TezTalks Radio #47: Alex Estorick of Right Click Save
As a self-described 'media theorist', Alex Estorick thinks a lot about the impact and significance of NFTs in the context of traditional and emerging art markets.
700 words, 4 minute read
Alex Estorick is Editor-in-Chief of - an online magazine founded earlier this year, covering art on the blockchain. As a self-described ‘media theorist’, Estorick thinks a lot about the impact and significance of NFTs in the context of traditional and emerging art markets. Marissa Trew sat down with Alex Estorick recently in London, to discuss Right Click Save, the evolving creator community on Tezos, and the impact of AI on art.
We’ve excerpted some of Alex’s comments below, and you can watch the full interview at the top of this page.
What makes the art community on Tezos different:
I came at crypto with skepticism, and I maintain that skepticism […] but I think, a lot of, perhaps the primary argument on the part of the layperson, on the part of mainstream contemporary art [and] traditional art institutions against NFTs has been the problematic environmental cost. That that’s a big change. And I’m interested to see where everything goes.
Tezos […] feels like the proof of concept for a successful Proof-of-Stake chain. What’s interesting to me about Tezos in some ways is that Hic et Nunc, which emerged early last year, and subsequent communities following Hic et Nunc on Tezos, have in a sense reproduced some of the conditions of early crypto art that you saw in the early days of SuperRare.
It’s been very exciting to see the ways these new communities iterate on what those early Ethereum communities were doing. And of course, I think The Merge poses a challenge from a superficial standpoint to Tezos, but what Tezos has is this extraordinary array of global communities, which are interconnected. […] I think crypto art is […] a global movement for radical inclusivity.
Why Web3 could be an opportunity for a fresh start:
With the NFT explosion last year, I think perhaps the kind of egalitarian roots of crypto art were obscured. Of course, that coincided with a lot of those early crypto artists making a lot of money […]. For me, you can either treat crypto art as a moment in time, or you can treat it as a set of principles. […] I think that the principle of having different communities interacting is fundamental to crypto art.
[…] I do feel quite strongly that Web3 media is about inclusivity […] where perhaps the traditional art world inflated the value of the art through the perception of creating an illusion of exclusivity. […] I think one of the privileges of being relatively early to Web3 is [an opportunity to learn the] lessons of Web 2.0, which has become this kind of really authoritarian corporate regime. How does one produce a new tech ecosystem which does not reproduce those old structures? Of course, principally, those are hierarchical structures, and blockchain, in principle, if not always in practice, militates against hierarchy.
On ‘posthuman’ art and Right Click Save as a ‘collision of ideologies’:
I think we need to present a collision of ideologies, which clearly surround us. We can’t pretend that we are not on a day-to-day basis making selections, privileging certain voices and so on. From my perspective, It’s important for me to stress that Right Click Save is ultimately a community platform. It’s not the mouthpiece of any one individual. As a result, I am guided by the voices that have been contributing so much over the last year in the absence of hype.
Someone who comes to mind […] is Sasha Stiles, who’s one of the leading blockchain poets. Sasha has showed a lot of people that an NFT doesn’t have to be a JPEG hanging on a blockchain. […] It can in in some sense be a document of a relationship between human and machines.
I do think that one thing that blockchain poetry expresses in a very literal way is this posthuman condition that we are moving into. […] Obviously a lot of work [that is] tokenized as NFTs is digital, much of which is produced using generative adversarial networks [with] machine collaborators. I think sometimes that question about where we are heading […] is ignored. That’s something that Sasha and a lot of the blockchain poets are confronting.