An Exhaustive Reenactment of Matt Kane’s Moral Performance
For Sickos and Scholars, by Maxwell Cohen
Table of Contents
· A Brief Prologue Containing Important Contextual Information
∘ Summer of 2022…
∘ One quick note about RarePass…
∘ Matt Kane’s Singular Skill…
∘ November 16, 2022…
∘ There is a world…
∘ Fate’s First Intervention: July of 2023…
∘ Fate’s Second Intervention: Early August of 2023…
∘ Fate’s Final Intervention: Mid-August of 2023…
· ACT I: Contractual Obligations
∘ September 26, 2023…
∘ September 28, 2023…
∘ October 1, 2023…
∘ October 2nd, 2023…
∘ October 3rd, 2023…
∘ The SuperRare Twitter Space
· An Intermission of our Own, Wherein we Gently Interrogate this “Past” Matt Kane is Always Referencing…
∘ …Specifically the 1990’s…
∘ “The night I asked for a sign…”
∘ Matt Kane’s Life in March of 2020…
∘ …Early to Mid 2023…
∘ …October 2023…
· The Zombie Intermission
∘ October 1st, 2023…
∘ October 18th…
∘ October 19th…
∘ The Matt Kane Action Figures…
· ACT II: Milk and Cookies
∘ October 20th, 2023…
∘ October 23rd, 2023…
∘ The Act II Announcement…
∘ October 27th to October 31st…
∘ November 1st…
∘ November 2nd…
∘ The Past…
∘ This Present…
∘ Our Future…
∘ Throughout Early-to-Mid November…
∘ November 16th, 2023…
· ACT III: FREE MATT KANE
∘ November 17th to November 20th…
∘ November 21 is a Tuesday…
∘ A Few Final Thoughts from Matt Kane…
∘ At Long Last, Block Friday…
∘ Some Weeks Later, on Christmas…
· The Moral Performance in Retrospect
A Brief Prologue Containing Important Contextual Information
Summer of 2022…
…was hot, and it was muggy, and it was sad. The at-large euphoria of crypto culture in 2021 had all but dried up, and the bear market — in whose clutches the entire ecosystem would remain for years to come — was beginning to tighten its sinister grip.
In this same Summer of 2022, one Mr. Matt Kane — who just eight months earlier had released the 1000-piece long-form generative coding collection, Gazers, to unprecedented community and critical acclaim — received a phone call.
The caller was an old ally from the foxholes of early crypto art: Zack Yenger, the Senior Vice President and cultural emissary of storied fine-art platform, SuperRare. It was not only a call to catch-up, it was also a call for help. As it turns out, Zack and the SuperRare team preceded many others in understanding that the coming economic squeeze would be extensive and difficult. Preemptive preparations for survival were being put in place. SuperRare had formulated a plan designed to A) motivate the market, B) rejuvenate some of the platform’s stagnated interest, and C) shore-up its financials for the arduous journey ahead. On the phone with Matt Kane, Zack described this idea, and he asked for Kane’s participation.
SuperRare’s gamble would be revealed in November of that year as RarePass, and the value proposition was simple:
250 mintable “RarePasses” were to be publicly released via auction, each pass promising its holder access to 12 months of airdropped artworks from some of crypto art’s most iconic artists. The benefits of RarePass were positioned to prospective buyers as such:
Each month for the next year, all 250 RarePass holders would receive one unique piece within a larger series created by a “legendary artist,” while another artist would airdrop three 1-of-1 artworks to three random holders, giving all RarePass holders a ~⅕ chance to receive something massively lucrative on top of their guaranteed acquisitions (because a little bit of gambling only sweetens the pot).
While these were pretty clear and persuasive incentives for buyers, the incentives for the artists themselves were far less clear. In terms of compensation for his RarePass participation, Matt Kane has emphatically asserted that he was initially asked to create 250 RarePass artworks 100% for free.
Apparently, SuperRare’s position was that artists would receive compensation via the royalties generated by each collection, the renewed attention paid to each artist at the time of their releases, and all artists each receiving a RarePass themselves. No additional financial incentive was at that point offered.
Naturally, Matt Kane felt this was “a bit extractive.”
One quick note about RarePass…
…is that on the day of RarePass’ release, SuperRare announced that its artists would receive hard compensation for their creative contributions, with 10% of RarePass sales being split amongst the artists involved. An important caveat, however, is that all contributing artists were to be compensated the same, whether they were asked to contribute 250 works or three 1/1’s.
“I didn’t understand they were going to compensate the artists who made three artworks in the exact same way they compensated the artists who made 250 artworks. That was not presented to me,” Matt explains. “Does that even make sense?”
Sensible or not, the decision to pay artists directly from the RarePass coffers was made retroactively. Matt claims he signed his contract with SuperRare on October 4th, 2022. The adjusted compensation for artists would not be announced until November 16th. As Matt told me, “I was already under contractual obligations, and then they just changed the terms of the agreement. But the terms of the agreement I agreed to was to do something for free.”
As this entire performance should communicate, Matt Kane has an elephant’s memory. And there is no burning away the past. SuperRare had asked him to work for free, and he had agreed.
Thus, unwittingly, is planted the seed for all of this.
Matt Kane’s Singular Skill…
…is that he’s always been able to “bend things to [his] will” (which is especially true in such business partnerships), through what he calls “site-specific” artistry. In effect, Matt has a uncanny urge and ability to comment upon the physical, relational, and cultural arenas of his artistry.
We can see this site-specific ideology all over Matt’s works. Gazers, for example, was itself a critical artistic use of the generative algorithmic minting method made famous by pioneering platform, Artblocks’; it was itself a commentary engaging with generative artistry. Gazers’ frankly-confounding amount of unique traits was in some ways a response to those arbitrary rarity rankings which Artblocks buyers would affix to other notorious projects therein, like Snowfro’s Chromie Squiggles, Tyler Hobbes’ Fidenzas, or Dmitri Cherniak’s Ringers.
We can go further back to when Matt infamously sold the piece, Meules after Claude Monet (2021) at Sotheby’s. “Sold” is a misnomer, seeing as the buyer ultimately reneged on their six-figure offer, no money ever made it into Matt Kane’s pockets, and Sotheby’s refuses to acknowledge the false sale on their website. The piece, Meules, was itself a site-specific commentary on auction-house politics/prices, with its description reading:
“A master copy after Claude Monet’s “Meules,” which was last auctioned at Sotheby’s on May 14th, 2019 for $110.7 million; one week after artist Matt Kane minted and sold his first NFT for 0.5 ETH, equivalent at the time to $85. This painting was created two days later with the artist’s custom digital art studio software with the dream to one day use NFT technology to connect this digital master copy to Monet’s original oil painting through provenance under the same auction house.”
Perhaps the earliest example in crypto art came with Kane’s “Marble Card” release, as part of their “Crypto Artist Series.” The Marble Card project tasked artists with designing trading cards of a kind, minting them as NFTs, and “marbling” the card by imbuing its imagery with a clickable hyperlink. With Kane’s card mimicking the aesthetic of U.S. fiat currency, the hyperlink — as opposed to the other four artists that series (WGMeets, Alotta Money, XCOPY, and ConnieDigital) all linking out to their own works — brought clickers to the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
Here, the same opportunity presented itself with RarePass. From the beginning, Matt was uneasy about the prospect of creating such a body of work for free, but “when Zack came to me with this idea, I was feeling like, worst-case scenario is that I’m an artist, and this will be another site-specific work.”
Site-specificity aside, there was not yet in Kane a desire to rabblerouse, certainly not to — intentionally or not — denigrate SuperRare on a public stage. There was only an artist famously full of ideas, a unique and frustrating situation that was ripe for commentary, and the first gurgles of perceived commodification by a business that was bleeding money (”SuperRare was losing a million dollars a month,” Matt told me) and seeking survival any way it could.
November 16, 2022…
…is the day SuperRare formally launches their RarePass auctions. RarePass Genesis #1 — said to confer “special benefits” onto its patron — is sold for an incredible 138 ETH to Kelly LeValley Hunt, sparking a furor. By the end of the day, all 250 would be sold out.
Matt Kane, however, has plenty of time until he was due to release his own artwork; he is slated as the Airdrop Artist for the following October. From his first conversations with Zack, he knew his contribution “was going to be a site-specific work no matter what,” but in what way? Matt was snagged upon that notion which had first irritated him: this idea of an artist being asked to work for free.
But it wasn’t just his initial contractual obligations that so enticed Matt Kane towards the concept of Free-ness. As Kane told me, “In crypto, free does not actually always mean free; it means undervalued, that’s how it’s used. When Gazers minted out two years ago, I saw “FREE,” that emoji 🆓, used so many times…I work with iconographic imagery a lot, and to my knowledge nobody had really taken that icon that’s culturally a staple and do anything with it.”
You may at this point naturally be wondering why Matt Kane would even agree to this SuperRare contract if the terms were so discomfitting. Kane, as it turns out, would spend the next year not only working on his RarePass contribution, but on two portraiture projects, ANONS and Multitudes, which required uncompromised mastery over his digital painting software.
And that meant a lot of practice in the meantime.
“In order for me to get fluid with my own software, I need to do small studies,” Matt says of his work in general. “This was true of 20 years ago when I was just working with a brush and tubes of paint, I’d make little studies, little color studies…So for me, if this helps keep the lights on for SuperRare, and it’ll be helpful for me because it’s going to make me all the more fluid and lively for these portraits,” then it was essentially a win-win. “What I was doing with [these RarePass works] about becoming a better painter and a more fluid colorist…it was about improving myself as a painter.”
There is a world…
…in which Kane’s initial RarePass concept, explored and perfected over the course of a year, used to gain expertise in his own creative software, commenting on the meaning of freedom and artist value and overcommodification in such a speculative crypto art landscape, proved the extent of Matt Kane’s involvement in RarePass.
He would have spent the rest of 2022 and most of 2023 creating 250 small color studies on this theme of “Free.” In October of 2023, these pieces would have launched, and just like with artists Pindar van Arman and Coldie and Sarah Zucker and OSF, the 250 RarePass holders would have been thrilled to receive a conceptually and aesthetically brilliant piece by a universally-admired artist. Matt Kane would have been at the center of some fanfare days, he surely would have been praised for his incredible artistry, and then everyone would move on. XCOPY’s and Hackatao’s November releases would have capped-off the final month of RarePass, and that would be that.
But throughout the course of 2023, a few key events fundamentally altered Matt’s relationship to RarePass, artistic value, and his own place in crypto art. He had walked out onto unstable ground. Or, perhaps it is better to say, he was led there by fate.
Fate’s First Intervention: July of 2023…
…when, as Matt Kane tells it, “I flew out to New York and I was part of a show that SuperRare put on there.” The show was called “A DIGITAL TRANSCENDENCE: THE INTERSECTION OF ART & TECH,” which opened on July 13th and featured works by “Botto, Camibus, Emily Xie, Jack Kaido, Matt Kane, Osinachi, and William Mapan x Christiane Lemieux.” Matt’s piece was created specifically for the event, Crown of Flowers after Bouguereau (2023), and was purchased thereafter by one of crypto art’s most stories collectors, Moderats.
Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t be necessary or even helpful to include an artist’s entire description for such a piece, especially within an essay about a completely different set of artistry. But for the sake of what comes next, it feels vital:
“Crown of Flowers after Bouguereau” is a deeply personal tribute and a reflection on the inexorable passage of time. It was 3,649 days before the opening of the exhibition for which this work was made that I experienced a devastating loss — the suicide of my dear friend who introduced me to the exquisite works of William Bouguereau, her favorite artist. A few days later, as if guided by the unseen threads of destiny, I found myself in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, standing in front of Bouguereau’s “Crown of Flowers,” where the sheer weight of my grief was laid bare.
This work is my dialogue with the past, as I revisit that transformative encounter through the lens of personal evolution. Using custom digital art studio software, a tool I constructed during the following years of my grief as a safe haven for expression, I’ve woven layers reminiscent of Bouguereau’s oil technique. The elder figure, rendered in an underpainting style, symbolizes the spectral yet formative presence of the past. Her unfinished form is both a tribute to the foundations on which we build, and a reminder that what lies beneath the surface shapes what we become.
By emphasizing a prickly weed and stones on the ground in this reimagining, I draw attention to elements present in Bouguereau’s original painting. Their bare feet, tender and unprotected, symbolize the vulnerability and openness with which we navigate the world. The enhanced prominence of the weed and stones in my work serves as a reminder of the hidden thorns and unexpected roughness that threaten even our most unguarded moments. They are a testament that amidst the blossoms, the sharpness of loss and adversity persists.
This piece seeks to foster curiosity about the intertwined stories of these figures, my connection to the artwork, and the transformative journey within. The temporal significance of this exhibition’s opening — 3,649 days marking a chapter — stands as a testament to how, through art, we can bear witness to our own metamorphoses.
As tomorrow dawns, marking the 3,650th day and the close of a decade since the loss of my dear friend, it whispers the promise of continuance. With each sunrise, we are granted the delicate power to carry our yesterdays into uncharted tomorrows, to honor the past as we layer day upon day, like brushstrokes of color, in the tapestry of our ongoing journey. Like the crowning of flowers in this artwork, may we embrace the gifts and lessons that our past bestows upon us, allowing them to adorn our lives with purpose and beauty. The underpainting, hidden yet foundational, is symbolic of the layers of our past that lie beneath the surface — shaping, supporting, and imbuing the present with depth and meaning. In the tender interweaving of sorrow and triumph, we find the seeds that we can plant, allowing the future to grow and blossom in gratitude toward our past.”
The point is beyond any one conceptual inclusion; the point is that there was so much conceptualism included. Like everything else Matt Kane creates, Crown of Flowers after Bouguereau, resulted from deeply-considered and arduous work.
And yet, this finely-executed, brilliantly-conceived, 4K-optimized piece was ultimately presented in SuperRare’s exhibition on a “1K television screen turned sideways.”
Matt took careful note of that.
“It was a disappointing presentation of my work to see in person. And to know that their level of quality assurance was there, it told me something about them. I expected better. And as a RarePass artist…I could have made 250 generative works in an afternoon, not put any more thoughts or consideration into it. But my contribution to RarePass was me making 250 hand-made paintings…and it was me every single day for a year putting anywhere between 20–90 minutes into making one of these studies. So it was no small effort.”
If this was how SuperRare treated Matt’s single exhibited work, then how would titanic RarePass effort be demonstrated and honored in the future? How could Matt Kane keep from asking himself that question again and again?
Fate’s Second Intervention: Early August of 2023…
…and after the previous month’s Exhibition disappointment, Matt meets with the SuperRare team to discuss his RarePass works. Therein, “I told everyone ‘Listen, I’m not mailing in my RarePass. I’ve got something really special planned,’ and I’m talking to them about the [color study] works.”
But “what happened was, within the next month, I had a meeting with one of the SuperRare partners…I basically brought my complaints to them privately, and I told them…what I thought about the rollout of RarePass. I suggested they think about, after everyone had gone, doing some kind of public something-or-other to show they’re proud of our efforts.” He meant something akin to articles, video essays, any show of scholarship from within SuperRare that would communicate a commitment to, and interest in, the RarePas artworks themselves. Matt wanted a declaration that all this work was not meant solely for the purpose of securing SuperRare’s coffers but was imbued with some greater meaning, befitting the artistic effort within them.
Alas, Kane is clear and emphatic about the resultant exchange:
“And what they told me was, ‘The way the partners at SuperRare feel, RarePass was a breakeven for us.’” In other words, it didn’t make financial sense for SuperRare to invest any more resources into the artists involved.
