Matt Kane has been an artist for over 20 years, and in his own words, he is “trying to do with geometry what the great painters did with oils.”
Unfortunately, if you’re looking for art featuring spacemen flying through a flock of flaming bitcoins on the way to the moon, you will need to look elsewhere. Don’t get me wrong, flying spacemen are awesome, but Matt Kane’s art, uninfluenced by market demands, starts deep in his own creative inferno and manifests itself through code. The hero of his editorial piece on SuperRare, Leaning into the light, is a lone plant, part of an experiment, which grows straight and true, albeit a bit yellow, because of, not in spite of, the absence of light. Matt Kane goes on to suggest his creativity may have been stifled if his earlier oil paintings received an enormous amount of financial rewards, lucky for his collectors, which include the biggest names in the space, they did not.
Every artist has their own process, and there is no right or wrong way to create art, but Matt Kane being in the space for so long, and having such few artworks in circulation, minted some of the rarest and most desirable tokens
Right Place & Right Time
Viewable on Async.art, or on volatility.art, Right Place & Right Time, which was won by noted collector TokenAngels on September 18th for $100K (several months before NFTs were making mainstream headlines) is autonomous art that can dramatically change depending on Bitcoin’s daily price action, the daily change in price controls how it’s rendered.
When the Bitcoin price is moving in a positive direction, among other details, we see the layers moving closer together and becoming larger, like in the image above on the right, which is how it rendered on volatility.art on March 13th, 2021 when Bitcoin reached a new all time high. If the Bitcoin price takes a dive, like we saw on February 23rd, 2021, then Right Time & Right Place will appear with smaller circles that move further away from each other.
CRYPTOART MONETIZATION GENERATION
A special token that Matt Kane created to honor the history of crypto art, NFTs, and the RarePepe community sold to influential collector Yeahyeah on a historic day, March 11th, 2021, when a Beeple token was won by a $69MM bid placed by MetaKoven.
Serendipitously, this token was created with another historic sale in mind, the Homer Pepe, of which there is only one, not only sold for $320,000 recently, but arguably more importantly, sold for $38,500 back in 2018. This made history as the highest priced NFT sale at the time, representing a shot in the arm of the entire NFT space, setting off a chain of events leading to today, where Beeple is among the richest artists in the world and CryptoPunks selling for a million dollars each hardly makes anyone bat an eye.
One of Us
One of Us was minted on November 1st, 2019. In this artwork we can really see the different layers that Matt Kane generated using code. It’s possible that this was made with three.js, a javascript library facilitating 3d rendering, but this is just speculation based off an interview that Matt Kane did with Josephine Bellini for Behind the Art in June 2020 (an exciting listen for anyone interested in his process.) where he lets us know he leverages the MIT licensed Javascript library in his some of his art.
Artwork that has elements of autonomous generation has always done quite well in the NFT space, and this one is no different. The bidding history on SuperRare for this token is a veritable
“whose-who” of the biggest collectors in the space, featuring TokenAngels, Coldie, VK_Crypto and more, and it’s already changed hands on the secondary market at a 48x profit for the original collector who purchased it from Matt Kane.
To keep up with Matt Kane, bookmark his website mattkane.com, and follow him on Twitter.