Erick calderon art blocks11/21/2023 In 2017, Calderon was browsing Reddit when he came across an early N.F.T. Going into galleries made him nervous because he couldn’t afford to buy anything, he felt as though he was wasting people’s time by being there. bracelets for people to wear at parties and festivals. In 2014, he and a friend raised forty thousand dollars on Kickstarter to manufacture programmable L.E.D. He spent his spare time on tech-adjacent creative projects, playing around with projection mapping and 3-D printing. After studying international business at the University of Texas, he founded an imported-tile company in Houston. Until 2021, Calderon, who is forty years old, identified more as an entrepreneur than as an artist. At Art Basel, Calderon said, “We had people from the traditional art world tell us that ours was the best exhibit of art in Miami.” In the past handful of months, both Christie’s and Sotheby’s have auctioned Chromie Squiggles, calling Calderon “legendary” and crediting his work with “bringing conceptual art back to the art market.” The New York gallery Venus Over Manhattan will host an exhibit of Squiggles later this month. ![]() “I don’t know if you’ve ever felt impostor syndrome, but I feel it every day.” His immersion in the art world has been unusually swift and thorough. The first time he’d been publicly introduced as an artist was the day before, he told me. Photograph by Hannah Gentiles / Courtesy Art BlocksĬalderon is a newcomer to fine art. Most of the art on display in the Art Blocks gallery originated as projects on the site. The painter Christopher Wool was equally skeptical: “It sounds like you’re talking about art without aesthetics.” “I’m hearing no conversation about criticality. “I’m feeling super depressed right now,” the visual artist Magalie Guérin said. When Calderon opened the floor to questions, responses were overwhelmingly negative. “We want to celebrate the intersection of art and technology in a town that’s served as a home for innovation.” “We want to educate locals and visitors on the subject of creative coding,” he explained. “There’s a Chromie Squiggle that sold-and I just kind of laugh, because I think it’s completely insane-that sold from one collector to another three weeks ago for $3.2 million,” Calderon said.Ĭalderon, a newly minted multimillionaire, used words like “revolution” and “movement” to describe the nascent technology, which allows for the ownership-and, therefore, commodification-of digital objects. Since then, the platform has generated more than a hundred million dollars in sales of digital art.īehind Calderon, a slide show flashed a picture of one of his own algorithmically generated art works, a rainbow-hued scribble known as the Chromie Squiggle, which he had released in an edition of ten thousand. ![]() The Marfa gallery is the physical embodiment of Art Blocks, a virtual platform for N.F.T.s that Calderon launched at the end of 2020. This past October, Erick Calderon stood in front of a crowd in Marfa, the West Texas town beloved by artists, and attempted to explain, in a public town-hall meeting, his new venture: a showcase of N.F.T.
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