For Matt Kane, this was akin to a betrayal. “I was around 200 artworks in at this point in the conversation, and I’m hearing that my efforts are just seen as a breakeven, so why would they put any more effort into RarePass or RarePass artists or RarePass collectors? That was the turning point… That’s where I look and say ‘You guys are not my buddies, you guys basically saw a way to extract, and all right, I accept that.’”
Acceptance and acquiescence, however, are not synonymous.
Fate’s Final Intervention: Mid-August of 2023…
…finds Matt ruminating on a year’s worth of work for a company that did not value him or his fellow artists properly. Value, of course, was a central theme of the artworks he had been creating to that point. His value, his works’ value, creative vs. economic value…
Kane labored this whole time under his initial agreement to work for free. The terms of that initial contract, completed before any community duress, hounded him. “…On the way to get breakfast one day, I thought, I should just go type ‘contractual obligations’ into Midjourney and see what comes up.”
The fruits of that freak idea motivated Matt Kane to spend the next month-and-a-half completely up-ending the context and contents of the RarePass project he had spent every day of the last ten months working on.
That which emerged would grow far beyond the bounds of what he and SuperRare were expecting or prepared for. The color studies were put aside. This new project, made with new tools and for a renewed purpose, gained a new name. Over time, it picked-up a lengthy performative aspect. It was apparently unrecognizable to any adherent of Matt’s previous oeuvre, this AI-based and heavily-improvisational new thing. It wouldn’t mollify RarePass holders, and might really piss them off. That was, in fact, its intention.
Matt Kane set to work generating a truly massive amount of Midjourney outputs, images featuring Harry Houdini, globes and globs of illuminated color, dead animals, flames, porcelain figurines, bubbles, barbies, bears, Christ figures, Precious Moments figurines, children, skeletons, crowds and kerosene lamps, firefighters, mermaids, marshmallow men, men on horses, men on fire, men with black bars over their eyes, monkeys, holy men, gamblers, a truly staggering variety of aesthetics — from Norman Rockwell to Hokusai — and, nigh ubiquitous amongst them all, burning bridges. Matt Kane was not aiming for subtlety.
The name of this new project: Contractual Obligations. Perhaps nothing more need be said about Matt’s new vehicle than this:
“I talked to the SuperRare partners maybe a week or five days before [October] because they had concerns, seeing all these burning bridges and AI from Matt Kane. It was like I was called into the principal’s office…They wanted to find out how pissed off I was.”
They would.
ACT I: Contractual Obligations
September 26, 2023…
…and the official SuperRare Twitter account announces to the public that, for its penultimate month, all 250 RarePass holders would receive an airdropped artwork from Mr. Matt Kane himself.
In a fascinating turn of events, the piece SuperRare chose for their promotional photo is a Matt Kane classic: Detour III, minted on November 16th, 2022, the very same day that RarePass launched, and featuring the Artist Description: “Ten years ago this day, I was detoured from my way to nowhere to somewhere to right here.”
It seems impossible that anyone at SuperRare, on September 26th, knew how pregnant with meaning their simple promotional poster would prove to be.
September 28, 2023…
…finds Matt Kane responding to a month-old, and more-or-less innocuous, remark from a RarePass holder named Merv.
The comment came in celebration of a previous SuperRare announcement, that the painter Sam Spratt was going to be releasing 3 1-of-1 RarePass artworks for August. Merv wrote: “OMG. It’s happening! Collecting a @SamSpratt 1/1 would be sick. Not to mention that we will also be getting an @XCOPYART and @MattKaneArtist in the next few months.”
A fairly benign outburst of excitement, but one that Matt Kane, would not let go uninterrogated.
Matt’s response reads, “Define what ‘getting a Matt Kane’ means. Is ‘a Matt Kane’ simply a recognizable visual style? Or something deeper? Is ‘a Matt Kane’ static or performance? Is ‘a Matt Kane’ just colorful Bitcoin logo or does it dynamically engage with ideas of value, values, & ethos of #cryptoart?”
We won’t be taking special note of every Matt Kane tweet throughout the next few months, but I find it interesting how, even days before his Airdrop would hit RarePass wallets and kickstart the first Act of his performance, Matt was kind of erecting an ideological arena around himself, publicly acknowledging one of the core conceits of his artistry to come. In this case, he makes clear his distaste for labels, his being commodified into an aesthetic by years of crypto art participation.
Kane will spend the next few days further constructing his performance’s conceptual scaffolding. But never obviously, or at least not at this point. Only with the benefit of hindsight could we connect the dots when on…
October 1, 2023…
…Matt Kane posted the following ambiguous communication:
We’ll return to this “Zombie ANON” a little later, when that portraiture project becomes intertwined for a brief moment with the performance at hand.
For those who came upon this tweet at the time, they would have found little abnormal about its contents: Matt was releasing another work which was characteristic of his style, and sure, there’s this bit about an intermission, but Kane has never shied away from his showman’s spirit, so probably not much to read into there.
If the Moral Performance would accomplish anything, however, it would be to ensure that every one of Kane’s communications henceforth would be read into ad infinitum.
Nevertheless, if the earlier Merv response was an ideological mise-en-scene, this throwaway communication on October 1st was more a physical stage-dressing. It at least was designed to pique curiosity for what would be coming the following day, on…
October 2nd, 2023…
…when eagle-eyed blockchain explorers would have noticed that Matt Kane’s wallet had minted 250 very strange artworks on the SuperRare contract in the dead of night. These were not the usual Matt Kane creations.
What are Matt Kane’s usual creations? How to describe his classic aesthetic? There’s something futuristic about them; the way that all his colors are imbued with a subtle electronic glow. They are a vortex of criss-crossing lines, dots, splotches of colors, arranged haphazardly and yet with implacable logic, like he’s rendering into 4K the holy geometry of atoms, molecules, and cells that vibrate endlessly upon the thread of all things.
Matt Kane’s works are advancements of an ambitious color experiment begun many years earlier when he worked in a physical medium: Kane would paint layers of resin and carefully press them together under a vapor-sucking hood (working with resin is a notoriously dangerous endeavor without the proper safety protocols). Matt seemed always drawn to bright, almost neon colorations, placing them beside each other, in tandem with one another, in ways which even today are distinguishable as his from a distance.
In a digital medium, this color theory expanded via a precise and creative tessellation of lines and shapes. To exemplify this principle, I’m going to use a few examples from Matt’s aforementioned projects, ANONS and Multitudes.
Below is his piece Anon #3 (2024). You can immediately see these bright, strange, brilliantly interwoven colors. You can see the development from the resin boxes of the past.
Matt, however, has recently taken steps to make clear the confoundingly deep composition of his pieces. Here is the same Anon #3 zoomed in:
Okay a little further, to really get a sense of Matt’s quantum scope:
I invite you to visit the piece and zoom into the gigapixel artwork for yourself.
This radical style is a constant through almost all of Kane’s minted pieces. It’s a cosmic marriage between technological brilliance, clear vision, and generational taste. It’s what makes his work so recognizable, so sought-after, so god-damn good.
But on October 2nd, 2023, Matt Kane minted 250 artworks that had absolutely no resemblance to his style at all.
Oh, and later that day, Matt tweets out the following coded message:
The highlighted text about Carnegie Hall holding 250 performances a year.
The admission that “There are no coincidences. Ever.”
The performative flourishes: “Looking forward to the curtain coming up! Or is it already up?”
Only those who had plumbed the SuperRare contract, finding 250 very-un-Matt-Kane Matt Kane artworks there, would have been able to answer such a question.
The next day, however, Kane would leave no doubt.
October 3rd, 2023…
…is the fated day, the day when so much about Matt Kane publicly burns: his perception, his style, his relationships within crypto art, every expectation about who he is as an artist and what he’s interested in creating; the Moral Perfomance’s unveiling.
In lighting fire to the bridge between himself and his own mythos, Matt Kane burns many other things in the process.
At 10:34am, those 250 previously-minted artworks are airdropped to the 250 RarePass holders. The collection together is titled Contractual Obligations, the irony of which is more apparent in retrospect than would have been to anyone paying attention at the time.
But, to be clear, from this moment onward, all of crypto art was paying attention to Matt Kane.
To so eagerly anticipate the coming of a Matt Kane artwork — amongst the most costly to acquire in crypto art — and to have all these preconceptions about their appearance, their inspiration, what bits of genius Kane (as he always did) would imbue therein…and then to find these…these very un-Matt-Kane artworks — all of them quite obviously AI-generated — with acerbic and acrimonious names which would have been immediately recognizable to crypto art culturalists. BREAK EVEN, Below the Floor, Follow for Follow, Here for the Community 4. The immediately combative titles were only cemented the deeper one looked into the aesthetics.
Each piece contained six traits minted into the metadata. They are as follows:
Act: Of which all 250 pieces are denoted as Act I
Creation Location: Desk, Bed, Bus, On top of a pile of many with many beautiful ladies, Couch, Under the typewriter desk, Shower, Bar, Aurora Bridge, Caspiar, and Yacht.
Effort: Featuring 28 possibilities, with traits such as Abysmal, Sad, Lamentable, Super-low, Douchey, Nadir, Bottom Barrel, etc.
Medium: 249 artworks are designated as Adversarial Network, while one piece (2012–11–16 23–20–21 896, much more on this work later) is assigned the medium Cell Phone Photograph.
Miniseries: 69 different miniseries traits denote whether the pieces are part of a mini-collection like Here for the Community or CGI Bubbles.
Normie or No: 187 of the pieces are tagged No; 57 are tagged Normie; 10 others were tagged Luggage, Baguette, Chuck, LOL, and, Nah.
Finally, if the title, imagery, and traits proved not quite descriptive enough of Kane’s attitude, his Artist Description, while cryptic, helped further solidify the collection’s message:
“Bound by words, liberated by art. RarePass marketing promised a chance to ‘Cement your legacy in the cryptoart revolution.’ Inspired by Sarah Zucker’s 2021 observation that ‘Crypto Art has a unity of Spirit but not Style’ and echoing Jason Bailey’s 2018 notion of crypto art’s pro-artist, self-referential dank nature, I turned to cutting-edge artificial intelligence. Herein, my text-prompt reflections unravel myriad cultural issues, moments, and styles.
Contrasting the gigapixel intricacy of my signature work, this collection embraces the ethos of ‘Low Effort NFTs,’ staying true to AI’s default resolutions and resisting the urge to upscale. Conceptually, however, I was unable to abide to low effort. Within the crypto realm, both ‘bridge’ and ‘burning’ resonate with literal and metaphorical significance. Each of these 250 NFTs, on one level or another, grapples with the theme of burning bridges — often taboo in many cultural circles, yet an essential tactic in wars and the most genuine revolutions of both culture and the soul of individuals yearning to break free from extractive systems of co-option.
Section 37B
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased, real-life locations, known objects, or even abstract concepts — be they tangible, intangible, fantastical, or somewhere in the digital realm — is purely the result of random AI imaginings and entirely coincidental. Rest assured, no bears, bulls, or neural networks were harmed, melted, or otherwise mistreated in the creation of these images. $VOID where prohibited. Warning: May contain toxic amounts of riboflavin. Not responsible for your freedom of choice, lost ETH, gas, bloating, misplaced trust, regret, impatience, speculation, gambling, or worship of cult of personalities or false idols. Sorry, no CODs. Fax mentis incendium gloriae et cetera et cetera. Kids, get your parents permission before downloading MetaMask.
Where I come from, you buy a 🎟️ to a performance.
Proof of Intent:
7291cb58b69d02a6694f280373d508e9287714177d0d0023284edf3cffcf1ae0
A81756ab0989557182e3a6868dc693dd8496efff67fa8d44a26202edfffe0800
D547965816374a8f2c9c20d1b7af4db09946863b3d6f1712c8848c4bd7e78cbe”
One thing you learn when writing about Matt Kane is how prophetic he is about how work will be received, how it will change, how it will ultimately be considered in the zeitgeist. So much of the Moral Performance to come was captured right there in this Artist Description. The ambition, the honoring of crypto art’s roots, the extensive indictment of crypto culture, the artist grappling with what “effort” means from a creative context, the comedic undertones, and, of course, more than anything else, the promise of a performance.
Because from this point onwards and for the better part of three months, everything that Matt Kane does publicly is part of one grandiose performance, and everyone who received a Contractual Obligations piece received not just an AI-generated Matt Kane artwork, they were reserved a seat for all which was to come.
While the Contractual Obligations airdrop is clearly the most important foundational aspect of the Moral Performance to take place on October 3rd, one can argue that the performance did not truly begin — surely, far fewer folks would have known what was happening here — if it wasn’t for what was to come at 1pm EST/10am PST that day.
The performance piece of the Moral Performance formally begins when Matt Kane joins a live Twitter event with Zack Yenger for what would come to be known as…
The SuperRare Twitter Space
At the exact moment that Twitter Spaces begins, Matt Kane’s entire three-act Moral Performance ascended ubiquitously into the public consciousness.
In Kane’s own words, “I didn’t go into [the Twitter Spaces] expecting to go-off on the whole [crypto art] space like I did…I ended up almost like I was watching myself talking, like an out-of-body experience… I was just gonna be doing my prepared statement…introducing people to the context of Andy Kaufman explicitly so that they could maybe get the fact that like ‘What’s Act II?…What’s Act III?’ That was all supposed to be it…just so people could see the roadmap.”
That was all it was supposed to be. Until it wasn’t.
For those uninterested in listening to the whole thing for themselves, here’s a minute-by-minute breakdown of the Twitter Space in its entirety:
5:00- 6:17: Zack Yenger introduces Matt Kane. It’s all the fluffy language, career accolades, exactly what you’d expect from a platform releasing a massive new collection of any high-magntitude artist’s work. What you don’t explicitly hear here, however, is the subtext: SuperRare only learned about Matt’s new collection a few days prior, and its tenor, which was…weird…and argumentative…and impugning.
6:17–8:44: Matt launches into a so-called “prepared statement.” He quickly invokes “Andy Kaufman, a comedic genius who understood the depth of expectation and the art of surprise” as the primary inspiration for the ensuing performance. He then announces that he will be reading a selection from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby being that: “Mr. Andy Kaufman was known to read The Great Gatsby to audiences from time to time, breaking their expectations as he read the book in its entirety” (which is true, actually. Kaufman — perhaps the most enigmatic of those comedic masterminds which the 1970’s and 80’s lashed to pop culture, known for bizarre stage antics, his role on the hit sitcom Taxi, and manic persona — would periodically, instead of performing the comedy routine audiences paid to see, simply read The Great Gatsby until exhausted audiences eventually jettisoned themselves for the exits). As Kaufman famously said during an appearance on The David Letterman Show: “You came for comedy; I’m going to give you humanity.” Apropos his Gatsby schtick specifically: “You came for comedy; I’m going to give you culture, whether you want it or not.”
Matt, by the way, adopts a robotic voice for the entirety of this segment, mimicking an AI that is introducing both himself and the book. He sets that voice aside for the next two full minutes in which he does indeed read the first few paragraphs of The Great Gatsby.
8:44–8:54: Matt feigns as if audiences were listening to a record. “End side one; please turn the record. End side one; please turn the record. End side one; please turn the record.”
8:54–12:08: It is Kane’s untransformed voice which comes next, imploring: “Let us reserve judgment,” before he then goes into a lengthy commentary on judgment, empathy, criticism (“Let us remember that being open to transparent criticism on a public stage is the substance of leadership, and that the freedom to criticize is vital.”), progress, and wealth:
“We stand together at the intersection of art and blockchain, grappling with questions of identity, authenticity, and value,” he says at one points.
“Together, let’s traverse the intricate landscape of Contractual Obligations, delve into the richness of trust and moral responsibility mirrored in the soft hues of the Dutch Baroque, and soar towards the sustenance of true freedom: to express, dissent, revolt, and with what ethos we might march forward while simultaneously reflecting back from where we came,” he says elsewhere.
