This week’s featured collector is Spicyshrimptaco
Spicyshrimptaco has a wild collection of various Ethereum NFTs. Take a look at lazy.com/spicyshrimptaco
Last week’s poll on NFT.NYC attendance gave us the most practically useful result we’ve had in a while: 44% said they’re not going but will follow along, while a substantial 33% already have tickets in hand. Another 11% are still considering it, and 11% said conferences simply aren’t their thing. That’s a healthy turnout by any measure — a third of respondents committed to being in Times Square this week is not the profile of a dead sector, and it means our request for trip reports has real prospects. To the third of you heading to the Edison Ballroom September 1–3: the invitation stands. Tell us what you actually saw. Which talk shifted your thinking, which artist you met that we should be writing about, what the room felt like versus what the timeline says. And to the 44% following from a distance — you’re the reason those reports matter. We’ll compile the best of what comes in, with credit or anonymously, whichever you prefer. The people who show up are the ones who know what’s really happening; the rest of us are just reading about it.
The Medium Was Speculation
Anika Meier has been quietly producing the best interviews in this space — we covered her conversations with SHL0MS and 0xDEAFBEEF earlier this year — and her latest, with artist Simon Denny, may be the most clarifying yet. Denny has a rare vantage point: he was making work about Bitcoin and blockchain in 2015, before NFTs had a name, and he’s still at it now that the hype has burned off. His read on what happened is neither defensive nor dismissive, which makes it worth sitting with.
The line that lands hardest. Denny recalls a panel he co-organized at Art Basel during the boom, where one of his invited speakers said the medium was speculation. He still thinks that’s basically true. Crypto, he argues, is more speculative by design than other areas of art — though speculation has always been part of the art world and long predates NFTs.
He anticipates the obvious objection: why focus on speculation when we’re interested in culture? His answer is that the two aren’t opposed. Speculation happens around culture, and has for a long time. NFTs and crypto accelerated it, for better or worse. Given how many readers of this newsletter have expressed some version of “I collect what I love, the market is noise,” it’s worth holding both ideas at once — the speculation was real, and it was never the whole story.
Why the art world turned hostile. Denny teaches at HFBK Hamburg and notes a shift: in 2016 people were bemused by blockchain — complicated, maybe interesting. Now they’re often hesitant if not outright hostile. His explanation is generous to the skeptics. Many people have the understandable impression that it’s scammy, a trick, not worth serious engagement, and you can see why given some of crypto’s most famous uses. He doesn’t argue them out of it. He just declines to let the scams define the whole field.
He also refuses the tidy tragedy narrative. For Denny, the satisfying story isn’t “we were promised everything and got nothing.” What happened follows a familiar pattern for technology that messes with something fundamental — and money and value are about as fundamental as it gets. Utopian stories arrive alongside commercial ones, and separating promotional claims from genuinely aspirational ones is always difficult when someone’s selling something. Things get tried at scale, they crash, people get angry, and the technology remains. The story of blockchain, he says plainly, is not over.
On the egalitarian promise. Asked how seriously he took the claim that blockchain would distribute power and wealth more evenly, Denny is direct: he knew the stories were being told, but never saw much equal distribution in practice. He saw the opposite — hyper-speculative, very uneven distribution. And yet he refuses each easy conclusion in turn. Does that mean the technologies have no value now? No. Does it mean you can’t do other things with them having watched these experiments play out? Also no. He notes someone could issue a new Bitcoin today, structured differently, that matched the original stories more closely.
Proof of Work, and what an experiment is for. In 2018 Denny co-curated an exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon where he applied blockchain thinking to curation itself — designing a protocol for distributed decision-making rather than choosing the artists himself. He invited participants who in turn proposed works, with a diagram at the entrance showing who chose whom. He didn’t select at least half the show, and some of the pieces he wouldn’t have picked turned out to be among the most interesting.
His framing of why that matters is useful for anyone who’s watched a crypto experiment fail to scale: he never expected the whole cultural sector to adopt it, and knew plenty of people wouldn’t want to work that way. But it’s still worth trying, because once you have a proof of concept, people can look back at it, return to it, and reflect. That’s a healthier standard than “did it take over the world.”
What’s relevant now: prediction markets. Asked which early blockchain ideas are only now becoming important, Denny points straight at prediction markets. Throughout the 2010s, from Augur to Gnosis, they struggled to get going — among the earliest crypto companies he encountered in his research. Now Polymarket and Kalshi are some of the most impactful financial products around. We famously “live in a casino now,” and he sees what happened to culture during the NFT period as running parallel to what’s happening with prediction markets today.
Longtime readers will recognize this thread — we covered Emily Morley’s Ocula essay in May on exactly this, artists responding to a world where volatility itself becomes the site of value. Denny is describing the same shift from inside a practice that’s been tracking it for a decade.
Two more things worth taking away. First, Denny insists the craft matters as much as the concept. For the 2016 Berlin Biennale work he spent months finding the right venue, worked with the Bundesdruckerei on custom postage stamps, and built the whole installation in the visual idiom of trade fair booths. People criticized it as looking like a startup presentation; he adopted that idiom deliberately and still thinks he was right. His current work — plotted paintings examining defense-tech aesthetics and Italian Futurism — is almost entirely visual, nearly textless. As he puts it: it’s not a report, it’s art.
Second, he’s comfortable with problems that don’t resolve. Futurism, he says, is almost unresolvable — full of innovation and beauty, but also violence, militarism, and proximity to Fascism. He finds that compelling rather than disqualifying, and he keeps ambiguity in his own work deliberately, accepting that people will misread it in both directions.
Why this matters for collectors. We’ve spent the year watching people try to answer whether NFTs were a scam or a revolution, and Denny’s usefulness is that he declines the question. The speculation was real and it was the medium. The egalitarian promises mostly didn’t materialize. The technology is still here and still interesting. The experiments that failed to scale still produced proofs of concept worth returning to. All of that can be true simultaneously, and pretending otherwise is how you end up either a permanent booster or a permanent cynic.
For anyone still holding, still collecting, still reading a newsletter about this stuff four years after the crash — that’s probably the most honest frame available.
This post is based on Anika Meier’s interview with Simon Denny for SLEEK Magazine: https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/we-live-in-a-casino-now/
Poll: Was speculation the medium of the first NFT era?
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