GM

Today's newsletter is to be paired with Lauda & Motet while staring longingly outside your window maybe.

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

Bitcoin is about to get some great art 

O Dearly Beloved, you should see the number of garbage, mind-scarring, Bitcoin drops coming across my desk these days. 

Honestly, I deserve a medal of honor for shielding you from it all. I can only blame myself for choosing this cross to bear. 

Luckily, today we’re talking about one of the upcoming collections that I’m actually excited about. 

Context 

Richard Nadler announced details for Memento Mori, his AI art collection dropping on Bitcoin.

• Mint date: “Mid-March” 

• Supply: 206 (only 190 for sale)

• Price: Ranked auction with rebate

Our take 

Richard Nadler wants you to think about death. 

He’s following a long line of tradition of using skulls and treasures to bring attention to our fleeting mortality, except in this case, it’s golden Bitcoin(s) instead of bejeweled crowns. 

It’s an ultra-brief reminder of impermanence amidst the never-ending flood of content intended to distract. Almost like the tweets I get from Daily Death Reminder, which pop up on my timeline to remind me that “You will die someday”, before promptly getting swallowed by an avalanche of memes. 

It’s also, in a way, a Bitcoin tradition now, given that the very first Ordinal was a Mexican sugar skull, which often is used as a memento mori symbol.

Nadler is again drawing on skeletons, sometimes in decadent robes, sometimes holding gold coins, often standing in front of blooming flowers or other explosions of color.  

It’s all seemingly made with organic threads of vines and roots, a look that was curated from over 17,000 AI outputs. 

Also worth noting the technical challenges here. 

As you may have noticed, O Most Astute Reader, many of the collections on Bitcoin use low-res pixel art. This has less to do with artistic choice than it does with Bitcoin’s incredibly high fees associated with inscribing art onchain  

Memento Mori is the opposite – high resolution and rich in color. 

So to get around the costs, each artwork needed to be manually compressed, with every piece divided into individual layers that were then optimized for onchain rendering (and they still paid $10-15k in fees to inscribe it all). 

The team at gmscribe.art, which is helping launch the collection, calls this being “scribed by hand”. It’s a nice touch.

Bottom line 

An exciting first showing on Bitcoin from an AI artist coming off of a couple of big hits recently, including Yamabushi’s Horizons which showed up on our Best NFTs of 2023 list. 

In this case, I think the result mostly looks great, although I don’t think I’d ever personally hang something on my wall with the Bitcoin logo on it. 

NOTE: These drops are lightly curated. Our only requirement is that they have recognizable founders. As usual, DYOR. To learn more go here.

Houston - Journey of an Artist

The ClickCreate art platform announced its first show following the release of its S2 Pass last month, featuring none other than Erick Calderon (a.k.a. Snowfro, a.k.a. the creator of Art Blocks) at the curation wheel.

Like past ClickCreate shows, this one has weekly drops lasting the whole month, the first of which mints today with Daniel Calderon’s GENERATIVE.

Plus, they’re introducing a new mechanic today which gives pass holders influence over the supply of each Season 2 drop by using a PrePay feature.

Under Neith

Often find yourself stargazing? If so, this curated Foundation drop might fit your atmosphere.

Centered around the story of Neith, a moon sighted in the 17th and 18th centuries never to be seen again, four artists dealing in different genres explore cosmic concepts like the void and the unknown.

While this section is not long enough to describe each one, my favorite one is probably this hazy audiovisual piece by Night Sea, where cozy musical notes interject an otherwise ominous monochrome ambiance.

STRATA by Alkan Avcıoğlu

Faithful Mint or Skip readers with sensational memories and avid AI art aficionados might remember this artist’s name from Overpopulated Symphonies, one of the better-received collections from Fellowship’s PPP II show last year.

Now, Turkish artist Alkan Avcıoğlu follows the well-trodden path of many other AI artists this year, stepping into the Solana arena with STRATA.

It’s a post-photographic, mind-bending interpretation of large-scale societal structures, both natural and man-made, which can perhaps best be described as taking that one scene from Inception and extrapolating it 999 curated times. And that’s pretty cool.

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