Finally, Kane invokes the immortal final words of The Great Gatsby, “‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ As we venture forward, let us reflect on the paths trodden, the bridges crossed, and the morals that guide our passage through the vibrant mosaic of crypto art, where every pixel tells a story, every NFT holds a universe, and every artist is a beacon of unyielding expression.”
12:08–13:34: Matt concludes his prepared statement with the following quite-hopeful closing:
“I am positive that a fair introspective look across the collection, taking time to read titles and traits, will result in a transformed perspective from a superficial glance as we initially do so often when observing art. Please take some time to absorb the art, connect the collection among itself in a culture you are a part of. Feel your feelings. Art must be allowed to make us feel something, must be allowed to give us perspective on ourselves and the world we inhabit, must be allowed to critique, must be allowed to be critiqued. Art must be free. To be all it will be.”
Finally, a quick and accented, “Thank you very much,” with the “very” pronounced “ved-ee,” just as Andy Kaufman would do.
13:34–50:40: For the lengthiest brunt of the Space’s runtime, Zack Yenger, followed by Paloma Rodriguez (Direct of Business Development and Senior Curator at SuperRare), ask a series of thoughtful conceptual questions, essentially tee-ing Matt Kane up to transparently explain the thinking behind the collection, the perofmrative aspects, etc. I’ve selected just a few sections of the conversation for brevity’s sake:
SuperRare: “What would you say was your inspiration behind creating this series?”
Kane: “We can go back 11 years ago and I was experiencing a rough time… [A friend gave me advice based in Stoicism that] the obstacle is the way…you have to go through the obstacle…To lean into contractual obligations, to put an artist under — to me, it’s almost anti-freedom…That’s precisely what we’re fighting against in crypto art, is this broken system where we’re not honoring artists as living humans who we should be protecting from bad actors.”
SuperRare: “What do you, Matt Kane, think it means to collect a Matt Kane.”
Kane: “In 2018, when SuperRare began, that was what was cool about SuperRare: They were going with this non-zero-sum game, where everyone has mutual interests, and everyone is elevated by the tides. And it’s not my place to say whether we’ve gone off the tracks in the entire space, but I think these are the questions and conversations and discussions that I hope Contractual Obligations raises. What is our direction? Where were we going in 2020? Because that felt very healthy to me because there were peer-to-peer artist-to-collector transactions happening. And it was modest sums. Artists like myself were being able to start making a living on our passions, that we’d sacrificed — when you’re an artist you have to sacrifice to continue being an artist if you don’t come from money…”
SuperRare: “I’ll be the first person to admit that SuperRare has not done everything right…We’ve made mistakes, we’ve made big mistakes…If we could rewind time, would we have done the RarePass the exact way we did do the RarePass?…If we band together instead of working against each other, that’s how we’re going to move forward in this space.”
Kane “And I give so much credit to SuperRare for partnering with me on releasing this artwork. Because obviously this artwork, in part…it is a criticism of RarePass and opens the conversation to make criticisms of SuperRare. You guys did not need to move forward with this. You guys had other options. And what I said in my statement is ‘To open oneself up to criticism on a public stage, that’s leadership’…The problem is people are afraid to piss people off, of collectors never collecting from them again, and I get that because we all grew up as artists desperate for attention, for collectors. We were working minimum-wage jobs shelving groceries, and we were going home, breaking down cardboard boxes…because we can’t afford canvases…You have collectors paying you for your art? That’s badass. And it would suck for those collectors to disappear and be like ‘Something you said pissed me off, I don’t like what you did with royalties, so I’m not going to collect from you again, in fact, I’m going to go create my own little stable of artists over here, and we’re going to kind of just white wash you out of history and control the narrative.’ That happens, and that’s cool, but what’s really cool is speaking up for what’s right and what’s moral…There’s either a revolution, or there’s not.”
SuperRare: “It’s incredibly tough out there, and running a company, running a team in this space is incredibly competitive, incredibly difficult…If SuperRare had not made a number of decisions throughout the years that maybe may not have been exactly in line with our original values, we wouldn’t have made it until today…At the moment, it’s a game of survival. We had the best of intentions, I truly believe…It’s easy to think of SuperRare as this big entity that shouldn’t make mistakes, and should do everything right, but at the end of the day, we’re a team of people who just have the best intentions, and we’re doing our best to support artists.
Kane: “A lot of the artists, we agreed to do this basically as fundraising, because we’re all touched by the role you played in our careers. But at the same time, it’s like — Listen, I’m going to read you something, these aren’t my words, this is someone in my discord, they said, ‘Yeah, SuperRare has done an awful job at promoting the artists included in the RarePass and seems to have just put it behind them in the hopes of moving on.’ And for me as an artist, that breaks my heart, because that’s my reputation on the line. And I had some of my favorite collectors get RarePasses because they wanted another Matt Kane, and then meanwhile — you guys did fantastic contextualization [in the past], we had articles written and…videos produced…that’s what the artists are looking for…If you’re not into adding value and are just into extracting value without making sure that the incentives, that the artists are incentivized properly, you’ll end up with a cat like me who sees the flaws and is like ‘Sweet, I’m going to make an artwork out of this.’ So we’ve gotta think about adding value and not just extracting.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions, so good intentions aren’t good enough. All of these artists that you had creating 250 artworks that are being compensated the same way as the artists making three artworks? We’re all making art at a high-level, and we expect the people we’re partnering with to also be performing at a high level…
“My biggest hope in this is that SuperRare looks in the mirror, pivots, and takes advantage of the energy around this, because you can roll over and die or you can say, ‘We need to change…’
“I’m SuperRare’s biggest fan, and I believe that you guys being willing to have a discourse that’s open and honest, that’s where change can come from. When I say things like ‘Middlemen need to add value,’ I’m not talking about SuperRare at all…This is a problem of companies throughout the whole space extracting from artists and not doing enough of a value-add. So at the end of the day, we need to talk about these things!… I said a long time ago, ‘Success in a broken system is failure’…If all we’re doing here is creating a broken system that’s just replicating the same models of value extraction that we see in the systems we were originally fighting again, then, man, we gotta rethink things and restructure…We all need to look at the artwork, the traits…and reflect on ‘Why did I feel this way when I got a Matt Kane that was made by AI and he’s talking about low-effort?”…I spent 10 years building my own software, so anything I do, even if it’s higher-effort than someone who makes what’s considered high-effort AI, for me, it’s going to be considered low-effort because I’ve put so much into the other stuff.”
SuperRare: “Everybody’s been calling out to me that one of the traits is called Act I which seems to imply that there might be future acts to come. Can you touch on that at all?”
Kane:“I think Andy Kaufman, the way he would handle hecklers in the middle of his act, would probably be to grab a glass of water and throw it in their face or something…We’re not anywhere near into Act I, and we’re already asking about ‘When is Act II?’ Jeez.”
SuperRare: “One of these artworks is titled [Send 1 ETH to 0x06ceFD6E764e47f025ea4b91cb84337169A92A33], and it looks like some folks have already sent one ETH to that address. Is there anything there, or did a random address just get a couple ETH?”
Kane: “Oh no, it’s part of the performance, but…I didn’t expect that…One of the things I love about Andy Kaufman and comedians in general is there’s a factor of improvisation that happens. There’s a reading of the room that happens. So I go into this with a structure, I go into this with a basic premise, and people are asking ‘What is this Proof of Intent? What are these hashes?’ You will all learn what those are; do not send ETH to those addresses because those are not what you think they are. It was a way for me to encapsulate and record that here is my proof of intent, here’s the structure, and will we go off the rails? Of course, because the performance is an improvisation off of Andy Kaufman.”
50:40–57:01: This more-or-less ends the informative aspect of the Spaces. It is about to change into something else entirely. But as you go through the rest of this essay, I advise you to bookmark this spot, right here. Yeah, just like that. Come back to all this later because you’re going to keep finding things pop up that have their roots here: Dutch Baroque, improvisation, Andy Kaufman, extractive value, effort. These things arise again and again, artful tesselations, but it’s hard to appreciate that right now without the context of what’s to come. But this is a particularly astounding place to return to because it proves, even when all emprical evidence is to the country, that nothing Matt Kane does, even if it’s improvisational or sudden, is accidental.
At this point in the Twitter Spaces comes just about the only segment of the entire Moral Performance which Kane did not control. We’ll only go into this section sparingly because, if you’re interested, it’s better you listen for yourself.
Yenger opens up the conversation to audience questions, and first to come on-stage is the iconic crypto artist and avowed Matt Kane admirer, Pindar van Arman. He is not happy. Not with Kane, not with Contractual Obligations, not with how he feels Kane has maligned SuperRare thus far. Kane and Van Arman’s resultant exchange lasts about five minutes. It is surprisingly vitriolic and quite argumentative and painful even now. I won’t, however, record any of the conversation explicitly because it doesn’t have enormous bearing on the rest of the performance.
What it does do, though, is (because nothing in crypto art grabs eyeballs like heavyweight prizefights) bring this conversation directly to what felt at the time like every single person in and around crypto art.
57:01- 1:21:07: A series of artists — Sarah Zucker, AlphaCentauriKid, Andres Del Vecchio, Ned Ryerson — come into the Space to discuss Kane’s works, to delve into further context, to ask questions, to defend or poke and prod. Van Arman and Kane periodically reengage in heated conversation throughout the rest of the Space, with Yenger frequently forced to play peacemaker.
1:21:07–1:24:31: Among Kane’s closing words, after thanking SuperRare for the opportunity and the platform, is the following statement: “The artist kindly requests you remain seated, though you are free to choose for yourself. And that’s very important.”
Choice, another thing which will come up over and over and over again.
The Contractual Obligations pieces certainly caused much discussion in their own right, but the Spaces inspired a downright fervor.
Matt Kane became immediately and undeniably the most famous person in crypto art.
Voices from all corners of the space, with every size of following, every uniquely-conorted network, for every reason and public posture, all anyone seemed liable to talk about was Contractual Obligations. Contractual Obligations as performance. Contractual Obligations as commentary on middlemen and artist value. Contractual Obligations as simple aesthetic experiment. Kane’s collection was always meant to be controversial, but its meaning, its hitherto execution, its validity, its place in Matt Kane’s canon, all germinated into loud and stormy topics for chatter.
As Matt says, “I expected maybe 250 people to care, but it ended up being a lot more. I remember there was some Twitter Spaces where people were talking about me that I found out about as it was happening…I did my best to keep up with what was going on, but it definitely told me that I had hit a nerve…And so I decided that I would really put my all into the rest of the performance.”
Just as all of crypto art thereafter drowned in the floodwaters Matt Kane had called down from the heavens, ye too shall drown. Because when I say that all of crypto art was talking about Matt Kane, that’s no exaggeration. If you had a platform, you were dissecting Contractual Obligations, dragging or defending Matt Kane, parsing through other critiques and adding your voice to the throng. You were reading about Matt Kane if you weren’t talking about him. Your Twitter timeline would have been filled with things like this, this, also this, and this, plus this, something like this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.
In the coming days and weeks, Matt Kane would settle into the fervor. In that time, he appeared on our own MOCA LIVE podcast to talk about everything which had happened over the previous week. He sat down with NFTNow for a sprawling interview about the collection, its release, and its reception. And all the while, he incessantly teased the rest of the performance to come.
There was, for example, this time he teased the Halloween curtain-call between Act I to Act II:
There was his creation of the rallying cry “Blame Merv,” which stemmed from the aforementioned tweet-and-response by @Merv_Kim on September 28th (and which would be encoded as its own unique trait in the final flourish that capped Act III).
There was the continued repetition of the phrase “Stay in your seat. Please. Though you are free to decide for yourself. Choice is important.”
While not generally accustomed to such intense scrutiny, Kane committed himself to the hype, keeping he and his Contractual Obligations in the limelight while ultimately segueing himself and the entire crypto art community into the next phase of the larger Moral Performance, which we’ll discuss shortly: The Zombie Intermission.
But the Moral Performance did not unfold so nice and sequentially, as one might have thought, or as Kane had planned; neither should this essay.
For the foreseeable future, Kane was working without guardrails. So many of the decisions made during the lead-up to Act II would be off-the-cuff, as acerbic as the initial release, and continuously, consciously, courageously interwoven with reflected bits of Matt Kane’s own past.
An Intermission of our Own, Wherein we Gently Interrogate this “Past” Matt Kane is Always Referencing…
…Specifically the 1990’s…
…which reveal Matt Kane’s early dreams of becoming, as so many teenage boys of his era did, a stand-up comedian. Saturday Night Live in the 90’s was damn close to the peak of its powers, its nigh-unbelievable roster including Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, David Spade, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, some of the greatest comic minds of their age, easy for a laugh-splattered generation of teens to idolize and seek to emulate. And Comedy Central emerged in ’91, bringing stand-up to cable TV. It was no longer necessary for young men to sneak Eddie Murphy’s Delirious or George Carlin Again! or Richard Pryor or Cheech & Chong around their parents’ awareness in order to glimpse the glitz of comedy’s height. It was simply everywhere.
As clearly as any of his peers, Mat Kane aligns his intention towards comedy writing and stand-up performing. Somewhere amidst this adolescent fixation, Kane somewhat mystifyingly discovers the work of Andy Kaufman, who died in 1984, when Kane was barely 4-years-old. But even posthumously, Kaufman’s genius is enough to completely reshape Kane’s conception of what comedy could communicate and contain.
“Being asked questions about ‘How long have you been an artist; what are your origins?’ I always talk about how, when I was a teenager, I was interested in being a comedian and being a comedy writer. It was Andy Kaufman who bridged that for me, where I saw the possibilities of comedy actually being an art…I don’t think I make the jump when I’m 16 years old into considering art more important than comedy without Andy Kaufman to segue me. I think my career as an artist who tends to reflect back and reference and honor my inspirations and influences, to never be able to do that for Andy would be a loss.”
Reflect, reference, and most importantly honor; these are the Moral Performance’s touchstones. In Kane’s performance, there are ghosts to consider. The ghost of Andy Kaufman hovers over Matt Kane’s shoulder all through these months. Kaufman feels him there, watching, judging, pushing.
And Kaufman is not the only phantom on Matt Kane’s back during the Moral Performance.
“The night I asked for a sign…”
…or November 16th, 2012, is a date as corporeal as Kaufman’s corpse. Just over a decade ago and living in Seattle, firmly sequestered in his 30’s, Matt Kane isn’t doing so well.
He’s stuck for another year on the lease for a house that’s painted with bad memories down to the wainscoting. The house is full of ghosts; Matt Kane is haunted. He has moved away from his lifelong home in the midwest, forsaken his troubled family, finally admitting defeat on his ambitious adolescent artistic aspirations. A career in software engineering is much more practical. But like every life we receive in exchange for our idealism, this one hurts. Matt’s new and practical life is one of occupational malaise, relationship strife, familial heartache, and all this emphasized by the loneliness of living in a city without lifelines.
On the night of November 16th, Kane decides to go for a walk. He could not have known that this night, and what he saw on that walk, would manifest in his artistry — artistry that, defying all expectations, would make him acclaimed and beloved and iconic — over a decade later.
And yet, it does. This walk — at the outset of which Kane asks God to send him some kind of sign that he’s on the right path, that his anguish will be worth itself — is the chapter heading of an essay written about him 12 years after the fact.
Because expectations, often broken, aren’t always broken by design.
Kane asks God for a sign, walks out of his haunted house, and orients himself towards the nearest of Seattle’s many bridges. Mere minutes later, his phone rings. The voices on the other end are ones Kane hasn’t heard in years, family members from whom he had been previously and painfully estranged. Energized and enlivened by voices which for years had been silent, but far now from home, Matt decides to finish his walk. “My plan was to cross the bridge and go under and cross to the other side,” Matt told me. “But I couldn’t do that.”
