Michael Kutsche

🚀I'm proud that my newest 1/1 frag·men·tal has been selected for the upcoming Contemporary Discoveries auction at @Sothebys , starting Feb 22nd at 10am HKT. Excited to be featured alongside legends such as @terrelldom , @brokedidonato and @sleeprNFT 🔥

@halecar2 @grelysian 💯 Well spoken

Visibility, attention, and support are not decentralized. I think this idea that NFTs somehow escaped gatekeeping is one of the biggest myths the space keeps telling itself. It sounds good because blockchain infrastructure is technically open; anyone can mint, anyone can buy, and everything is transparent on-chain. Fine. But visibility is not decentralized. Attention is not decentralized. Support is not decentralized. And those are the things that mostly determine (especially online) who gets to exist culturally. The reality is that NFTs reproduced a lot of the same social structures as the traditional art world almost immediately. A small group of artists became canonized early, collectors clustered around them, platforms amplified them, and then everyone else was told the ecosystem was “open” while competing for scraps of attention in an economy driven almost entirely by visibility algorithms and insider networks. The success rate for artists experimenting natively in NFTs is not radically different from the traditional art world (something I personally have experimented with first in my trad art career because I am Mexican and not in the USA or Europe, and secondly in NFTs because I was late and not doing generative art). We act like this was some mass liberation event for artists, but how many actually built sustainable careers? How many received long-term support? How many got to keep experimenting after the speculative wave cooled off? Very few. The artists who succeeded were largely the ones who were selected early, platformed early, supported by collectors early, or given enough visibility to build communities around themselves. That’s not an insult, it’s just reality. It mirrors traditional art structures much more than people want to admit. In both systems, a very small number of artists are given enough oxygen to continue evolving publicly while most others remain invisible despite producing meaningful work. And I think this obsession with “nativeness” sometimes ignores how much of NFT culture was financially accelerated by speculation rather than by some fundamentally new social model. The transparency argument is interesting technologically, yes, but transparency of transactions doesn’t eliminate power structures. You can see the hierarchy more clearly, but the hierarchy still exists. Maybe even more aggressively because everything becomes publicly quantified. You can literally watch social consensus form in real time around a chosen set of artists and collections. You can watch people chase wallets, mimic buying behavior, perform affiliation, and build prestige loops. That’s not the disappearance of the art world. That’s just a faster and more financialized version of it (which is fine!). And this idea that traditional art is slow and NFTs are somehow more democratic because they circulate faster, I don’t fully buy that either. Fast circulation often benefited speculation more than artistic depth. A lot of artists became trapped producing for velocity, relevance cycles, timelines, floor prices, and engagement. The market rewarded constant visibility, not necessarily sustained artistic thinking. This I would also argue, is one of the biggest problems of our space. One could argue that great gestures take time, not just efficient network distribution. I also think people romanticize “community” in NFTs without acknowledging that communities are often formed around asset performance first and art second. Not always, but often. If prices collapsed, communities frequently disappeared too. That might tell us something important about the underlying structure of our space. What drew myself and many traditional art people into crypto initially wasn’t simply that it was “new.” The art world is constantly exposed to novelty. What was compelling was the temporary feeling that alternative forms of circulation and patronage might emerge. This felt like I was going to skip the gatekeeping I had experienced for being born in the South. But over time, what actually I saw emerged was another status economy with its own elites, its own language, its own institutions, and its own mechanisms of exclusion. Partly why I decided to create the projects I create was because I saw the massive opportunity that existed but that artists would need help to be seen, supported, and collected. NFTs are the most exciting space for contemporary art right now IMO. I fully believe blockchain has meaningful implications for provenance, digital ownership, artist royalties, and online-native cultural forms. But I think we have to stop pretending the ecosystem escaped human behavior or escaped the concentration of power. It didn’t. The same dynamics exist everywhere: a few artists become legible to the market, a few collectors shape discourse, a few platforms dominate visibility, and most artists remain structurally peripheral no matter how “open” the infrastructure is. That’s not failure. That’s just culture. The mistake is pretending that code dissolved it 🤔🫣🥺

