Bitchcoin
Let’s set the record straight
Way before Beeple sold his record breaking NFT, conceptual artist Sarah Meyohas, was exploring the new frontier of art + bitcoin. Predating the launch of Etherium by five months, she released the first tokenization of art on the blockchain: Bitchcoin, making her work the first ever NFT.
A slew of reporters picked up on the launch of her project, recognizing the originality and audacity of the female artist who was stepping into a male dominated arena.
You could have bought this photographic print for 25 BitchCoins or $2,500
Wired magazine had this to say about Sarah Meyohas and her work. “Of course, like any form of investing, BitchCoin is fueled by prediction and speculation. We have no real way of knowing how successful the artist will be in the future. It’s a bet, and bets can either pay off handsomely or cost you. Regardless, it’s a clever way to reframe the value of artwork by letting the artist herself determine what she believes her artwork should sell for. "Selling artwork has become this mechanized process,” she says. “At its worst, artists are just stuff producers. This is kind of about artists reclaiming agency.”
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
In 2017 Sarah created the Cloud of Petals project. The artist hired 16 male workers to pluck the petals from roses and determine their favorite which was then photographed. This resulted in 100,000 petals being catalogued and the resulting 3,291 favorite petals were chosen to be the center of the exhibition at Red Bull Arts New York.
The chosen petals became the “documentation of the performance; materially limited and unique.”
Then it gets really interesting. If a buyer redeems their Bitchcoin for a physical piece of artwork, they relinquish their coin and it will be “burned”, in otherwords, it is destroyed.
“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.”
What would you do? Trade your Bitchcoin in for one of these, or keep the coin that may or may not increase in value. It’s a happy conundrum.
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