Approaching the bridge, Matt is confronted by a sight that, to some of you, may look familiar:
A glowing yellow detour sign. On November 16th, 2012. “The night I asked for a sign.”
“I was like, this is beautiful and hilarious, but basically, on that bridge, I realized ‘I’m going to quit web development, I’m going to find a way.’ I had just ended up with this house…I was under contractual obligations to be in this house for the next year! And that’s my history. That [Detour sign] is the needle in the haystack.”
2012–11–16 23–20–21 896 is the name of the Contractual Obligations piece in which the Detour sign is captured. It is the only Contractual Obligations piece that isn’t AI-generated. It is the only to bear the traits Medium: Cell Phone Camera, Miniseries: Detour, and Normie or No: LOL. It is also the only with the following description:
“The night I asked for a sign.”
That Detour sign has some really cosmic implications. Without it, would Matt have returned to artistry? Would he have ultimately left Seattle and moved back in with his parents in the midwest, in whose house he would begin developing the creative software from which would spring the art we so celebrate him for? Would he have found blockchain and crypto art and all of us, all of this, here? For how many of us was Matt Kane the tasty hook from which we could not (or would not) free ourselves from crypto art?
Without that Detour sign, this essay would not be written, because there would be no Moral Performance, no Contractual Obligations, no Matt Kane…maybe no me.
One Detour that changed the course of a life; of lives! Imagine the awareness of that fact. Imagine the responsibility to make that life worth something.
8 years later to the day, on November 16th, 2022, Matt Kane mints Detour III, used by SuperRare in the first promotional announcement for his RarePass release. At the time, only Kane could have been aware of the significance.
10 years later to the day, on November 16th, 2022, SuperRare would sell its first RarePass. Again, nobody but Kane could have heard his past echoing (never again, however, will he be alone in that experience).
Such coincidences are everywhere in the Moral Performance, just as they are everywhere in Kane’s own life.
But that’s the thing about the Moral Performance: It is Kane’s life.
Matt Kane’s Life in March of 2020…
…is entangled with one of crypto art’s single most consequential moments. A few months prior, in November of 2019, SuperRare again made a survival decision. They abandoned the royalty standard which had been core in crypto art since 2017, when DADA.art encoded an automatic 10% royalty payment for artists into the smart contract code of their Creeps and Weirdos collection. That 10% number, shared hitherto amongst all platforms and considered customary hitherto for all artists, was sacred.
As Matt Kane tells it, “SuperRare had dumped 10% royalties down to 3% without asking any of us [artists] the previous November.”
Not a group to accept such decisions quietly, Kane and others launched a retaliation.
A group of artists — spearheaded by Matt Kane and including Sparrow Reed, Lawrence Lee, Alotta Money, skeenee, Josie Bellini, Mlibty, hexeosis, XCOPY, Giant Swan, Shortcut, Coldie, Bård Ionson, oficinas TK, Hackatao, Vansdesign, and GISELXFLOREZ — pulled together to write and release the following “Minimum 10% NFT Royalties — Letter to Platforms.”
“I organized all those people [for the letter],” Kane told me, “and the thing is, we were making a good income on our art, many of us for the first time…To [publicly] say ‘Hey, no, royalties are really important to us,’ and to do all that, it was a risk, because it might lead collectors not to want to collect me.”
In these days, what many consider the Golden Age of Crypto Art, the overall community was tiny. There were 330 total artists approved on SuperRare and proportionally fewer collectors. To ostracize even a single collector or platform was to risk a massive financial and reputational decline.
“It goes back to that day [in 2012] with the bridge. Here we are in March of 2020, and I see myself having an opportunity, like having a huge impact perhaps on the future for artists by standing up for royalties…So if we just get this cemented, no pun intended, then that could become a cultural standard, and for the next few years, it did.”
Until, of course…
…Early to Mid 2023…
…when Matt Kane begins to sense the poison circulating through crypto art’s bloodstream. Despite an outcry from many artists and collectors and builders and writers, 2023 was the year in which crypto art royalties — what Kane and so many others had fought so very hard for — withered away.
Because of market pressures by opportunistic actors, royalties (not just 10% royalties, but all royalties) were made unstandard on Opensea, the largest platform on which NFTs were bought and sold. Many had mistakenly believed that royalties could be enforced down to Ethereum’s execution contract level, making them impermeable, but that revealed itself as a false assumption. Royalties had always, apparently, been optional, despite appearances to the contrary. Royalty payments revealed themselves as a choice, and that choice fell to individual collectors. You can probably tell by the tenor of this paragraph how things turned out.
Kane told me how, “I had already seen my bravery to stand up [in 2020] and speak out for people and for royalties. I saw that as being my answer to the universe in terms of [a sign]. And then in the course of 2023, that was taken from me. It disintegrated. So now we’re,” and by we’re, he means SuperRare in their RarePass marketing, “just using this empty hollow term, ‘cement our legacies in crypto art.’ Meanwhile, my legacy has vanished.”
Now, with all this in mind, let us return back to…
…October 2023…
…as Matt, the only one aware of all this historical context, continues facing the fallout and fervor from Contractual Obligations.
“So why did I do Burning Bridges? It’s not actually about me burning bridges with SuperRare or SuperRare burning bridges with me. It’s about me saying ‘My legacy got burnt’…The bridge for me is a representation of [my old life], and for me it’s saying that I have in the last decade completely changed my life…I’m burning bridges.”
He continues on, saying, “The whole performance is about the loss of a legacy but the gaining of a life, and the gaining of freedom. And it’s about ending toxic relationships at the same time…with SuperRare, them not bringing reciprocity to the artists before me, it was an extractive relationship. [Contractual Obligations] is me burning bridges with so many things.”
Like so much of Matt Kane’s artwork, Contractual Obligations wove levity together with dark undercurrents. Just as his MarbleCard, underneath its gorgeously-colored exterior, was a commentary on the manipulability of fiat currency, and just as his Sotheby’s piece, nominally a clever and creative take on the work of Claude Monet, became an encapsulation of broken expectations and dishonorable activity, Contractual Obligations — with all its neon color and its silliness and its delicate clay figurines and its Harry Houdini allusions, its neon bubbles, crypto iconography, influencer sendups, lack of effort, and acerbic traits — was also a deeply meditative selection of ideas, symbols, phrases that represented fragments of Matt Kane’s past. Some he was embracing, some he was looking at nostalgically from a distance, but most he was finally turning away from, ambivalent to the smoke scent in his nostrils.
“I’m a poet, right? And what I do in my poetry is I never explicitly say what something is, but I have to express it, I have to express the trauma, so it’s all there, except it’s under the surface. It’s all connected under the surface,” Kane says.
With most of the Moral Performance still to come, there are yet more connections, more allusions, more resurrected skeletons of the past, more inside-out reversals of expectations, still more, still more, still so much more…
But Kane needed a break, and we needed a break, and there was so much prep work to be done. Altogether, this more than merited a short intermission.
The Zombie Intermission
October 1st, 2023…
…is still two days before Contractual Obligations launches. We are still grounded firmly in the past. None yet know what a Contractual Obligation is. Few have had their concept of Matt Kane’s style challenged.
And so on October 1st, when Matt Kane Tweets out the following, there’s no way anybody could completely follow what it is he’s talking about:
And yet, concurrently to the entire Moral Performance, both preceding and outlasting it, Matt Kane engages in the sequential rollout of another project, one much more in-line with expectations.
We’ve already mentioned these ANONS and Multitudes briefly. First announced on September 4th, ANONS and Multitudes are interlinked “portraits and generative fragmentations” that in many ways represent a return to the physical work Matt Kane began creating way back in the 2000s, long before he became a software whiz. Each ANON is a magnificently-colored portrait of a person from some epoch past; their dress and postures are all unmistakably dated. There is an irony in Matt Kane affixing his hyper-modern manner of computer painting upon these anachronistic faces.
Multitudes, meanwhile, are alternate versions of an ANON, their inspiration taken from Walt Whitman’s 1855 (though rewritten in 1892) poem Song of Myself (from Whitman’s collection Leaves of Grass), where the poet says:
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Multitudes aren’t just alternate version of an ANON, they are increasingly wonky, disintegrative, and chaotic. Most ANONS have 8 multitudes, while others have only four or five.
The artwork in the tweet above is one such multitude, titled be patient and perfect til I come, which, like all the other Multitudes, derives its title from a line in Leaves of Grass. The conceptual and artistic brilliance of these collections is absolutely worthy of its own essay, but for our purposes, ANONS are principally important for two reasons:
1) They are, aesthetically speaking, sterling representations of what many assumed “a Matt Kane” looked like before Contractual Obligations turned such assumptions on their head.
2) Matt, ever the showman, eventually collides ANONS with the Moral Performance in progress.
Which is, at its most simplistic, what the Zombie Intermission entails.
The very first ANON, ANON #1, was minted on September 14th. Bidding opened on September 19th, and it was sold on September 20th. In fact, ANON #2, ANON #3, and ANON #4 were all sold by the end of the day on the 20th, this glut of classically-Matt-Kane artwork remaining blissfully unaware of all the Contractual Obligations which were to follow them.
And thus, it is to the “Zombie ANON,” or ANON #5, which all of crypto art has its attention drawn on October the 1st.
Understand this: Nothing Matt Kane does is accidental. He confirmed this when telling me, “The Zombie intermission, the geeky thing I did there was I used an Andy Kaufman quote where he says, ‘ I’m from Hollywood, I have the brains,’ And of course, what’s a zombie? They have brains! And they’re from Hollywood!”
Even before the Moral Performance began in earnest, Matt Kane had Kaufman on the mind.
The mint of ANON #5 on October 17th, and its subsequent sale on October 18th, ushered in what would ironically come to be the most involved (for Matt Kane), and perhaps lucrative (for Contractual Obligations holders) epoch of the entire performance, an almost completely improvisational 14-day sprint that includes Action Figures, Souvenirs, Open Editions, and a complex network of burns, royalty payments, performative slights of hand, and downright startling attention to details.
Ironically, the Zombie Intermission is perhaps the most thematically resonant aspect of the entire performance. Which is why, I imagine. Kane always cautioned his audience to stay in their seats.
Everything which happens during the Zombie Intermission hinges on a central question: Can Matt Kane commoditize himself more than crypto culture even could?
Exploring that question meant teasing the release of a “roadmap,” for what was then called the Contractual Obligations Performance. Kane did this a few separate times leading-up to the Zombie Intermission’s formal start on October 17th.
NFT projects and their “roadmaps” quickly proved inseparable concepts in the NFT fervor of 2021. A roadmap gave potential collectors an expectation for an asset’s future value before actually buying-in. This helped valueless assets retain their value via the everpresent promise of something more…coming…eventually. For 250 RarePass holders suddenly in possession of an artwork with a ~5 ETH (~$8000) valuation, that assurance of future value would have seemed extremely important.
Which Matt Kane must have known as he closed the curtains, raised the house-lights, and entered into the intermission.
October 18th…
…as the ANON #5 auction begins, Matt simultaneously launches a “Souvenir Stand” for the Contractual Obligations performance. Kane hereby manifests not just a stage for his demonstration, but an entire theatrical milieu. This is what we do during a play’s intermission, after all: use the restroom, stretch our legs, saunter over to the souvenir stand to get ourselves a t-shirt.
Kane’s Souvenir Stand is a small boutique of sorts, but with only a single item. Visitors could purchase THE ARTIST’S ROADMAP — UNROLLED POSTER EDITION, an Open Edition NFT selling at the time for .0042069 ETH a pop (or about $6.50). This artwork alone was the long-teased, long-awaited roadmap for Kane’s performance:
“The roadmap of the living artist is the living artist,” is all it says. Another case of broken expectations.
In a way, it’s fitting that the first appearance of Matt Kane’s unmistakable aesthetic within the formal Moral Performance would be the least valuable. 3311 editions of THE ARTIST’S ROADMAP — UNROLLED POSTER EDITION currently exist, and you can get one today for about $22.
You’ll notice that the piece’s full title is “THE ARTIST’S ROADMAP — UNROLLED POSTER EDITION” which implies the existence of other editions. Maybe those would be rarer, more valuable, a kind of secret roadmap within the roadmap. If the crypto ecosystem regularly proves anything, it’s that the economic-minded are capable of magnificent delusion. Surely, many stayed in their seats through the intermission if only in anticipation of a more fecund money tree to come.
Disapprove as he may of such attitudes, Matt Kane would not disappoint his loyal audience.
October 19th…
…brings another surprise:
You can almost hear Contractual Obligations holders sighing. Finally! A real Matt Kane! None of this weirdo AI bullshit, nothing inherently nonvaluable, but a veritable Matt Kane, recognizable from any distance, carrying an imposing price tag! This is more-or-less what holders received, though in Faustian fashion, the dialectic decisions in a devil deal prove crucial. All who held a Contractual Obligations piece during a secret snapshot taken two days prior were indeed airdropped a Matt Kane, unmistakable in both composition and content:
“The [Matt Kane Action Figures] were a detour I took because I realized in the creation of the performance, in talking with people about things I was hearing, the commodification of me and other artists was ridiculous. It was clear I had to commoditize myself,” Matt explained.
And so it was Matt Kane Action Figures for everyone, freely airdropped into every wallet that held a Contractual Obligations piece. In total, 16 different versions of Matt Kane’s Action Figure were created and sent-out, their specificities varying based on the activity of the Contractual Obligations holder to whom it was granted. Holding one since launch, purchasing in the aftermath, paying royalties or not on that purchase, all such factor contributed to an Action Figures various traits and aesthetics, extras and attachments.
While it would be factually inaccurate to suggest that these Action Figures were the most labor intensive aspect of the Moral Performance, this 250-piece improvisational flourish — a “detour” in Kane’s own words — is so filled with easter eggs, minutiae, and conceptual integrity that it’s hard to imagine their creation resulting from anything but some laborious mania.
Kane had probably been prepared to create Action Figures like these since he was a child. “I had been an action figure kid as a teenager,” he told me. “I was a nerd who made my own card backs for Star Wars figures because I was poor and couldn’t afford to collect real ones, so I would use a paintbrush to make these.”
So much of the Moral Performance is about Matt Kane’s past, interrogating it with the use of new skills, new insights, new paintbrushes. Kane had been creating card-backs of this sort for decades, but his freshest labors are wholly of the moment in both process and purpose. I’d argue they rank among the most creative artworks in Kane’s storied career.
The Matt Kane Action Figures…
…contain a startling depth of detail worth lengthy discussing, and so we’re going to discuss it all (as much as possible). However, I wanted to offer this short disclaimer before proceeding onward:
DISCLAIMER: The following section about Matt Kane’s Action Figures is quite long and involved, but that’s by necessity. The sheer amount of thought, effort, and detail Mr. Kane put into this improvised, relatively-miniscule aspect of the Moral Performance was what forced me to finally, fully understand what kind of an artistic madman this Matt Kane is. If you want to skip over the sheer manic amount of variety Matt Kane included in this Action Figures, I understand your decision, but I implore you to at least read this breakdown of the Matt Kane Action Figures as put together by Punk7635 (ArtieHandz) in a brilliant thread on the topic (which is what Matt mentioned in the most recent tweet).
Consider that disclaimer both a warning and an invitation. Regardless of your decision, you can take a look at all these bad boys (pun intended) on Matt Kane’s Souvenirs website, where NFTs from throughout the Moral Performance are collected together. But okay, on with them: the Action Figures, one by one.
Of the RarePass holders come October 3rd, 221 never sold their original Contractual Obligations piece, and thus they were airdropped the following NFT, A MATT KANE Action Figure with Cement Trowel:
This baseline MATT KANE Action Figure is the collection’s standard: There is Matt himself, morphed via AI into an action hero with explosive color at his back; there he is again, molded into plastic. This version includes brandings like “Fully Accessible Living Artists” and an age suggestion of “6.9 & Up.”
