MOCA LIVE

MOCA LIVE: Criticizing Crypto Art Criticism, Who Gets to Create Context, and Being Trapped by One's Style with Eleonora Brizi

Max and Colborn welcome the curator and critic, Eleonora Brizi, back to the podcast for the 3rd time (!!!) to dive deep on crypto art's many problems with criticism. The three will tackle the lack of criticism in crypto art, and what has in many ways replaced it. They'll go into the difficulty of creating criticism while honoring crypto art's values, the trouble of artists being trapped in their own styles, whether criticism can ever be properly incentivized, and much more.

MOCA LIVE: Night of the Living Bots, The AI Agent Devolution, and the Juiced Number Incentive

Today's episode is all about bots: automated programs, AI agents, procedural scam artists, if it's performing an action without direct human intervention, we're breaking it down and talking about why it's important. Whether bots are used to juice follower numbers, mislead investors, or create artificial cultural ephemera, there's no denying their outsized impact on every crypto-adjacent. Max and Colborn dive deep on different kinds of bots, how they affect crypto culture, and whether crypto art can ever escape their influence, especially since the internet at-large cannot. 

MOCA LIVE: The Impossibility of Innovation, AsyncArt's Legacy, and The Maslow's Hierarchy of Crypto Art Needs with Conlan Rios

Today, Max and Colborn welcome a crypto art legend, and one one of the founders of Async.Art, Conlan Rios, to talk innovation in crypto art: Can innovation occur sustainably from the business end? How can a business survive sustainably in crypto art? Drawing from three years running AsyncArt, a leading creative crypto art plaform, Conlan dissects the legacy of his own project, what lessons are applicable to all of crypto art, and the nasty era of un-innovation we (perhaps unavoidably) find ourselves in.

MOCA LIVE: Crypto Art's Failing Business Model, Killing Platforms with Values, Royalties, Criticism, and Bubbles

On today's episode, Max and Colborn dive headfirst into the noxious swamp that is crypto art's business environment. They trace crypto art businesses from early years until today, discuss the difficulty of running a sustainable business in crypto art despite rising crypto prices, wonder whether our values are incompatible with survival, debate criticism, and field a whole host of questions and comments from a rollicking chatroom. 

MOCA LIVE: What Does Crypto Art Value, Remembering the Cypherpunks, Data Scientists and AI, with Martin Lukas Ostachowski

This week, Max and Colborn welcome the remarkable cloud artist and crypto art historian, Martin Lukas Ostachowski (MLO) to the podcast to plumb through the past for the values that crypto art holds dear, if there are any. Join us as we go back to the cypherpunks, through the creation of Bitcoin, back and forth through many years of crypto art to see what crypto art values, when those values were traded away, how data scientists and AI models might provide new hope for unearthing crypto art's actual history. 
 
Read "Crypto Art - A Decentralized View" by Massimo Franceschet, Giovanni Colavizza, Tai Smith, Blake Finucane, Martin Lukas Ostachowski, Sergio Scalet, Jonathan Perkins, James Morgan, and Sebastian Hernandez here:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.03263
 

MOCA LIVE: Airing Our Crypto Art Grievances (And There are a Lot of Them) with ROBNESS

In a crypto art world always on the edge of flaming-up into fury, Max, Colborn, and special guest ROBNESS spill a bunch of gasoline everywhere and light a match. The three will vent their deepest grievances about collectors, generative art, AI, art contests, and much more. Listen now...if you can handle the heat. 

MOCA LIVE: Where Audiences Wander, Twitter is Terrible, Subscription Services, and If Warpcast is the Future with Max Jackson

On this week's episode, Colborn and Max (Cohen) welcome the OG crypto artist Max Jackson to MOCA LIVE for a discussion of, not art necessarily, but all those who love it. Audiences is the day's topic, and the three discuss the best (and worst) ways of finding an audience, what having a crypto art audience even means, the death of Twitter's reliability, the birth of new models of audience-seeking, and whether any such model can survive long-term. 

MOCA LIVE: The Collector's Condundrum, Art We Don't Want, and the 10 New Definitions of Crypto Art with Artnome

On today's podcast, Max and Colborn welcome the legendary collector, writer, thinker, and crypto art forefather, Artnome, for a conversation about all things collecting and crypto art history. Beginning with the question "What do we do with art we no long like?" and opening up into a discussion of good vs. bad art in general, the trio eventually come to question and retool Artnome's foundational "What is Cryptoart," article from 2018. We somehow avoid talking for too long about the Boston Celtics. 
 
"What is Cryptoart": https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/1/14/what-is-cryptoart
RightClickSave: https://www.rightclicksave.com/
ClubNFT: https://www.clubnft.com/
 

MOCA LIVE: The Collaboration Revival, Did Artblocks Kill Collaborations?, and the Line Between Collabs and Derivatives with George Boya

Max and Colborn are joined by the OG crypto art collage artist George Boya for a podcast about collaborations, free artistic spirits, and creative processes. Inspired by George's recent series of collaborative pieces, Partners in Crime, the three go in depth on the importance of collaborations in crypto art culture, why the collabs suddenly ended (Artblocks, we're looking at you), what the process of creating collaborative artwork is like, how AI and derivatives factor into the collaborative ecosystem, and much more!
George Boya: https://twitter.com/BoyaGeorge
Partners in Crime: https://foundation.app/gallery/cultishnya
Through Time and Space (artwork mentioned during the Pod): https://superrare.com/artwork-v2/through-time-and-space-15473
 

MOCYah or MOCNah: Moonbirds' CC0 Nightmare, Taking Advantage of Platform Incentives, Honoring Dead Artists, and an Existential Economy

Max and Colborn are back (with sound effects!) to assign archaic denotations of value to the biggest recent news stories (and end up spiraling into head-scratching discussions). This week, it's Yuga's questionably-illegal reverting of Moonbirds' commercial rights away from CC0, Latasha using Zora incentive fees to help recoup the losses from a wallet hack, the best way to honor traditional artists who have recently passed, crypto artist identity crises, and an existential economic moment.