This Man’s Goal: To Be a Virtual Coin
Kevin Abosch wanted to turn himself into a coin. Why? Because he sold a photograph of a potato. Let’s back up. Mr. Abosch, 48, is an Irish conceptual artist and photographer who lives in New York. He is interested in the blockchain, the technology best known for its use in virtual currencies like Bitcoin and ether. The strange culture around cryptocurrencies is making its way into art, in works that explore value, decentralization and the buzz around digital money.
His photo, “Potato #345,” made headlines after Mr. Abosch said it was purchased by a European businessman in 2015 for a million euros. The attention generated by the sale was exciting, he said. “On the other hand, the focus shifts from the artistic value to monetary value of the work, and for most artists the art is an extension of the artist, so you yourself start to feel commodified. In order to sort of control that, I began to think of myself as a coin.”
Mr. Abosch turned to the blockchain, which records a series of transactions across an open network of computers. The Ethereum blockchain allows coders to create virtual tokens, which can be transferred between users. Mr. Abosch created 10 million tokens. “But I didn’t want to just make these 10 million pieces of virtual art,” he said. “I wanted them to be connected to my body.”
So he had six vials of his blood drawn. He stamped the contract address — a string of numbers and letters indicating where the tokens live on the blockchain — onto 100 pieces of paper, in blood. He called the project “IAMA Coin.” He said he believes that he has “successfully connected my physical body to the virtual works.”
Michael Connor, the artistic director of Rhizome, a center affiliated with the New Museum in New York that tries to foster “digital- born art and culture,” said that he’s seen a flurry of crypto-related projects.
“Blockchain seems like it has some sort of potential to offer a different economic logic that structures society, and so a lot of artists are interested in the social implications of blockchain and crypto,” he said.
Mr. Abosch’s works — and how they’re bought and sold — capture some of the strange ethos of the world of crypto: A former tech executive recently paid more than the price of a real Lamborghini for a neon sculpture Mr. Abosch made of a blockchain address that symbolized Lamborghinis.
The piece, “YELLOW LAMBO” (2018), is a reference to a half-serious joke in the crypto community about using profits to buy Lamborghinis.
Mr. Abosch created another token, YLAMBO, and turned its address into a sculpture in yellow neon. It sold for $ 400,000 at a San Francisco art fair to Michael Jackson, the former chief of Skype.
“You meet people in the crypto world who throw millions into coins backed by nothing, but don’t understand how a piece of art has any value,” he said. “Then you meet people in the art world who don’t understand why you would invest money in art that has no physical manifestation. That’s where it gets exciting for me.”
Mr. Abosch has been wearing an electroencephalogram, or EEG cap, which can measure electrical activity in the brain. The point is “to understand to what extent ego is engaged or how it colors work, particularly when I’m photographing humans.”
Some of Mr. Abosch’s work has no visual presence whatsoever. “Forever Rose,” although inspired by a photograph of a flower, exists only as a single blockchain token that sold to 10 people in February for a total of $1 million. Mr. Abosch said this seems to him “the purest form of art — it’s the idea, without the baggage of a vessel.”
Mr. Abosch is also tokenizing Manhattan. For a soon- to- be- unveiled project, he has created 10,000 blockchain tokens for every street in Manhattan, then printed the contract addresses on a two-meter-tall map. Collectors will be able to buy the tokens, or virtual artworks, for a few dollars each. More projects are on the way.
“Whatever this is,” Mr. Abosch said, “I’m right in the middle of it.”