Notice the “FREE” sign in big letters, a nod to how Matt, when conceptualizing the Action Figures, “was originally thinking about G.I. Joes and how…they have these cute little like ‘Free Refrigerator Door’” emblems on their card back.” Notice too the table covered in candies, the bottle of milk.
What else is included on this most-numerous version of Matt Kane’s playtime likeness? As per the card, “Includes: Cement, Trowel, $CANDY, Match, Cookie; Legacy not included, Royalties Optional Since Feb 2022,” which, besides hinting at aspects of the performance to come, also makes a cleanly digs at Opensea’s royalty-crippling policies over the previous years. #Blamemerv also makes a reappearance.
Next…
…the 12 RarePass artists who submitted three 1/1 artworks for distribution (and who were not required to own a Contractual Obligations herein) received the following NFT, also titled A MATT KANE Action Figure with Cement Trowel, but with a different “FREE” sticker in the bottom-left:
The fine print there reads, “FREE MATT KANE in spaceman armor with purchase of any 1000 Gazers (See details inside.) Offer expires 12/4/2021. Must pass KYC, Caspiar residents only.” A lot of crypto in-jokes there. And a notable lack of individualization for this class of artists, whose RarePass contributions Kane hereby suggests are worthy of distinction.
Meanwhile…
…the 12 other RarePass artists, who like Kane contributed 250 unique works, received something altogether different, noticeably different, A MATT KANE Action Figure with OG Cement Mixer. Kane wanted these overtly differentiated because “RarePass didn’t draw any distinction between these artists, in terms of our compensation or anything, and so that was me being like, ‘Here’s the OG cement mixer for the ones who put in more work.’”
The OG Cement Mixer (legacy still not included) reflects the effort each artist put into cementing their crypto art legacy (Kane loves wordplay), as opposed to the trowel included in above examples, which, as a tool, is more about making cement aesthetically-pleasing and useful than creating it in the first place. This version includes an even more badass, flame-thrower-toting Matt Kane, “in battle biker gang armor,” complete with a baseball bat for close combat scenarios.
But this…
…is where things start to get hectic. Another smattering of Action Figures were sent to all who had bought a Contractual Obligations piece after its release. Inherent in these purchases was a choice on whether to pay royalties or not, as Opensea allows buyers to do so manually. In an earlier Tweet, Matt noted that he needed to “massage data & cross reference etherscan manually…to make sure [every Contractual Obligations holder] gets what they deserve.”
17 individuals paid no royalties on their Contractual Obligations purchase, assumedly via Opensea. Kane airdropped each A MATT KANE Action Figure Card Back, the action figure itself noticeably absent, along with other signs of physical degradation:
Not exactly subtle.
Four individuals paid partial royalties on their purchase and received A MATT KANE Action Figure stripped of its added accessories and many of its easter eggs. Still, akin to the partial royalties themselves, better than nothing.
Those who paid full royalties on their piece received something quite similar to that which Kane airdropped the 250-piece RarePass artists. This version of A MATT KANE Action Figure with OG Cement Mixer lacks the Free accessory in the bottom right, but instead of a baseball bat, their action figure wields a lightsaber-like weapon. Inherent in this version is Kane’s understanding that royalties — and those who pay them — are as fundamental to crypto art’s creation as any one artist’s contributions.
Punk7635 summed-up this segment of the performance best when he called it “a fun visual representation showing whether the participants followed the social construct of royalties that Matt and others have fought so hard to establish and maintain.”
It’s worth pausing to remember the ample criticism Matt received regarding how the original Contractual Obligations pieces were not a representation of the classical Matt Kane style many knew and loved.
What did people know and love Matt’s artwork for, if not, (as he encapsulates the aesthetic in his own words), “visualizing provenance blockchain data”? Cheeky as it may be, and without aesthetic similarities to his past work, are the Action Figures not exactly that?
Matt provides his own wonderful deep-dive into the ethos behind the Action Figures in this thread. A few highlights:
This last tweet is quite important.
Perhaps some of you remember this mid-90’s/early-2000’s custom of cutting out the UPC (barcode) on cereal boxes or action figures and sending them back to the manufacturer in exchange for goodies. Rewards for the most devoted or obsessive of children.
Inspired by his own UPC experiences, Matt offers Action Figures holders the same thing:
“Trade A MATT KANE for THE ARTIST’S ROADMAP — UNFOLDED MAILER POSTER COLLECTOR’S EDITION” he announces.
This offered ARTIST’s ROADMAP is the alternative version of THE ARTIST’S ROADMAP poster mentioned previously. If you “sent in your action figure,” i.e. burnt it on a dedicated Manifold page (“I was using the verbiage of, ‘Send in your UPC,’ never saying burn, never using that verbiage…I wanted people to understand what I was going to do: I was going to cut out the UPC and send it back to them.”) in exchange for this:
The same roadmap as was widely available, but with the crinkles and indentations of something that’d been manhandled through the United States Postal Service (or else stuffed in a plastic box in the basement for untold seasons).
But have no fear, for all who sent in their Action Figure, trusting Matt Kane in their process, indeed had theirs returned, but these redeemed Action Figures had their UPCs “cut out.”
If you’re thinking that this last one lacks the cut-out UPC of the previous few, know that the aesthetics of this version of A MATT KANE Action Figure with OG Cement Mixer don’t tell the whole story.
Dig into the metadata, and you’ll see a trait “Condition: UPC Code neatly removed,” reflecting the fact that the theoretical UPC was on the cement mixer box and not on the card-back itself.
This was, as always, deliberate. “There’s a thing in Cryptopunks where it’s like, the invisible traits where one trait is covering another trait, so basically they’re invisible; it’s in the metadata but doesn’t display. And that’s a very rare thing. So this was kind of a homage to that, having the cement mixer where it’s in the title and the metadata but you have no UPC, so you don’t actually see it.”
As a final note — and as you might expect in a performance that so-heavily revolves around choice — Matt Kane offered all non-royalty paying Contractual Obligations purchases a choice to “make right.” Those who sent Matt Kane proper royalties after the fact, after this public indictment, received a commensurate reward from the artist. Perhaps because there was this choice in a performance so choice-obsessed, or perhaps because these individuals burnt bridges with their previous selves in a way, or perhaps because the performance itself inspired them to change, for whichever reason these make-gooders dented Matt Kane’s soul, they did. And the resultant pieces are now amongst the Moral Performance’s rarest and most-creative compositions.
There was this “collector, who upon getting the shitty cardback…they were kind of put on notice, like ‘Hey, you did this.’ But then they made good on it,” paying royalties in full retroactively. This collector received A MATT KANE Action Figure — REDEMPTION:
Notice the special accessory pack, featuring two science-fiction-y ray guns, one purple and one green, an unabashed and pointed homage to Han Solo’s infamous introduction into the Star Wars universe in 1977’s Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. We initially meet Mr. Solo in a bar, as escalatse an increasingly-hostile conversation between he and a great green alien named Greedo. It eventually ends in a gunfight.
A throbbing question has plagued Star Wars superfans since this film came out: Though Han and Greedo definitely exchange shots, it’s unclear who shoots first! Did Han murder Greedo in cold blood, or was he shooting in self-defense? Is Han the luckiest, quick-drawing antihero on Tatooine, or is he a cold-blooded murderer?
It’s pretty clear from watching the clip that Han shot first. George Lucas, recognizing how this derogatorily affects Han’s entire character (our mid-70’s bad-boy action heroes must be bad, but not that bad), retconned the thing in 2018, digitally reconfiguring the scene, but that’s besides the point. The point is, when it comes to a fight between collector-who-did-not-pay-royalties and artist-who-publicly-put-them-on-blast, it’s worth asking: Who shot first?
“There was someone who had sent partial [royalties] and made up their full, so they got just the accessories” but laden in gorgeous gold. A MATT KANE Action Figure with Golden Cement Trowel, sent to this collector, is one-of-a-kind:
But it’s the final version which is my indisputable favorite. “There was someone who paid nothing [at first] and then paid the full royalties…this one’s really fun,” Matt told me, regarding A MATT KANE Action Figure Card Back — REDEMPTION:
Lots to dig into here. The (super) rare steak, the actual photo of Matt Kane crudely pasted over the previous black scribbling. The Han Solo and Greedo guns. And then the paintbrush which, as Matt says, “It’s got googly eyes, and the smile is actually made up of Max Osiris’ pubes.” He provided more context on that inclusion, saying:
“In crypto art Lore, Max Osiris and Secondrealm and ROBNESS were all kicked off [SuperRare],” (a real event in 2020 which you can read about in Eric Rhodes’ article on the subject) “and of course ROBNESS was in RarePass, so he was representing himself, but I wanted to represent Max and Eric in this too. So you have [Eric Rhodes’] Peoples Potato and one of Max’s pubes, and then I’m putting my real face over the commoditized version because it’s like the whole idea of [the collector] honoring my whole personhood by making up the entire royalties.”
The rainbow-hued cat sticker, by the way, references a real cat, one Matt shared with an ex-girlfriend many years back, and who Kane painfully had to put down. The cat, not the girlfriend, that is. In the piece’s metadata (along with references to all the other easter eggs herein), you’ll find the trait “Condition: Betty ‘Shitty Paws’ Rambalam Memorial Sticker.”
As Matt says, “That was just something happening in my real life, so, I don’t know, this piece I feel like is very real.”
It too is one-of-a-kind.
All of the initial Matt Kane Action Figures were sent to holders on October 19th, with the UPCs and redemptive Action Figures airdropped throughout the next two weeks.
But this was, naturally, not the only thing created during the Zombie Intermission. In true Matt Kane fashion, he was slowly-but-surely arranging pieces on the chess board, preparing not only for the end of the Intermission, but the beginning of Act II. A beginning which would begin, of all places, in Newport, Rhode Island, and of all people…with me.
ACT II: Milk and Cookies
October 20th, 2023…
…is a cold autumn night in Newport, Rhode Island to begin with, and I’m no more than a baseball’s toss from the ocean, so there’s a frigid sea breeze to contend with too. I’m here for a friend’s wedding along with a gaggle of old friends, and we’re walking down America’s Cup Avenue towards a Mexican restaurant called Diego’s, which, as I’d soon learn, overcooks their carne asada. Before I tell you about what happened next, there’s a few things you should know about me:
- I unfortunately do not have the requisite income required to actually invest in the art I spend most of my waking hours writing about. Naturally, I did not purchase a RarePass, and so I was not among the personally-aggrieved (or energized) throng of participants participating in the Contractual Obligations performance.
- Nevertheless, I’ve consistently kept my snout close to whatever Matt Kane is creating. If the subtext of this article weren’t clear enough, I’m a superfan of Kane’s work. Ever since failing to procure one of his Gazers in the hours after their release, I’ve been enamored with his style. I admired Mr. Kane exclusively from afar, until I found an opportunity to write properly about Gazers, which I have come to unironically believe will prove themselves intergenerationally important.
In a March 2023 article titled, Matt Kane is Eternal, I wrote:
“I now believe that Matt Kane has crafted not just a crypto art masterwork, but artwork deserving a pedestal in the hallowed halls of all art history. Because Gazers isn’t just drop-dead gorgeous, decadently thoughtful, or something which exposes the intricacy of its creation both on its face and in its gut. Gazers may be the first artwork to mimic the infinite expression of time itself.”
For the purposes of that article, I interviewed Matt Kane for the first time, beginning what would prove to be one of my most enduring crypto art friendships.
- I had Matt Kane on our MOCA LIVE podcast a few days after Contractual Obligations’ release, to my knowledge the very first time Kane had publicly spoken about the performance (outside of his Tweets). And so we were once again in each-others’ orbits, where I had yet another opportunity to profess my love for his artwork, his panache, his penchant for creating things as twisting and layered as life itself.
- I tend to answer phone calls from unknown numbers. Call it a pastime, call it a safe way to gaze into the abyss, call it anxiety, it’s something I do. Sue me.
Well, I’m literally steps from Diego’s door, trailing a bit behind my friends, when my phone rings. It’s an unknown Chicago-area number. Of course, I pick up the call, expecting an update on my car’s limited warranty, and yet, there on the other end, somewhere many thousands of miles away, is Matt Kane.
We schmooze for only a moment before Matt gets into the meat of things: He wasn’t quite exactly sure how he wanted to go about it, but he wanted to involve the Museum of Crypto Art in the Contractual Obligations performance in some way. As Kane explained, the performance was hurtling towards its second act, and there was going to be a kind of burn mechanism involved. “Originally, I was going to have people burning Contractual Obligations, burning their bridges. In fact the original token name was just going to be‘$BRIDGE,” he told me later. By burning their own “bridges,” holders would signify their continued participation in the performance, thereafter receiving a new artwork.
But, Matt wondered, could there be a better way? Does anyone ever really burn their bridges? Is it even right to burn away the past, to cut ties with it altogether? Was that the message he wanted to convey? No, Kane concluded, we can let go of the past but we can never forget it, never forsake what it meant and what we once were. What if, instead of burning all these Contractual Obligations pieces, they could instead be sent away, stewarded somewhere safely? One would cease their ownership of these pieces, but the bridges would still elsewhere exist. Because we can’t ever really erase the past. We can’t really burn our bridges. We can only cross them over and leave them behind. It is up to us to look back at them again. We are free, always free, to choose for ourselves…and that’s very important.
Matt asked me if the Museum of Crypto Art would be interested in becoming a part of this performance, acting as a steward for all those burned bridges.
While I’ve never been in a position to make unilateral decisions on the Museum’s behalf, this was my one exception.
“Of course,” I told him. “We would be honored.”
He said he needed a few days to think in more detail. I told him that would be just fine.
October 23rd, 2023…
…is when I next hear from Matt Kane, but I’m ready for the Chicago call this time. He wants to move ahead with this collaboration-of-sorts, but as he tells me, this isn’t a one-way street. My intertangling ourselves in the Moral Performance, the Museum takes on debit. I’m promptly sent a Google Doc that Kane had put together over the intervening three days, which details the reciprocation Matt Kane expected in exchange for Moral Performance inclusion.
I here want to include the document in its entirety, not just for the sake of clarity, but for the sake of accountability (and also to emphasize Matt’s many extraneous undertakings amidst the performance):
In essence, this collaboration was not only a way to segue participants into Act II of the Moral Performance, it was a way of integrating MOCA itself into the very same thematic issues within which Matt himself simmered leading-up to Contractual Obligations’ release. We too fell under a kind of obligation, though a moral one instead of a contractual one. Despite not signing anything, and despite never exchanging funds, by just being granted the privilege of involvement in Mr. Kane’s performance, MOCA would be obligated to contend with issues of trust, stewardship, and responsibility. We had a tight set of expectations placed upon us. This essay is our way of making good on a number of Matt’s qualifications herein: The contextualization and educational materials, the inclusion of public commentary, and the documentation of stewardship over time. By the time you’re reading this, the entire Moral Performance Collection should be live on our website for all to indulge in. The performance’s title governs our actions from here, just as morals governed Matt’s relationship with SuperRare throughout 2022 and 2023.
I asked Matt point-blank why he decided to include MOCA in the performance, and after some very kind compliments, he said, “I think it’s like, if you guys are willing to take a chance on being involved in something you have no idea about — like where this is going? — you guys deserve the benefit of the doubt too, and here’s an opportunity to take this and run with it.” That’s true; Matt asked for our commitment before we knew what would be expected of us on the back end. We knew nothing about where the performance was going, only that we were to have a small role in it.
