Hi Crowd!
Confession: I am a collector.
I collect things, but also stories and ideas.
This is not a surprise to anyone who knows me. I could (and have) psychoanalyzed the whys and hows of this but suffice to say I missed out on a lot of things as a kid because I couldn't afford them but I would get magazines and obsess over things and often found myself telling the people who could afford them which things they should buy. Later, as I got older and I realized that the "thrill of the hunt" was often much more rewarding than just buying things, and I saw a pattern where I'd buy things to learn about them, often before other people cared much about them, and then keep a few but sell the rest to help fund the next things I'd been hunting. (Spoiler: I often kept the wrong ones) So while the "stuff in my possession" might fluctuate, the weird tidbits of info about all these things just kept growing.
If you want to have a conversation about rare punk rock records specifically misprints and short runs and random colored vinyl mistakes, obscure Japanese robot (diecast only) and kaiju (sofubi please) toys or Jumbo Machinders, Japanese denim, Vietnam era watches, knives and zippos, 1990's street/pop art screenprints, rare editions of occult books or blockchain based digital art, and how those things all relate to each other, and do it over a cup of naturally processed Kenyan coffee, I'm your guy.
Long story short, I'm a nerd and I like finding cool stuff. Recently (last few years) I've been spending a lot of time with generative art and since I've answered the same question a few times in various forums I thought maybe I'd just send out something general about it. Artblocks is the gold standard that all generative art collectors know about so I won't be spending any time on that right now. All the major stuff is there and that's where super big ticket high profile works can be found. I love it, but I also can't afford to buy everything I like there, as a result I find myself spending more time on fx(hash) and can often find works by the same artists and their contemporaries and often at a fraction of the price. Blockchain wise, Artblocks is on Ethereum, fx(hash) is primarily on Tezos though has recently added support for Ethereum and Base. If you are new to Tezos you'll want to set up Temple wallet which works just like Metamask and has a simple swap/buy mechanism to convert some eth over if you like. But that's just mechanics.
The project I saw a lot of people really get excited about recently was g l y p h by punvyr. I believe this is the most minted generative project ever now, with over 270k pieces minted. It was a free mint which certainly aided in that, but the mint was open for a week and that people kept going back to mint more was really exciting - it wasn't just a rush and then a dump. Additionally, it was super fascinating to see a generative algorithm pushed this far -almost 300k iterations! I minted a bunch, and then also went back and bought a bunch of others that I found visually interesting. There's a number of different color schemes and traits to explore, and the pieces are actually animated (which I can't show here) but I really love this collection and think the huge number of them means that this might become a default collection that anyone into genart will have a piece from eventually. I admit to having quite a few of them and need to do some internal curation.
This collection was to celebrate fx(hash) launch on Base, with punvyr being one of the very first and most active artists on the platform, so it's significant for other reasons. These can still be picked up for pennies.
Speaking of first artists, the very first collection on fx(hash) was released by the founder of the platform, so if you think of Artblocks, founded by Snowfro and his Chromie Squiggle collection, RGB Elementary Cellular Automaton is the Squiggle equivalent - but there are only 1000 of these vs 10k Squiggles, and still have a super reasonable entry point for new buyers though I don't know how long that will be the case. I've spent so much time going through this collection and really love it - I'm saddened that a handful of the most amazing pieces in the collection seem to be in lost or inactive wallets, and hope that these are just temporarily forgotten about and whoever owns them comes back soon and does something. NFTs being lost in old wallets is a real risk, one we don't really have a solid grasp on yet.
It's also really fun to find artists doing work today with Artblocks or Bright Moments for example, and then search for them on fx(hash) and frequently you can find earlier works, or explorations on ideas they've continued to experiment with over the years. The following examples are some from my collection so obviously hand picked for my personal tastes, but there are countless others that can be found with just a little bit of searching around.
Lisa is a great example here, I discovered her when she released Speak To Me on Artblocks which I loved and minted several of, but then I found so many of her previous collections and have had to snatch up a bunch of them.
Targeting hunting is fun, but I also love just scrolling through the recent sales and listings to find things I might have missed otherwise. Here's two examples of things that caught my eye and I was delighted to add to my collection.
This isn't a comprehensive how-to but it covers the questions I get asked most often and hopefully was somewhat useful or entertaining. There's a ton of creativity happening there and the above only represents my personal tastes, so if you have some time and some curiosity, I definitely recommend checking it out. Let me know if you find something cool!
-Sean
