Onchain for centuries with Art Blocks

Header art: Chromie Squiggle #59 by Art Blocks founder Snowfro (Erick Calderon), owned by 0xb99a6171df6ecd6b90abef6af6452fef0ffef9c9.

Ryley Ohlsen has a chandelier hanging in his office. That detail set the tone for our whole conversation.

Splits interviewed Ryley and Lindsay Gilbert, both engineers at Art Blocks, about how the platform stands out among so many NFT marketplaces. The secret is encoded in the name — Art Blocks' core purpose is putting art in blocks, building high culture into the living edifice of Ethereum. Art Blocks has been all about onchain culture since before "onchain" became a buzzword.

"We view the art as something long-term, something we want to keep accessible and available," Ryley explained. "That's why we're using the blockchain," for its digital durability. Art Blocks helps artists create "hundreds-of-years assets," even when it costs thousands of dollars to upload the constituent data.

Most NFT platforms are like a neighborhood craft fair: anyone willing to pay the booth fee is welcome to peddle their wares. By contrast, Art Blocks is a fine art gallery with exhibitions hand-selected to express a particular vision. This rarified ethos is evident in the description of Art Blocks Curated, the platform's premier venue:

The Curated collection is the foundational series of Art Blocks. Selected by the Curation Board, it represents our vision for the pinnacle of generative art, showcasing projects that embody world-class innovation, technical rigor, and aesthetic beauty.

Art Blocks has experimented with other formats, culminating in Studio, where previously curated artists can self-publish new works. "They can be a little bit more experimental, we don't have to tell them no as often," Ryley said wryly.

Art Blocks specializes in showcasing generative artists who use the Ethereum blockchain in their work. As Ryley put it, minting one of their pieces "is a collaboration between the artist, the collector, and the blockchain itself."

The financial aspect of crypto is convenient for this purpose, streamlining the payment and compensation process. What's more compelling is how Ethereum acts as a medium, ingredient as well as infrastructure.

Generative art is a "natural fit on the blockchain because of that pseudorandom seed generation," Ryley reflected. Furthermore: "Art Blocks tokens store their metadata fully on-chain, ensuring collectors that their NFTs will always remain accessible and immutable."

This spring, Art Blocks general manager Holladay Saltz published "On a New Aesthetics of Seriality," examining how the unique modality of onchain generative art evolved from postmodern contemporary art. Among other factors, she identified this paradigm shift: "Art is an object → Art is a system." In the new context, "Art depends on transaction to exist."

As Splits has previously said of generative art, "​​Creative coders define a possibility space, and then snapshots from that space are minted as NFTs." The collectors' choice to mint initiates the concrete body of work.

In addition to cultivating conceptual sophistication — or because of it — Art Blocks has gathered a warm collective of artists who care more about pushing the frontier of generative art than about crypto prices. Lindsay recalled that Art Blocks’ annual event in Marfa, Texas was equally vibrant in 2023 when Ethereum was slogging sideways through a bear market. "The community's enthusiasm and belief in what people are doing" is a deep well of resilience, she told Splits.

Splitting the Blocks#

Art Blocks integrated Splits for practical reasons. "We wanted to do a better job facilitating multi-party payments," Ryley explained. Splits is a core building block (pun intended) for a "smoother" experience. "We collaborate with a lot of artists and they collaborate with each other." Splits makes it easy for Art Blocks to distribute revenue to all parties.

As for what's next, Art Blocks is intrigued by the rush of activity around Ethereum L2s while maintaining a long term view. "The technology is heading in the right direction, you get the security of L1 along with scalability," Ryley said. Lindsay and the Art Blocks engineering team are working on bringing Base to Art Blocks, a new epoch for the platform.

A moment to mint#

Three ongoing works from Art Blocks Studio:

Incircles by Jos Vromans "presents a subdivision of the plane into triangles, but instead of drawing those triangles, each incircle is drawn." The triangles are suggested by their geometric contents:

"Abstract art is an expression of the artist's inner world, but it also allows each viewer to see unique images based on his own experiences and feelings. Each abstract painting becomes a mirror, reflecting the unique inner state of the one who looks at it." Untitled by Olga Fradina:

Fragmented Perception by Motus Art "features an ordered grid of circles, fragmented in a disordered yet rhythmic dance that explores the balance between clarity and chaos."