“And to not put you guys under a contract like I was…well, what is the performance called? Moral. And so I think that’s something that the whole space needs to operate from, humanity needs to operate from: a moral perspective. Not just in terms of making a moral decision, but what are the lessons we learned? What are the morals we’ve learned? It goes both ways.”
I didn’t notice the following detail until much later, but Matt tweeting this out after our conversation was a beautiful way to recognize our agreement’s sweet improvisation:
But let’s step back from the thematics for a moment and get back into the performance, the “detour route,” so to speak.
In the above document, you may have noted Matt’s request for “MOCA [to create] 3 wallets dedicated to receiving donations of Contractual Obligations NFTs…the wallet addresses corresponding to Past, Present, Future.”
We did exactly that:
MOCA Past (0xc41c37724296e82ECBe9f1913b0Ec886A054B3ec)
MOCA Present (0xFE351Eaa4E81c0a6E50ED16768dCDECA8F3358cc)
and MOCA Future (0xc244A5561E5804a117993D2042522dfE5601E0F9). We even gave the wallets cute little thematically-resonant images corresponding with past, present, and future, respectively:
The idea, in theory, was simple. Contractual Obligations holders, instead of burning their bridges, would send them to one of these three wallets, thus committing themselves to a specific era of crypto art: Past, Present, Future, three things oft-discussed and always-interlocking but perpetually divisive, the present being mostly shit upon, the past and future being idealized in their own ways.
By doing this, by “[migrating] trust from a private company’s investment art pass into both a living artist and an institution of culture — by donating Contractual Obligations to MOCA…this marks a transformative act of patronage by collectors and a true show of trust and support to this art movement,” as the document reads.
What would happen thereafter? Fuck if we knew. Would Contractual Obligations holders even participate? We hoped, but that was all we could do, hope. As it says in the document, “Was this a trick or was it a treat? Collectors will learn November 1st. ;)” and, thus, so would we. As for the contents of Act II, we had only the following to go off of, the very last thing Matt wrote to us:
“I invite MOCA to be at the forefront of this metamorphosis as the trusted friends that receive all my $CANDY this Halloween.”
The Act II Announcement…
…properly comes on October 26th. At 12:05pm EST, Matt Kane releases a massive tweet thread, which we at MOCA follow at 2:18pm with one of our own. This is our joint way of announcing that the lead-up to Act II of the Moral Performance had officially begun. Both threads are below (Matt’s tweets are on the left, MOCA’s on the right):
Let us pause for a moment mid-thread. I draw your attention to Kane’s verbiage, specifically his use of “$CANDY.”
This nomenclature is Kane’s way of reducing his Contractual Obligations pieces themselves to the level of fungibility and commerce, while also keeping thematically concurrent with the Halloween season. There is backstory here too: Without going into too much detail, Matt Kane’s childhood was quite restrictive in terms of what he was allowed to eat, and while he would go out trick-or-treating with his friends each year, he wasn’t permitted to eat any of the candy he received; he would thus spill his sweets out on the floor, into a pile which his “frens” would split amongst themselves.
Imagine that pain for a moment. Your peers, stuffing their faces with candy you collected, gorging themselves on chocolate-coated, nougat-stuffed gold, and you unable to participate. The excitement on the doorstep of each new house, the anticipation of an unknown, the joy at a prized reward, all forcibly experienced as mere spectator… all build-up, no pay-off.
But as Matt said, “It’s also a double meaning…the idea of the grab-bag, where you go into trick-or-treating, and you’re getting random candy, kind of the same as RarePass: You’re getting random candy, and you just want that sweet satisfaction, that sugar…and the addiction the people in NFTs have to the sugarness of everything, so that’s kinda of where $CANDY came from.”
Let’s stop once more to unpack the juiciness revealed here. Pragmatically, there is this tease about frame-sizes and aspect ratios corresponding to epochs: “The Past is wide, The Present is long, The Future is square.” More information would come on that in time.
But most presciently, Matt reveals Act II’s proper title: Milk and Cookies. Yes, that is relevant to Matt’s own life, as home-baked desserts were provided to him as post-Halloween substitutes after giving his candy away. But there is a greater connection here, once again, to Andy Kaufman, whose influence on the Moral Performance is crystallized further in Act II.
There is one especially mythic Andy Kaufman performance, his August 26th, 1979 show at Carnegie Hall, today the stuff of legends. This is the performance (perhaps, for all your Kaufman fans out there, you know of it) where Robin Williams emerged from backstage, dressed as Andy’s grandmother to perform a bit, but then remaining in a rocking chair on-stage for the show’s duration. It was also where Andy promised his audience, if “everyone is very, very good,” that he would take them all out for a snack after the show.
And what was that snack?
You guessed it. Nor was Andy lying. After an 80-ish minute performance, Andy boarded the entire Carnegie Hall audience into buses waiting outside, which took them to the New York School of Printing, where the audience found hundreds upon hundreds of bags of Famous Amos Chocolate Chip Cookies alongside cartons of milk awaiting them (there were also magicians, jugglers, and Andy’s patented wrestling show, among other things, in what turned out to be a kind of Kaufmanian Carnival).
At this point in Matt Kane’s own performance, the acerbic and standoffish tone from Act I begins to dissipate, mirroring how, in many of Kaufman’s own performances, the comedian would first come on stage dressed as his alter-ego, the brash and bristling lounge-lizard, Tony Clifton, who might sing and dance to start, sure, but who would usually come to either berate the audience or get into altercations with those around him. Remaining through Clifton’s set rewarded audiences with Kaufman himself, thenceforth conducting the zany comedy his flock had come to see. Kaufman’s famous Milk and Cookies Performance (which indeed included a Tony Clifton intro) was a crystalline distillation of that duality. Thus, from this point on in the Moral Performance, with so many of his collectors donating their pieces — at the time, worth around 3 ETH a piece — to MOCA, Matt turned himself fully to sweetness.
But again, there was nothing forced. As Matt says in his next tweet, “Whether you choose to enter Act II or remain in Act I, you are free to decide what to do with your choices. But please known that I am ‘Looking for your Cooperation.’”
This would be the final point in the Moral Performance at which MOCA knew more about the what was to come than the audience participating with it. Herein, participants knew only that there were new themes to come, new nomenclatures to learn, a trio of wallets, a choice to be made, and a cut-off date for that choice: 11:59pm PST on October 31st.
October 27th to October 31st…
…were strange days. See Matt Kane wondering whether anyone will be interested in moving on to Act II, and if some did, how many? Consider Matt Kane asking collectors to willfully dispose of a four-figure asset, at that time the most lucrative single piece to emerge from RarePass. Would his audience trust Matt Kane? Would they trust MOCA? Where did their values lie? Was the performance’s heretofore momentum strong enough to carry all these individuals into Act II on intrigue alone?
Matt and I exchanged the following message on October 27th, when the Contractual Obligations donation-period opened:
Shortly after this conversation, at 11:41am EST, Contractual Obligations piece 2012–11–16 23–20–21 896 was sent to the MOCA-Present wallet: the Detour Sign photo. That this specific piece would be tied forevermore to the present has since felt especially apt, for what is life but a series of detours, every day something new, untethered to the past, unaware of the future, but adrift in the endless now. Matt did not let this donation go unacknowledged.
On October 28th, the number of donors climbed to 48.
On October 29th, the same Merv Kim whose words underscored all of Act I decided to continue into Act II:
By the beginning of Halloween, the number of participants had climbed to 113.
By All Hallows’ Eve’s end, 155 Contractual Obligations pieces would be sent to one of the Past, Present, and Future wallets, representing 62% of all holders (though Matt, at the time, mentioned the number was closer to 74%. I cannot currently account for that discrepancy, but either way, this was far more than the 30-or-so Matt had envisioned).
And with that, Act II could commence in earnest. Milk and Cookies for everyone.
November 1st…
…marks the curtain actually rising on Act II. As with every transition in Matt Kane’s Moral Performance, from here on out, there’s new terminology involved.
Just as the above post morphs the Contractual Obligations piece Here For The Control from a metal sculpture fresh-from-the-forge into a bowl of cookie dough, Matt Kane changes the entire aesthetic composition of his performance from brimstone to bakery: sweeter and, by proxy, less dangerous. He references his changing verbiage in a tweet later the same day:
Matt Kane would hereby refer to these Cookie Dough NFTs as the “Bake Posters.” These three unique AI generations were airdropped to whomever had sent their Contractual Obligations to MOCA’s Past, Present, or Future wallets respectively. Each is a kind of motif-laden advertisement for “AmeriGAN Cookie Dough,” a company of Kane’s own invention which transports themes of mass-production, sugar addiction, and over-commercialization into a new aesthetic sphere.
Those donors who chose the Past as their patron era received BAKE-PAST:
“Let’s Go Dutch Baroque for AmeriGAN Cookie Dough” the work reads, teasing a segment of Act II still to come. BAKE-PAST mimics a classic Dutch Baroque still-life in composition, but the hyperrealism more properly evokes a still-life’s set-up than the actual painting itself. Herein are the bones of an artwork to come, the inspiration, that which the artist will soon transmute into art proper. I’m not sure what to make of the giant bees, however, nor the swiss-cheese candle.
Meanwhile, those who choose the Present as their representative epoch receive BAKE-PRESENT:
The imagery here is less charged (no buzzing bumblebees) than BAKE-PAST but equally delectable. “Live and Laugh for AmeriGAN Cookie Dough,” this one reads, in what seems to play upon those “Live, Laugh, Love” signs guarding the doorframe of many-a-midwestern-mother’s kitchen. Very 21st-century Americana.
And finally, Future donors are destined to receive BAKE-FUTURE, certainly the most lurid (and unsettling) of the three Bake Posters:
BAKE-FUTURE is uber-vivid. The uncanny valley of the hand — its screws and mechanical innards exposed to the light — literally dripping with wet, creamy, melting cookie dough. The brazen inhumanity of the hand mirrors the discomfitting viscosity of the cookie dough. Perhaps Matt is trying to tell us that something (everything?) is amiss here. The spelling of “Cyborbakers” in the tagline “Cyborbakers for AmeriGAN Cookie Dough,” only supports that reading.
Listen closely, and you can almost hear the groans of Contractual Obligations donors. Into Act II they go, so trustful, yet here’s another strange AI-generated artwork airdropped into their wallets, and this one without the inherent 1/1/x rarity of their original pieces.
Matt lets these Bake Posters sit in the metaphorical oven for a day, taking up space in wallets. Perhaps because he expected blowback, another outspoken conversation, more hate, some fundamental misattribution of his efforts. But the vibes would remain, on the whole, against expectation, fairly positive.
Merv even reappeared briefly:
As Act I ceded to Act II, the Moral Performance’s audience necessarily shrunk. The intense initial buzz from Contractual Obligations had all but died-down. The general public probably lacked the sufficient attention-span for a multi-month performance art piece. Act II’s remaining audience was not only locked-in on the performance’s specificities, it proved far more supportive of Kane’s flourishes. Of these participants, the bulk were likely either mega-invested in Matt Kane as an artist or, you know, had just finished sending a highly-sought-after and expensive piece of artwork to an on-chain Museum and were literally bought-in, prepared to see the thing through to its culmination.
And Matt makes them all sit with the perceived consequences of their choice for a moment. “With the Bake Poster, everyone thought, when they were sending in their Contractual Obligations, that they were choosing which path they wanted,” Matt told me.
That would have been a reasonable expectation: After such extensive lead-up, after being asked to send highly-valuable assets to one of three thematically-charged wallet, after Kane hammered the moralistic importance of choice over and again, that once a choice was made, choosers would be asked to reap what their choices had sewn.
After all, that’s the nature of on-chain transaction, isn’t it? Everything is recorded, unchangeable, set in stone forevermore.
But each portion of the Moral Performance is a broken expectation in-and-of itself. Why would Milk and Cookies be any different?
November 2nd…
…proved that, of the many things that the Moral Performance sought of its participants, it really did seek their choice most of all.
If, the day prior, one were to have explored the Artist Description on any of the three Bake Posters, they wouldn’t have found very much of note. But November 2nd found Matt Kane announcing Milk and Cookies’s next phase, which not only bestowed the previous day’s Bake Poster’s with new meaning, it granted them new metadata altogether. Now, each of the Bake Poster’s carried the following message:
“Hear Me Out — Cookie Dough NFT with Burn Mechanism Except We Rebrand It BAKE! ✊🥛🍪
BAKING INSTRUCTIONS
Thank you for remaining in your 🪑. You recorded your thematic choice between Past, Present, and Future on the blockchain when you transformed your Contractual Obligations to MOCA’s stewardship. Now you must $CHEWS whether you remain in this theme or if the art sways you to make a different choice. Please take time with the art and the curatorial opinions provided by CuratorialGPT in each artwork’s description. You are free to do as you choose, of course.”
Beneath that description were posted three links to three individual Manifold contracts, which linked out to three new artworks, each requiring a Bake Poster be burnt in order to claim. The crux? Any of these new artworks — The Past, This Present, and Our Future (but only one) — could be redeemed by burning any of the three Bake Posters.
Matt made all of this clear in an announcement thread, saying:
After all, what is choice without the opportunity to revise that choice? Choice is an anarchic continuum, a sequence of non-linear pathways snaking forward, around, looping back and over and across one-another. Just as Matt made this point by allowing non-royalty-payers to retroactively make-up for their poor past decisions, he herein allows those who previously chose Past, Present, or Future to change their direction, given the new information presented to them.
“With the bake poster,” Matt told me, “everyone thought they were…choosing which path they wanted. They got a Bake Poster poster of what they decided, but then they could swerve. And that’s interesting because I’m giving them free choice…Not being locked into a decision, it all starts with…getting a random selection of artwork, now suddenly you’re getting ready to choose progressively until you’re completely free in the choice.”
The three Milk and Cookies artworks — The Past, This Present, and Our Future — are deserving of special attention. As Matt would tell me later, “It’s my favorite part of the whole performance!”
You can see why almost instantly.
These three pieces are among the most beautiful digital paintings Mr. Kane has created in his career. The Past, This Present, and Our Future are not only three separate plays on Johannes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, they are also love letters: to Matt’s artistic influences, to his participants (for whom these pieces would finally represent “the Matt Kane” they had likely hoped to receive from the beginning), to a painting practice which, upon being rediscovered throughout 2023, would thereafter explode into so many different forms.
Matt promised his participants that if they were good, he would take them out for Milk and Cookies, returning to the idea immediately upon announcing this segment of the performance.
As far as treats go, these three artworks are about the sweetest imaginable. In fact, before we move on, let’s look at each one individually. I’m going to give each its own segment heading, because, man, if these aren’t considered among Matt Kane’s masterworks, I don’t know what could be.
The Past…
…like both other artworks in this mini-series, boasts an extensive Artist Description, each of the three written by a ChatGPT variant Kane calls “CuratorialGPT,” which had been fed data about Kane himself, the public’s response to Contractual Obligations, articles on his work, etc.
The descriptions for each piece are lengthier than what you’ll see here, very much worth your individual investigation, but I’ll just direct you to this bit from The Past’s CuratorialGPT description:
“With The Past, Kane constructs a bridge that spans from the tangible, tactile world of Vermeer to the fleeting digitality of our age. Art, in its essence, captures the cyclical nature of societal ethos. Just as Vermeer’s The Milkmaid encapsulated the sentiments and nuances of its era, The Past stands as a reflection of our time, marked by rapid digital evolution and the reconceptualization of societal norms. In this melding of historical reverence and contemporary critique, the artwork beckons viewers to reflect on the shifting paradigms of labor, artistry, and the delicate balance of dreams and reality in our digital age.”
This sentiment is reflected in another of Matt’s Tweets from the Milk and Cookies announcement, wherein he mentions that, “While Vermeer uplifted laborers with harmonious light, today’s artist grapples with the shadows of a culture they helped shape, yet often find disjointed in this era.”
