From Lurker to Leader in the Cryptoart movement: Matt Kane on Dankness
On this episode we are honored to speak with artist and cryptoart community activist Matt Kane! Matt is a self taught programmer who came to coding as a way to better actualize his artist visions through his own custom software. His work features dense multi-layered works that bring to mind complex, intricate, mesh-like, webs or networks. Matt is perhaps best known for his tremendously successful 2021 Art Blocks project “Gazers.” With Gazers, the works respond to the cycles of the moon and are perpetually shifting, making these works collectors want to live with and regularly revisit.
In this episode, we discuss Matt’s journey from “lurker” to leader in the Cryptoart movement. Matt is candid about early successes and struggles to make it as an artist and the positive opportunities cryptoart opened up for him. We learn where his interest in currency as a theme in his art stems from and his discovery of crypto. He also shares his love of art history and how analog painters like Monet serve as inspiration for his digital works. Matt shares an important story detailing how he collaborated with other important members of the crypto art community in 2020 to successfully lobby for a minimum secondary resale standard for artists. The Dankness is grateful to Matt for sharing so much of his story, it’s a special and insightful conversation, and we hope you find it as engaging as we did!