Bitchcoin

  • Predating the launch of Ethereum by five months, in February 2015 conceptual artist Sarah Meyohas released the first tokenization of art on the blockchain: Bitchcoin.

     

    Six years later, the artist migrated Bitchcoin from its native chain to Ethereum, releasing reserved Bitchcoins backed by art from her seminal Cloud of Petals exhibition at Red Bull Arts New York. For this release, the artist chose to back each Bitchcoin with a unique pressed rose petal. The total supply of this release is 3291.

     

    480 tokens were auctioned in a dedicated sale with Phillips. Individual Bitchcoins are available on Opensea.

     

    BUY A BITCHCOIN

     

  • "Long before Beeple’s digital collage fetched tens of millions of dollars at auction, Ms. Meyohas was experimenting with using the blockchain technology behind bitcoin to make art." - Bourree Lam, WSJ
  • INTO THE ETHER Bitchcoin proposed three ideas that are only now being seriously considered: using blockchain to track ownership of...

     

    INTO THE ETHER

     

    Bitchcoin proposed three ideas that are only now being seriously considered: using blockchain to track ownership of artwork, public fractional ownership of artwork, and blockchain itself as a medium. 

     

    The prescient audacity of the project garnered considerable attention and was featured in Vice and Wired, among other publications. According to critic Tim Schneider, “blockchain-based work probably first surfaced in art-world consciousness in the form of Sarah Meyohas’s Bitchcoin.” Meyohas’s creation of cryptocurrency as art, minted on her own proof-of-work blockchain, engaged with the ownership and utility of art in the digital future, but the intrinsic connection between each Bitchcoin and its constituent artwork necessitated non-fungibility, creating the "proto-NFT" as early as 2015.

     
  • A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME This series of Bitchcoins is backed by the artist’s 2017 Cloud of Petals project,... A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME This series of Bitchcoins is backed by the artist’s 2017 Cloud of Petals project,... A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME This series of Bitchcoins is backed by the artist’s 2017 Cloud of Petals project,... A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME This series of Bitchcoins is backed by the artist’s 2017 Cloud of Petals project,...

    A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

    This series of Bitchcoins is backed by the artist’s 2017 Cloud of Petals project, a present-day happening in a former temple to Progress. Cloud of Petals explored the future of labor in the face of automation and weighed the paradox of subjective valuations of beauty. Meyohas employed 16 male workers for a data collection ritual at the former R&D center of Bell Laboratories, a soaring steel and glass structure by Eero Saarinen. The men meticulously plucked, preserved, and photographed 100,000 rose petals to amass a dataset for artificial intelligence capable of algorithmically producing new, unique petals ad infinitum. Injecting human subjectivity into the equation, the workers set aside the one petal per rose they considered most beautiful, creating a taxonomy of individual aesthetic value. The 3,291 chosen petals were exhibited as the centerpiece of the artist’s 2017 exhibition Cloud of Petals at Red Bull Arts New York.

  • The petals are the documentation of the performance; materially limited and unique, they are the proof-of-work of Cloud of Petals.... The petals are the documentation of the performance; materially limited and unique, they are the proof-of-work of Cloud of Petals.... The petals are the documentation of the performance; materially limited and unique, they are the proof-of-work of Cloud of Petals.... The petals are the documentation of the performance; materially limited and unique, they are the proof-of-work of Cloud of Petals....

    The petals are the documentation of the performance; materially limited and unique, they are the proof-of-work of Cloud of Petals. If one chooses to redeem their Bitchcoin for a physical relic, their coin will be destroyed, or “burned,” establishing the symbiotic value of token and backing. Each Bitchcoin token has a number on the back — the number of the worker, and the number of the petal selected. This number links each token to its unique petal. As each Bitchcoin is backed by a relic from this project, the value of the cryptocurrency is tied to the inarticulable value of art, continuing the symbiotic call and response that established Bitchcoin as one of the world’s earliest NFTs. 

     

     

  • “It is perhaps indicative of the shifts in the fundamental dynamic of capital accumulation that have occurred in the last fifty years, foregrounding speculation over production, that, while Andy Warhol opened a Factory in 1962, Sarah Meyohas designed a financial instrument in 2015.” - Nathan Eisenberg, Hypocrite Reader # 58