Which brings us to the second masterwork of mention…
This Present…
…which, besides being my personal favorite of triptychs, is also their codex. In The Past, the milkmaid maintains a physical closeness to the dough which is her creative instrument; its creation is but a single step within a larger creative process (assumedly it will soon become a confectionery of some kind), and its creator holds it physically close to her, the look on her face one of idyllic adoration.
In This Present, meanwhile,the creative conclusion has already been reached; the resultant cookies are finished, they are cooling, they are set-out for consumption. The Milkmaid here is distracted, looking down at a tablet from behind the counter, she having forfeited her role as creator to instead wear the mantle of salesperson, taking orders or ringing payments, she with a financial relationship to the creative object but no longer an artistic one. This milkmaid lacks physical contact — or much seeming interest in — the cookies themselves, the creative objects, which to her predecessor was quite overtly a source of nourishment and joy. We are a step removed from the creative process, and the creative object has evolved into an economic mechanism.
Matt’s CuratorialGPT says as much:
“With This Present, Kane constructs a narrative that’s both reflective and cautionary. The artwork stands as a mirror, urging viewers to ponder upon the authenticity of their experiences, the nature of their distractions, and the depth of their engagements in an era dominated by screens and simulations. Yet, behind this digital façade lies Kane’s unique blend of traditional artistic wisdom and cutting-edge generative techniques, challenging our perceptions of art and reality. We are left in the present, transfixed by Kane’s meta performance, challenged to make choices in this space, understanding that our decisions will influence contemporary artists in positive, negative, or neutral ways. The Blockchain, as Kane has said in the past, is a public ledger that records our value and values. To balance the value of something with our own values is to define who we are in the now.”
And so we have come to the final part of the cycle, the aptly named…
Our Future…
…in which the creative object, here emblematized as a pitcher of milk, is without human contact whatsoever. It is an automated, self-sustaining object, the mechanisms of its creation/distribution not just uncertain but ostentatiously odd. There is still a Milkmaid in this masterwork, but she’s receiving the creative instrument’s fruits, no longer even connected to its creation, she herself become merely a consumer. She is also painted her as strikingly inhuman:
Without a traditionally-human figure in the frame, both processes herein feel automated: that of the creative instrument and that of the receiver. The artwork’s inception and its enjoyment are now non-participatory actions, which feels especially pregnant given Matt’s clear-eyed scorn for a crypto art movement that seemed to have traded its once-revolutionary mindset for relatively soulless market mechanics, mechanics which exalt inhuman factors like “floor price” over very human creative instinct and execution. CuratorialGPT takes this further, saying:
“The traditional attire of the milkmaid, now draped over metal and circuitry, serves as a poignant juxtaposition of the organic and the synthetic. Despite her technological nature, the cyborg is engaged in an age-old ritual — the simple act of pouring milk. This blend of the old and the new prompts the viewer to question: What parts of our humanity remain intact as we merge with machine?…
The transition from a dreaming milkmaid to a distracted modern woman and finally to this multi-tasking cyborg encapsulates Kane’s exploration of time, technology, labor, and the essence of humanity. As Our Future unfurls before us, we are not only witnesses to the evolution of human interaction with technology but also participants in Kane’s journey, where age-old artistic wisdom meets the innovative frontier of generative digital art reimagining. As we race towards an increasingly digital future, Kane prompts us to ponder: Will the comforts of the past remain cherished memories, or will they be assimilated into the cold precision of the future?”
Matt published, in the same reveal announcement, a formal document entitled “A Thank You to Supporters of the Museum of Crypto” which detailed some of the contextual and performative nuances of Act II’s latest segment. Within this document, you’ll find Matt professing his specific gratitude for the conversational tenor of the entire Moral Performance:
The last thing Matt mentions in his announcements is that every artist who contributed 250 artworks to RarePass (Anne Spalter, Carlos Marcial, Coldie, Helena Sarin, Krista Kim, OSF, Other World, Pindar van Arman, ROBNESS, Sarah Zucker, and XCOPY) would receive “complimentary admission” to ACT II, i.e. an airdropped Bake Poster. In Matt’s words (made all the more meaningful with the previous month’s Twitter Spaces in mind), “Us artists gotta stick together, man.”
As the three Manifold Burn-to-Redeem periods opened the following day, as the three Bake Posters (PAST, PRESENT, or FUTURE) became redeemable interchangeably for any of Kane’s Three Masterworks, participant choices were reflected, reneged and redirected.
42 Contractual Obligations were sent to MOCA Past, 45 The Past artworks were minted.
44 Contractual Obligations were sent to MOCA Present, 60 This Present artworks were minted.
69 Contractual Obligations were sent to MOCA Future, 55 Our Future artworks were minted.
Read into that split whatever you like.
Throughout Early-to-Mid November…
…the Manifold contracts for The Past, This Present, or Our Future remained open. In that time, Matt would make only a brief selection of announcements regarding the Moral Performance, letting his participants make their choices without much outside influence, without teasing anything to come.
Kane would appear only briefly on Twitter, sometimes to post old photographs taken years earlier, memories seemingly resurrected from a cellphone camera, all presented without comment other than the hashtag “#ContractualObligations.”
This is my favorite:
Elsewhere, a few days after the Bake-to-Redeem began, Matt chronicled its progress.
On November 7th, he tweets “Past the halfway point. 96 choices made, 92 choices to be made. 34,33,29,” referencing the respective editions of The Past, This Present, and Our Future now in existence. “I’m trying to understand if collectors love and cherish these Act II works… or whether we’re just going to consume them and move on? Not sweet enough for you? Too much lactose? #cryptoart.”
In rereading this post today, I wonder if it wasn’t Kane exposing a more vulnerable, less sardonic side of himself, quite far from the snarky, all-knowing persona that he’d let loose unto the public in prior posts. Previously, when Kane had put forth these kinds of rhetorical questions about the nature of the Moral Performance, it felt very showman-like, a ringleader in the circus center asking the audience “Are you ready for more?!”
But here, after four days with only 50% participation, just a week after Act II’s inception — a time I know for a fact was stressful and uncertain — Kane questioning the motivations of his remaining participants feels like a momentary, perhaps even unwitting, break in the performance. Away goes Ringleader Matt Kane and out comes vulnerable, sometimes neurotic, even cynical Matt Kane. And at such a critical juncture in the performance, after so much time and effort had been put into the thing, while it stood at its midway point — too far-in to not see it through, not close enough to the end that its conclusion was yet in sight — I get the sense that Matt was overcome by the same anxieties about intention which had inspired the performance in the first place.
Only a few days later, however, the vulnerability recedes and the showman reappears:
The rhetorical questions, the wordplay, the veiled threats; Matt Kane is back! But also, here we get the first hint that Act III was nearing fruition. For those holders watching and waiting, this message acted, essentially, as a kick in the ass.
In this same period, there were a number of sideshows going on which were not directly related to the beginning of Act III. For instance, the aforementioned collector who had made good on an initial zero-royalty payment (who had received the MATT KANE Action Figure — REDEMPTION) received their piece, with Matt drawing special attention to the guns (and Max Osiris pubes) themselves and to Eric Rhodes’ Peoples’ Potato.
Then, finally, on November 14th, Matt offers — with little context and no overt connection to the Moral Performance other than the inclusion of “$CHEWS” — the following quote from Denis Villenueve’s 2017 film Blade Runner 2049:
I couldn’t embed the full gif in this essay, but it’s Ryan Gosling looking progressively more perturbed, eventually putting his head in his hands, eyes-widening, before he screams out in frustration and turns away from the camera. A pregnant communication, no? I’m tempted to unpack it, but perhaps it’s better left as is.
Otherwise, Matt Kane, after hinting at Act III’s quickly-approaching start, remained relatively quiet. I often wonder what collectors thought in this moment. What did they think they were waiting for? Were they afraid that Matt had exhausted his bag of tricks? Did they wonder if their editioned Matt Kane Masterwork, beautiful as it may be, was their ultimate prize after — by this point — a month-and-a-half of attention, participation, and trust?
Had they begun to doubt?
November 16th, 2023…
…finds Matt Kane dropping an ACT III announcement video for the ages. Consider all present doubt assuaged.
Using a voice I can only describe as a hybrid between professional wrestling announcer and Billy Mays, Matt Kane announces the final Act of his Moral Performance. Act III was to begin on the 21st of November, the Friday after Thanksgiving, a day synonymous in the United States with overconsumption, sales, and shopping malls: Black Friday (as in, the day when retail establishments get their yearly revenue out of the red and back in the black, i.e. profit). Here, it is playfully stylized as “Block Friday” (for obvious reasons).
(If you’d prefer, here’s a transcription of the video:
“FRIDAY FRIDAY FRIDAY! Abandon your family! Block Friday Madness! Bring a lawn chair to a freezing cold parking lot, and make awkward small talk under the waft of stale coffee! Transact on a centralized server! Centralization: Nobody does it better than crypto art! FREE FREE FREE FREE! We have the ethos, cement your legacy now! Join the placeholder Alpacas, spitting facts: ‘Extra narrative, chunky syrup!’ The Contractual Obligations performance continues…as seen on Twitter Spaces! Get your gravy-eating ass off the coach and L!!!!! F!!!!! G!!!!!”)
The video contains many thematically-massive elements we could focus on. For example, how its brazen air of commercialism and consumerism directly echoes the performance’s underlying impetus.
As Matt Kane told me, “I realized like, hey, you know what? Black Friday is coming, and I’m an American…So much of this is about consumerism and commercialization, and we’ve got like THE American holiday which celebrates that.”
In the video, Matt becomes an overcommercialized hyperbole, mirroring with his voice what so many influencers, shillers, and NFT maniacs inflect in their tweets. GET PUMPED, BUY NOW, YOU CAN’T MISS THIS, GOING TO THE MOON, LFG, etc. etc. The video is missing only an initial “GM(:” at its inception to get the vibe exactly right.
Besides the thematic exaggeration, there are also a number of practical details herein that directly communicate how Act III will begin.
There is that allusion to the “Placeholder Alpacas,” i.e. these guys:
Alpacas…which are known to spit when they get angry. Alpacas…spitting facts…get it? Even in miniscule moments like this, we can trust Matt to interject a double-entendre.
Another Placeholders Alpaca appears in a poster attached to the initial announcement (as does Matt Kane’s action-figured face):
Naturally, Matt’s choice of alpacas as his Act III harbingers is not without historical influence:
“As an American artist who grew up in the 80s with Toys Я’Us stuff, the alpacas, it’s a cross between Jeffrey the Giraffe — who came to mind because I did the action figures — and I was also thinking about Joe Camel, who was the cartoon [mascot for Camel Cigarettes], smoking cigarettes and stuff. So I was like, what is the cross between them? An alpaca. Unlike a giraffe and a camel, the utility of an alpaca is incredible. You can shear them…they’re raised for their meat, and they’re even used as pack animals, so the utility of alpacas and utility of NFTs, the connection is there.”
But perhaps more important than anything are the following four images, which appear in the Block Friday video each time Matt exclaims “FREE! FREE! FREE! FREE!”
In a truly full-circle moment (though unbeknownst to any of the performance’s participants), the FREE artworks — which Kane first labored over in the many many months before either Contractual Obligations or performance were thoughts in his mind — are revealed to the public. These first four brief FREE MATT KANE artworks are nothing less than a year of built pressure finally being released.
The next day, as if unable to stop the flow now that it’s started, Matt reveals a fifth FREE MATT KANE:
Here, he does not forget the requisite “GM.”
And so with all these pieces presented for public consumption, but with no clear link between them (and without a method to claim them for one’s own), Matt — as a sidewalk magician might — lays out all the tools he will use to pull the final Act of the Moral Performance from his hat.
Which lands us, one and all, audience and onlooker, at long last, in Act III, its title simultaneously a plea, an offering, and a command.
ACT III: FREE MATT KANE
When I first conceptualized this essay, it was going to jump back and forth through time. This felt like the only way to properly capture the Moral Performance, because you can’t really understand Act I: Contractual Obligations without understanding the many communications, starts, stops, and enervating interactions that Matt Kane had with SuperRare over the previous year.
And you couldn’t understand Act II: Milk and Cookies without knowing Kane’s reverence towards Andy Kaufman, present for decades. To really evoke all the fine details — the burning bridges, the Action Figures, the $CANDY — herein, you need to go back, back, back into Matt’s past. You need to see him as a lonely midwestern kid with a very small brush, painting his own action-figure card backs throughout colder, deader winters. You need to kneel with him and his friends on the floor, a pillow-case-worth of spilled candy scattered around them, as weary-eyed Matt Kane watches the sweets he had spent all night assembling be divvied-up by others. You need to walk across that Seattle bridge with him, you need to feel the phone ring, you need to see the phantom orange Detour sign appear out of the foggy northwestern night.
Because that’s where the art is. Matt’s cleverness is routinely overt in the Moral Performance, but his heart beats in the details. In its totality, the performance functions as a kind of jaunt through crypto art history, but it’s one seen through Matt’s eyes. And to see through Matt’s eyes, you need to see what he saw, think what he thought, feel how he felt, channel his own life-forged sensibilities.
And so, with Act III heralding the Moral Performance’s conclusion, it is only fitting that the thing ends where it long-ago started.
FREE MATT KANE, as nomenclature, is a tongue-in-cheek denotation of value: 🆓. It’s a plea and a command both. It is also a return home. The subtitle of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is “or There and Back Again.” That could be FREE MATT KANE’s subtitle too. We only ever end up back where we began, the circumstances the same, but us having changed. Bridges never burnt, but changed, and ultimately retread.
Of the 256 participants in ACT III —which includes
A) those who held one of the three Masterworks,
B) 28 early-Kane collectors who owned a piece from his The Door series,
C) 32 individuals who held a “size-0” Gazer (as Matt explained to me, “size-0” was a trait which expressed itself within that collection as a very, very tiny central object, aesthetically unappealing by comparison. These Gazers often sat at the floor value-wise, but its holders formed a tight community around this diminutiveness) —
there is no doubt they changed too. I myself have changed over the course of writing this essay, just as you have changed over the course of reading it. But of all who changed throughout the many-month-long development of this performative magnum opus, it was Matt Kane who changed most.
Act III itself, though teased for the first time on November 16th, would not start in earnest until November 21st. Refusing to state with real clarity what exactly ACT III entailed until that day arrived, Kane certainly generated some strong hints in the meantime.
November 17th to November 20th…
…prove beyond all doubt that Matt Kane is a tease.
Over the course of these few days, Matt continues showcasing the FREE artworks he had created in the previous year.
The first FREE is as follows, and Matt contextualizes it with only a “GM 🆓”:
This next one he reveals on November 18th at 1:36am EST, saying that “🆓is a collection created over the last year by a living artist painting spontaneously in the moment with his own custom software.”
12 hours later, whilst asking “those of you with BAKE posters — please be sure and $CHEWS this weekend. BLOCK FRIDAY MADNESS IS COMING” he reveals another:
Then this beauty on November 19th, presented without much comment:
And finally, it’s this particularly abstract piece which Kane presents to the world on November 20th, saying “It’s not always easy to see why or how we value 🆓 in crypto culture, but after spending a year meditating on the word + symbol, I’m looking forward to shearing my contribution to discourse on what being 🆓 means.” Shearing, herein, is not a typo.
In total, 9 🆓 artworks were teased in the lead-up to Act III: a slew of styles, a cavalcade of color schemes, no clear answers yet as to, well, what are these things? How do you get one? How will they be distributed? What might they mean (beyond the obvious)?