@TheoChron @SHL0MS 😄👌

@michaelkutsche @SHL0MS I'm producing so much AI slop lately 🤣🤣🤣

From now on, whenever some luddite throws a tantrum and blanket-calls something “AI slop” without even looking at it, we can point them to this wonderful experiment by @SHL0MS. Well played! 😂🤌

@Defacedstudio 🔥🔥🔥

A Series of Headaches. Twenty self-portraits drawn from a headache journal. Details below ↓

@degens @nyuniversity Congratulations! 🎉

AFTER 9 YEARS OF HARD WORK, I’M GRADUATING FROM NYU WITH MY MASTER’S THIS THURSDAY 💜🎓

Elon Musk spent $290 million to elect Trump. Musk got $512 billion richer since Trump was elected & is now worth $815 billion. He wants to cut Social Security and Medicare by $500-$700 billion a year. You’re not angry enough.

@DrDreamsMusic @grok @diplo @RickRubin @MrChuckD @WeAreDeLaSoul @RZA @HipHopGoldenAge @DJPrincePaul @djjazzyjeff215 @KillerMike @QtipTheAbstract 🔥🔥🔥

The Bronx, 1982, three young legends at the dawn of hip hop. #RunwayBigPitchContest @grok please show this to fans of Wild Style, style wars, graffiti rock, @diplo @RickRubin @mrchuckD @wearedelasoul @rza @hiphopgoldenage @djprincepaul @djjazzyjeff215 @killermike @QtipTheAbstract @questlove

@kattlatte Love the retro vibe of this!

A young woman's recurring dreams begin bleeding into reality, binding her to a quiet stranger halfway across the world. #RunwayBigPitchContest

NFTs could have worked out if people actually wanted to own them instead of flipping them. i never spent a splashy amount of money on NFTs but steadily bought lower priced work from artists who i like and wanted to support and own something from and never sold anything. what serious artist wants their work to be traded by mouth breathers foaming about floor prices who couldn’t give a single shit about art? i find it ironic that this new breed of shills are doing the whole “this trad artist who sells million dollar paintings has an NFT series from 2022 that’s only $39! aRbItRaGe!!!!” while at the same time perpetuating the gauche flipper bullshit that crowds out any possibility of any of these artists with the bona fides they revere so much ever minting work again. at the very least accept that you’re a glorified memecoin trader and not an art collector and stop talking out of both sides of your mouth

@redbeardnft @ronnaldong @nicedayJules Love this

Gm I think it’s important to take notice of @nicedayJules Bird project You might think it’s success is because it’s filled up on your timeline But in reality it was because Jules built a project that was specifically not fomo induced We feel often that projects here need to be built on the timeline in order to be successful The sell out is desperately hinged on tweets and likes Jules took the opposite approach He made a spreadsheet of all his Collectors and those who expressed the interest to collect Over the last few months he made 120 meetings to show his project to potential buyers … 120 He made it about the importance of the 1 on 1 relationship and strong communication He than spent his own money to create an irl experience that was a gamble on weather it work or not It ended being one of the best art exhibition I have experienced The hype was not visible but the soul of the project was deep in the background waiting to bust out We all need to learn from this We are building slowly and the grind can feel endless But it is important to Remeber that releasing your best work while being patient is more important than anything We need collectors that want to speculate on legacy not price Projects like Jules were not promising gains or pumps but instead a feeling of hope and connection Congrats to jules and his team for doing it different and proving to everyone that art can be made, sold and loved in all different ways This is How Jules builds

@nicedayJules Impressive!

Birds x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

@summergwagner Congratulations! 🔥

So excited to learn I’m a finalist for the Hasselblad Masters 2026 in the Art category :)

@RDToTheMoon @Zhuk_live That's awesome, congrats Rob! 🥂

@hafftka @RDToTheMoon @iconic__culture Big congrats! Love to see it 🥂

GM fam, Faces sold out. Decades of work, built independently. Thanks @RDToTheMoon @iconic__culture This is just the beginning.

MIKE BROWN: “Everyone Trump surrounds himself with is fake. Fake lips, fake tits, fake gold, fake pools, fake bible verses for crying out loud.” It’s so true though.

@aylaelmoussa @TransientLabs Stunning work, Ayla! 🔥💙

In Absence Of ___ A Curated drop is now live on @TransientLabs 11 works, each a 1/1 [link below]