only did they bring a collection of 10K pieces made from the knowledge of the greatest masters in the history of art to you in a democratic fashion. They enabled you to command them with your own words. They gave you the opportunity to not just commission the piece, but to creatively direct and co-create your own piece using your own language.
During the minting process you were urged to type in a phrase, anything you could think of, and then the AI created a piece of art inspired by those very words. Then (then!) you were given the option to either mint the piece that the AI came up with, or to send Michelangelo, Pollock, Picasso, Dali, van Gogh, Rembrant, Cézanne, Kahlo, Monet, Manet, Munch, and Mondrian, back into the studio to bring you something better.
The Kings and Cardinals of times past would’ve had you executed on the spot through sheer envy.
In the Eponym Discord, minters kept referring to how incredible the experience was over and over again. After a week or so the team created a channel called #minting-stories. A channel I can warmly recommend spending some time in.
Here’s a video tutorial that shows you how it happened, made by our favorite NFT Twitter prophet, @Zeneca_33:
So. All this is pretty fascinating. But the best is yet to come. This is where it gets truly interesting:
The collection is alive!
It’s now up to the holders of Eponyms to keep curating and recreate the collection. In a few weeks, a second mint is taking place. This time you can’t buy your way in. In order to be able to mint a new Eponym you would have to burn two Eponyms from the genesis mint.
This means that the holders of the Eponyms will have to sacrifice two pieces from their own collection to create one new piece in the Generation 2 collection.
Members of the Eponym community decide what pieces stay in the collection, and what pieces are to be sent to the graveyard. Not through consensus or a discussion. But through action.
Having to send two to the graveyard to be able to create a completely new piece is a very poetic touch. The design of this process is art in itself. It represents life and death. It represents progress and stagnation. It represents the entire history of art. The process gives a notion to the pieces of art we remember, the pieces we hang in our museums to be revered in comparison to the ones who were “sent to the graveyard” over the course of time.
It represents entering and exiting the stage, as Shakespeare would have said.
“It’s only the masters that matter. Those who create…”
Pablo Picasso
Eponym has now given all its holders a huge responsibility. It’s up to us to burn the pieces that we think could be improved, the pieces that we think do not make the cut. It doesn’t matter what we say, what we write in the Discord or on Twitter. There’s no vote. There’s no deciding debate. There’s only destruction and creation. There’s only action. Action that matters. Action that can not be reversed.
Eponym has turned us into creators and curators, with the collected competence of all the masters past at our fingertips. Competence that can only be put into action by our own words.
At the end of the day Eponym has given us the opportunity and responsibility to become the artist ourselves.
And when the time comes, the artist will be faced with two fundamental questions:
What will you destroy? What will you create?
Below are some of my favorites from the Gen 1 collection. Which are yours? Reply with link in comments!
“stoner”
“disconnected”
“lighthouse by the ocean”
“hookers and cocaine”
“invisible”
”market”
“bitcoin mining”
“dark portal”
“gateway to heaven”
“heaven or hell”
”Conquest”
”Bruxelles”