November 21 is a Tuesday…
…and also three days before Block Friday is slated to begin. Finally, Matt Kane begins to provide some much-requested answers:
In the middle of the night, to all the groups mentioned above, Matt had airdropped a so-called Placeholder Alpaca. The Alpacas’ purpose was made quite clear:
Kane’s announcement goes on to reference a dedicated website for Act III, the aptly titled free.mattkane.art, where the entire FREE MATT KANE collection continues, to this day, to live in its purest form.
Anyone who visited the website between the 21st and 24th of November found the following countdown timer:
Matt also reveals four more FREE artworks herein, bringing the grand total up to 13:
Of all the moving pieces in the Moral Performance, the Placeholders Alpacas are, today, the only part to not currently exist. Alas, they were only ever meant to serve a purpose, all that utility bringing them not immortality but void. They would live short lives, but would nevertheless receive their shining moment a few days hence, on Block Friday, when the free.mattkane.art countdown timer finally reached zero, as Matt Kane brought the Moral Performance to its more-or-less conclusion.
A Few Final Thoughts from Matt Kane…
…appear in the coming days. Some of them are FREE teases:
Others are expressions of gratitude:
And some are final jubilant decrees from a soon-retiring Moral Performance ringleader:
At Long Last, Block Friday…
…or November 24th, when the countdown timer on Matt Kane’s FREE website finally reaches 0 Days, 0 Hours, 0 Minutes, 0 Seconds, 0 Milliseconds.
At 3:02am on November 24th, Matt announces that the “Website is live! Have fun chewsing,
those of you with an 🦙 assistant.”
Visiting free.mattkane.art at any point post-countdown automatically opened a page that, today, is known as “The Catalog.”
The Catalog acts as a repository not only for the 256 FREE MATT KANE artworks, but also a host of other frankly-bizarre, clearly-AI generated imagery. The “🦙 assistant” Matt mentioned is an omnipresent little Placeholder Alpaca that hangs out in the bottom right corner of the screen, offering advice and commentary. A voice calling out from the void.
The Alpaca’s commentary helped Block Friday collectors to go about claiming one of the FREE MATT KANE works in the Catalog; a Placeholder Alpaca in one’s wallet was required in order to do so, each address being linked to a specific piece, delivery at a later date. All FREE MATT KANE artworks were claimed on a first-come, first-served basis. Those who first visited the site had first dibs on whichever FREE MATT KANE they liked best, something they could only know by scrolling through the Catalog in its entirety.
Today, the Catalog looks mostly the same as it did on Block Friday. There are FREE MATT KANE artworks galore, all of which, when clicked, open each NFT’s dedicated page on Matt’s site, metadata revealed, and the artwork presented in the same gigapixel style as ANONS and Masterworks.
Clicking on any of the scattered AI generations in the Catalog will prompt the 🦙 assistant to comment something soullessly and vaguely connected to crypto art or crypto politics:
You get the idea.
There are at least as many AI-generated images in the Catalog as there are FREE MATT KANE artworks, though we shouldn’t be surprised by now that — even for what was more-or-less a throwaway gimmick unrelated to the actual artwork-chewsing process — Matt went completely above and beyond what was expected, necessary, or even rational.
Which is a fairly good encompassment of the performance as a whole.
Slowly but surely, those with Placeholder Alpacas began to claim their FREE MATT KANE artworks. On December 2nd, 185 of 256 Act III participants had been “CHEWED” as Matt says.
(In this same post, Matt explicitly reveals that the inspiration for all the MATT KANE ACTION FIGURES was a 1987 G.I.JOE promotional action figure of “The Fridge,” otherwise known as William Perry, a 6’2, 335lb. stand-out defensive tackle who played college ball at Clemson before being drafted by the Chicago Bears in 1985, going on to win the Super Bowl that same year as a vital cog in Mike Ditka’s legendary defensive front, just an absolute NFL legend, one who managed a sizable pop-culture impact to boot. Perry’s career was ultimately truncated by both weight issues and infighting among the Chicago Bears coaching staff, but there is no doubt that he continues to carry titanic status in Chicago and elsewhere; the man was inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame, for that matter. His G.I.JOE figure was available as a mail-order prize during the late 80’s, making him the second living person to be recreated as a G.I.JOE figure, after the WWE’s Sgt. Slaughter.)
On December 5th, the 256 Placeholder Alpacas were all blinked out of the world, their metadata updated en masse to reflect whichever FREE MATT KANE their holders chose to claim. Thus, the Placeholder Alpacas served their small purpose, demonstrated their utility, and then disappeared entirely, to be entirely forgotten, at least to anyone who is not here in this paragraph with us.
Some Weeks Later, on Christmas…
…by which point the performance is long over. It ended just as it began: rather unceremoniously. All FREE MATT KANE artworks had been distributed, every Placeholder Alpaca metadatically-erased. We join together one more time, for what would be Matt Kane’s final bit of conceptual panache: an 11-Tweet thread set to the lyrics of John Lennon’s 1971 Christmas classic, Happy Xmas (War is Over).
Curtains.
The Moral Performance in Retrospect
By this point, it’s fair to ask whether this was all really necessary — for the purpose of recollecting and analyzing Matt Kane’s Moral Performance — this spending nearly 25,000 words cataloging every minute choice Kane made over the course of the three-or-so months during which the Moral Performance took place. There is so much minutiae herein, after all, and much of it probably seems happenstance even with so much context at-hand.
But a lot of it was happenstance and sudden. Kane never hid the improvisational nature of his lengthy brainchild. It’s abundantly clear in his effortful diversions (like the Matt Kane Action Figures), in the way Twitter served as the primary arena for communicating updates and thematic hints, in MOCA’s own involvement, and in all the unpredictable interactions which fundamentally altered the performance’s running course: Merv, Pindar van Arman, the unnamed SuperRare executive who spoke to Matt Kane about break-evens during an otherwise uneventful lunch sometime in the Summer of 2023.
If there’s one thing to take away from the performance, it’s that it was only as sudden and happenstance as its inspirations: chance encounters, bright ideas, AI generations, throwaway comments, Andy Kaufman, a Detour sign stumbled upon one lonesome and momentous night long ago on a Seattle bridge. Another site-specific artwork, perhaps.
It remains my belief that one could not truly grasp the scope or ingenuity of the Moral Performance without having access to its every step, lilt, stumble, shamble-cum-somersault a la Willy Wonka. You need to see all of its excess in order to understand both its seismic scope and the armada of meditations — on medium, on criticism, on his past, on aesthetics — with which Matt wrestled throughout these months. The nature of the performance structurally changes depending on your relationship to it, and so one could not write about the Moral Performance without offering readers as many relationships to it as possible.
This is not a performance like Valie Export’s Touch Cinema (in which the artist approached citizens throughout European cities, a small curtained cardboard-box literally attached to her chest, and offered passerby an opportunity to fondle her breasts behind the curtain) with a single motif, a repeated action, one striking message. It is unlike Yuukitanaka’s Rolling Mud performance (perhaps you’ve seen it on social media) which took place in front of one rapt audience, in a single space, over a pre-understood period of time, where the only object of attention was the performance itself. RarePass holders, who were individually involved in the Moral Performance from its inception, have a fundamentally different relationship to it than any of us who watched from the sidelines, myself included. They were actually making the choices. They were financially inclined to pore over every post that came from Matt Kane’s account. But holders had different experiences than one another, too. There were some who never made it out of Act I. There were others who missed their opportunity to exchange a Bake Poster for a Masterwork. There were those who chose not to keep-up with Matt Kane’s early-morning musings and so would have missed the Andy Kaufman allusions, the repeated symbolic importance of the Detour sign, the tiny details implemented in every Action Figure.
I myself occupy a unique position in the Moral Performance: I know more about its inner-workings and intricacies than almost anyone alive; while not personally involved as a participant, I was extremely involved in the background. I interviewed Matt early-on in Act I, I received that call about MOCA’s participation, I moved that process forward, I wrote Twitter threads, and I hung on Matt’s every word as he brought his performance from its zenith to its conclusion. I wrote this endless essay.
And so in thinking about how I wanted to wrap this essay, I figure it’s best to let the performance speak lengthily for itself.
Instead, I will talk about myself and what the Moral Performance means to me.
I will admit, I’ve had my own periodic difficulties with crypto art. While I am an unabashed lover of this art movement, and much of the art within it, there is something numbing about having so much art presented so pell-mell — a daily bludgeoning of talent — which makes it hard to appreciate quality. It’s exhausting to deeply research anything, let alone feel energized by any specific artwork enough to form some connection with it. There’s so little opportunity to stop and stare, which is ironic, because great art wants only one thing: to be stopped and stared at.
Yet, from within the great, tremulous crypto art cloud, the Moral Performance emerged. And it stopped me as soon as I became aware of the discourse around it. The audacity of the thing, the devil-may-care decision to potentially alienate massive swaths of the crypto art public. That kind of thing just does not happen here. Maybe in art movements anywhere. Crypto art is extremely reliant on platforms and collectors, and so to put oneself in a position to disappoint or dismay these people, that was immediately quite exciting, and to do so on such a grand stage, with such singular weirdness, from a pedestal as appreciated as Matt Kane’s, there was just so much in the performance’s early moments that made me want to pay attention.
I was — and still am — struck at how wide-ranging conversation around the Moral Performance became. The length of time it dominated our collective mentality, the variety of opinions good and bad, the amount of analysis and insight it inspired, the many corners of crypto art it collected together. I have perhaps never seen the crypto art community so unified around a single topic, certainly not a single artwork (and so sparingly concerned with floor price). Matt stood in the center of his hurricane as an unblemished maestro, charging ahead without regard for anyone’s opinion. He never apologized, never backed away from his initial assertions, only ever became more targeted, more creative, more himself.
And on top of that, there was this unimpeachable sense of joy radiating through the entire performance. A climber finds God between over-exposed holds, John Mayer makes orgasm faces while playing the guitar, and Matt seemed to dance between the raindrops of the storm he started. There was always a levity, always a brightness, always a celebratory aspect to the performance that superseded its oft-darker subject matter.
Each choice, improvisational or otherwise, felt inspired by something, an identifiable something, reasoned-out and never random. The many ways Kane expressed care for the performance’s participants, for example. A good artist has an effect on its audience. A great artist anticipates that effect, turns the audience into the instrument, the page, the palette. The Moral Performance sought as large an audience as was interested in being involved, and so, despite its fluid brilliance, never lacked in approachability; full of subtlety, but subtlety used as a reward, never to mask or confound. Matt abstained from hifalutin discourse as he described the artworks and his process. He explained his thinking in crypto art’s own terms, in language designed for the masses instead of for academics. So that we may all get played, should we so wish.
There are versions of this essay that take a much more scholarly approach to Matt’s color study, his compositions, the art-historical continuums in which his performance sits, but that wouldn’t feel true to the performance itself, which was so much more experiential than it was explanatory, so much more like a circus than a lecture.
In the aftermath of the Moral Performance, months later when we spoke on-the-record, Matt told me, “Artists, and especially myself, we got into painting as a form of therapy, dealing with emotions…and as I look back the whole performance was, it’s no different than any painting that I’ve made that’s really dealing with emotions and with therapy and trying to assemble some deep-seated things and figure them out and make sense of them and put them in a form I can see and move around and move on from…Jackson Pollock is known for Abstract Expressionism, and my whole performance, some of those swipes, some of those things [I was doing], it was like my arm moving out, my arm lashing across a canvas, it really is that the whole performance, it was therapy.”
That’s palpable in the performance, in its targets, in the strained relationships it meditates on , a few of which we know about, many of which we do not, and some of which the performance created itself. Despite its celebratory nature and oft-neon-drenched aesthetics, there is a stunning amount of pain expressed in the Moral Performance. Pain from beleaguered and unrealistic expectations. Pain from broken promises. Pain from manipulation. Pain from devaluation. It may take a lifetime to really feel that pain, let alone internalize it, let alone name it, let alone give it artistic shape or elucidate it across many hundreds of artworks. I thus feel that the Moral Performance’s final act is its most fitting: FREE MATT KANE.
An ironic name given the context, and as we’ve discussed, it doubles as a command. But above even that, it is an exultation. Matt Kane is free, becomes free, not just by completing these many months of work which began with the signing of a contract in the Fall of 2022, but by the revelation and release of all his pain. As we’ve discussed, the primary conceit of burning bridges in Contractual Obligations was not to destroy the past but to destroy its hold over one’s present and future.
Among the last things Matt said to me was this: “I’ve begun to see different things now, like why do I have such a problem with manipulative people? And as I’m in this space and being confronted by manipulative people, why is that so difficult for me?… I’ve just been really connecting the pieces.”
Listen, there’s a lot about Matt’s history that neither you or I know, which we will never know. There are references within the performance to hidden relics of Matt’s past struggles with manipulation and deceit, many of which he placed in the Moral Performance for nobody’s benefit but his own.
In some ways, we are all, regardless of our participation, watching the Moral Performance through a window. We can see Matt gesticulating in the center of the circus ring, we can make out his tone of voice, but we still struggle to understand him at times, even with our cheeks smushed to the glass. There are things he whispers under his breath, forlorn looks that arise for only a moment as he moves on to his next trick. Only Matt Kane knows the many, many Matt Kanes which existed before the performance, which influenced so many of its intricacies. There is a sense that this was a performance designed for an audience of one, that it was as much about how we would react to Kane’s own reaction as about how we were reacting to the performance ourselves.
“Maybe I’ll never be a healthy human being,” Matt admits, “but I think the healthiest thing is to be striving towards that. To spend a life striving towards healthiness, that’s not bad, I don’t think that’s a terrible outcome.”
Does it change our relationship to the Moral Performance if the freedom which came at its conclusion is admittedly ephemeral? An artist of Kane’s caliber, with the impact and notoriety he maintains, is sure to court other manipulative elements in his future. There will be other people — perhaps I am even one of them — who seek to capitalize on his fame and genius for their own gain. How long before he is trapped again in an obligatory cycle, before another thoughtless comment reconnects the cables of an unwittingly rebuilt bridge? Our lives are cyclical, and those things which were once our tormentors tend to return in different clothes, speaking with a different accent. The Moral Performance is Matt Kane’s blueprint for outwitting his own tormentors in the future. Honesty, brazenness, self-certainty, community; look how all were brought to life in service of Matt Kane’s own liberation. We may not agree with each of his healing tactics or who they insinuated, but we cannot doubt the efficacy of his actions.
The Matt Kane who emerged on the other side of the performance seems lighter, brighter, more assured. He has big plans, none of which he will reveal. I expect that the Moral Performance will never truly end for Matt Kane or his art, that we will see its tentacles breaking through the water in many of Kane’s future movements. Kane himself expects as much. “It’ll be interesting what the collectors make from now on. Gazers is an infinite performance. I believe this Moral Performance is also an infinite performance, because it essentially assigns the participants from here to take away some lessons and put those lessons into action…What will it mean when someone pays me royalties when they sell a FREE MATT KANE or an Action Figure? What will it mean when they do not? For me, it’s about choices they make, and that’s why, in the end, making choices about choosing the FREE artwork became so important, because their choices ultimately will be what carries on the performance beyond the third act.”
At least in Matt’s mind, the performance is still ongoing. This essay is a part of it, and you are a part of it too; simply by becoming aware of the performance, reading Matt’s words, traveling through a past that will always have happened as it happened, your own choices made never to be unmade, every casual comment, every momentary outrage being cataloged somewhere, being remembered by someone, you have entered yourself into it. Welcome to this vast cohort of participants. We are happy to have you.
Like a cloaked vampire whom you have carelessly invited across the threshold into your house, Matt Kane’s Moral Performance has entered into your life, glittering and glamorous as it first appeared. You cannot evade it, it has already sunk its fangs into your neck. It will never forget the taste, you will never heal the puncture. Every step you take from here extends the Performance’s duration. Every sentence I further add to this essay…
