This week’s featured collector is Genon
Genon has a fun collection of NFTs that reflect on crypto culture. Check out their curation at lazy.com/genon
Last week’s poll on what’s driving the NFT blue-chip recovery painted a clear picture: our readers are pragmatists, not romantics. Broader crypto risk-on rotation took the lead at 40%, meaning the plurality view is that BAYC’s floor doubling has less to do with NFTs specifically and more to do with money flowing back into speculative assets across the board. Behind that, holders held, DeFi fatigue, and dead cat bounce all tied at 20% — a three-way split that captures genuine uncertainty about whether this recovery has legs or is just capital looking for somewhere to go. The most striking zero was institutional art adoption, which got no votes despite pseudonymous analyst “Van” making exactly that case in a widely circulated essay the same week. Our readers apparently don’t buy that MoMA and Centre Pompidou acquisitions are moving floors. One in five voting dead cat bounce is also worth noting — even in the middle of a rally, a meaningful slice of this audience thinks it’s temporary. Taken together, the results suggest our readers see the BAYC recovery as a macro-driven event first and an NFT-specific story second, which is probably the most honest read available right now.
SHL0MS Posted a Monet and Called It AI — Thousands Fell for It
If you missed it, here’s what happened. Anonymous artist SHL0MS posted a high-resolution scan of a Monet Water Lilies painting on X, claimed it was AI-generated, and asked viewers to explain why it was inferior to a “real” Monet. Thousands of people obliged. Painters offered detailed compositional critiques. Art critics called the brushstrokes incoherent. People said it looked better upside down, that the lilies were crudely drawn, that the image was hideous. They were all critiquing an actual Monet.
In a long interview with Anika Meier for Sleek Magazine, SHL0MS breaks down the work — titled Inferior Image — and it’s one of the most interesting conversations about internet-native art we’ve read this year.
The provocation itself was elegant, but the real artwork was what happened next. SHL0MS didn’t just post and walk away. They spent time in the replies, guiding respondents toward constrained aesthetic critiques under the assumption that they were comparing a Monet JPEG to an AI-generated JPEG. When someone delivered a particularly detailed takedown of the painting, SHL0MS would quote-tweet it with a screenshot, building a curated repository of expert critiques of a real Monet. The result was a structured, navigable archive of people confidently identifying flaws in a masterwork they’d been told was synthetic.
What makes this land for us is what it reveals about how the AI conversation has shifted. SHL0MS puts it precisely: a year or two ago, the dominant critique of AI-generated images was mechanical — AI can’t make coherent images, it gives people six fingers, it can’t do wine glasses. That was what SHL0MS calls the “six-finger paradigm.” But the responses to Inferior Image showed something different. People weren’t arguing that AI couldn’t replicate a Monet. They were granting that it could but insisting it lacked soul, intention, some ineffable human quality — a quality they then failed to detect in an actual human-made painting. The paradigm had shifted from “AI can’t do the thing” to “AI can do the thing but it doesn’t matter” without anyone noticing that the middle step — actually being able to tell the difference — had been skipped.
SHL0MS describes their broader practice as pseudonymous, social media-based performance art that’s been running for roughly nine years. The viral moments — Inferior Image, the Gmail shutdown hoax, the fabricated Trump-Clinton Epstein leak image — are the visible peaks, but SHL0MS is clear that they only work because of the thousands of smaller provocations and experiments in between. The viral pieces are one-liners by design. What makes them artistically interesting is the practice underneath.
The NFT angle is characteristically understated. SHL0MS minted the Monet scan as an NFT, which sold for a significant sum during a dry market and predictably drew accusations of money laundering — which SHL0MS dryly notes would be an odd thing to do through a viral artwork with millions of views on a public immutable ledger. But the minting raised a genuine question that SHL0MS doesn’t try to resolve: what’s actually the artwork? The tweet? The discourse? The NFT? The curated archive of critiques? SHL0MS’s answer is essentially all of it — the NFT is an occasional artifact of a practice that lives primarily on the internet itself.
There’s a passage in the interview that’s worth sitting with. SHL0MS argues that humanity spends trillions of hours on the internet every year, yet most people still think of it only as a distribution channel for art — a place where you share images of paintings or videos of performances. The idea that art can exist on the internet itself, as native to the platform as a painting is to a canvas, still doesn’t register for most people. Even in the NFT world, the token is the neat package that makes the art legible. SHL0MS is working in the messier space where the boundaries between tweet, performance, provocation, and artwork blur into a spectrum.
For collectors, Inferior Image connects to something we’ve been tracking in this newsletter — the question of what makes onchain art interesting beyond the object. r__ipe’s Value Discovery used Uniswap pools as compositional material. SHL0MS uses the algorithm, the audience, and the discourse itself. In both cases, the work isn’t sitting in a frame waiting to be looked at. It’s embedded in the infrastructure of the internet, and the participation of the audience isn’t optional — it’s the medium.
The title Inferior Image works on multiple levels, but SHL0MS’s reading of it is the sharpest: the Monet was never inferior. The way of seeing was.
This post is based on Anika Meier’s interview with SHL0MS for Sleek Magazine.
Poll: What’s the real artwork in Inferior Image?
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