Newsletter #268: There Isn’t a Single Canon
This week’s featured collector is Recourier
Recourier is “just some guy on the internet” who collects NFT pfps. Check it out at lazy.com/recourier
Last week’s poll on the Binance and Mondrian split sent a clear message: 67% of readers said the takeaway is that centralized infrastructure can’t be trusted, with the remaining 33% pointing to a market that still hasn’t found its bottom. Nobody picked “artists still love NFTs” or “something else.” The result lines up neatly with the self-custody theme running through the Binance story — when the world’s largest exchange gives users a hard deadline to move their assets off-platform or lose them, the lesson lands hard, and our readers internalized it as a trust problem rather than an art-market story. It’s worth noting the two winning answers aren’t really in tension: you can believe both that centralized platforms are unreliable custodians and that the broader market is still grinding toward a floor. Together they paint a sober but not despairing picture. Our readers aren’t reading platform exits as the death of NFTs — they’re reading them as confirmation that the durable value was always in self-custody and on-chain permanence, not in the convenience layers built on top. Which, fittingly, is exactly the thread we’ll keep pulling on.
There Isn’t a Single Canon: 0xDEAFBEEF on Surviving the Boom and What Actually Makes Art Matter
Few artists carried the contradictions of the NFT era as visibly as 0xDEAFBEEF. The Toronto-based artist rose to prominence at the height of the 2021 boom with works built from generative systems, sound, code, and genuine conceptual rigor — and spent that same period deeply skeptical of the speculation driving the market around him. This summer he’s presenting new work at Zero One by Art Basel in collaboration with Asprey Studio, and a new interview with Anika Meier in Sleek Magazine offers one of the more thoughtful reflections we’ve read on what the NFT moment actually was and what’s worth keeping from it.
Here’s what stood out for collectors.
He turned the hype into material. His project First, now a cult classic, emerged at the peak of the mania and satirized it from the inside. He wrote a smart contract that generated 5,000 absurd claims about “the first NFT” — the first NFT on the moon, the first endorsed by the Vatican, the SEC, or some imagined authority — mixing every possible source of prestige into increasingly ridiculous combinations. The strange afterlife of the piece is that some of those absurd predictions have since come true, and collectors still point back to a First token whenever a bizarre headline lands. As DEAFBEEF describes it, the project was partly his own way of processing the anxiety of that period.
He stopped minting at the top, and gave the money away. By summer 2021, the speculation had made him so uncomfortable that he stopped releasing work entirely. He didn’t want people coming back later feeling taken advantage of. First was released right at the peak, and all proceeds — more than a million dollars — went directly to GiveDirectly rather than his own wallet. He says he doesn’t regret it for a moment. Some people still speculated on the piece despite how explicit it was about what it satirized, but he took none of the upside himself, redirecting capital from the frenzy toward something he believed in.
The central idea: there is no single canon. This is the part of the interview most relevant to anyone thinking about generative art. When the form exploded in 2021, the conversation tended to trace one lineage — Sol LeWitt, Vera Molnár, plotter-based drawing. DEAFBEEF, who admits he didn’t even know who Sol LeWitt was at the time, came from somewhere else entirely: computers, electronic music, signal processing, experimental film. His references were Ben Laposky, Mary Ellen Bute, John Whitney, Herbert W. Franke — pioneers who built new visual languages out of oscilloscopes and electronic signals long before contemporary digital art existed. His point is that generative art isn’t one tradition with one aesthetic. It’s a constellation of overlapping histories, and the dominant canon is just the one that got institutional recognition first. At Art Basel he’s putting his money where his thesis is, exhibiting several of Laposky’s actual Oscillons from the 1950s alongside his own oscilloscope sculptures.
The work is increasingly physical. At a moment when AI is pushing toward frictionless, instant image generation, DEAFBEEF is moving the opposite direction — into forged iron, oscilloscope sculptures, hand-made objects. He’s careful to say he isn’t anti-AI and has explored AI themes himself. But he argues that craft and material engagement take on a different meaning in the generative-AI era. His reasoning is specific: we’re already very good at fooling the eyes and ears, but touch remains stubbornly resistant to simulation. Tactile interfaces are crude compared to our visual and auditory systems, and he doesn’t expect that to change soon. Embodied, tactile experience is, for him, one of the things that still distinguishes the human from the simulated.
And the thesis that ties it all together: art is fundamentally social. This is the line collectors should sit with. Drawing on years of forging handmade wedding rings — where people paid hundreds for a ring made of inexpensive material they could have bought cheaper online — DEAFBEEF concluded that value was never in the object. It was in the story, the process, the relationship, the meaning attached. His Hashmarks project with Bright Moments made this literal: one hundred hand-forged iron talismans, each linked to a cryptographic token, arranged in a perfect grid in Patagonia for a single moment before being dispersed across the world to the people who gathered there. The complete work existed exactly once and can never be reassembled. The impermanence and the gathering were the piece as much as the objects or the blockchain component.
Why this matters for the rest of us. If you’ve been following this newsletter, you’ll notice the threads converging again. We keep landing on the same insight from different directions — Yuga’s CEO framing NFTs as community assets that persist beyond price, SHL0MS treating discourse itself as the medium, r__ipe making market disagreement the material of the work. DEAFBEEF arrives at the most direct version of it: meaning emerges through relationships between people, objects, histories, and communities, not from the object in isolation. That’s a useful filter for collecting in a down market. The work that endures won’t be the work with the highest floor. It’ll be the work embedded in real relationships, real histories, and real critical engagement.
He’s clear-eyed about that last part, too. Echoing curator Trevor Paglen’s critique of “weak curation” in the post-blockchain space, DEAFBEEF argues digital art can’t survive as a space where anything goes with no standards, no criticism, and no historical awareness. For the work to last, it has to be discussed, evaluated, and situated within larger histories. The most interesting future, he says, is cross-pollination between digital art and the broader art world — not two separate domains, but one conversation.
This post is based on Anika Meier’s interview with 0xDEAFBEEF for Sleek Magazine.
Poll: What makes a generative artwork last?
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