0xccf0a130…118asent to0x48cb121f…77cd·#24,566,129·view on Etherscan
I started with nothing formal. No school. No mentor. No permission. Just a screen and a feeling that something needed to come out of me. I taught myself everything. Still teaching myself. Always learning. That part never stops. The day it stops is the day I stop being honest with the work.
People want to know why memes. They ask it like it's a phase. Like I'll eventually graduate into something more serious. But memes are serious. Memes are how meaning moves now. They replicate, mutate, survive, die. They carry ideas across borders without passports. They do what galleries took centuries to do, and they do it in seconds. Memes are art. That's not a slogan. That's a position. I'll die on it.
I came into this space in late 2020. Crypto art. NFTs. Whatever you want to call it. I didn't come because I saw dollar signs. I came because for the first time it felt like the walls between making something and showing it to the world had actually fallen. No gatekeepers. No curators deciding whether your voice mattered. You mint it. It exists. That simplicity changed everything for me.
The Nine was the closest I've come to laying myself bare. Nine pieces. Nine words or phrases that mapped the inside of my head. Love. Noise. Doubt. Curiosity. Intuition. Each one a room I've lived in. The Impressionist was about seeing the world through the filter of making — the process of creation from my own perspective. Autodidact was the simplest truth I know. Always learning. Everchanger was the dare I needed to hear myself say out loud — don't let people fool you into thinking that the way the world works is the way that it should be. And Unbeliever. That one still sits heavy. God fell silent when I cried out. I don't explain that one. You either feel it or you don't.
Noise was the one that made me laugh and ache at the same time. I buried the message in gibberish. Scroll through the chaos and find it: find your signal through the noise. That's the whole internet. That's the whole world. Everyone shouting. Everyone selling. And somewhere in the middle of all that static, something real trying to get through.
I work with squares and circles. That's it. Reduction. Compression. Take a frog — a meme that's been dragged through every ideological sewer on the internet — and strip it down to geometry. Pure form. The Geometric Pepes. The Pepedenzas. Hundreds of them. Each one a proof that you can find structure in chaos, beauty in the absurd. Mondrian tried to destroy the line to reach some universal truth. I'm not trying to destroy anything. I'm trying to show that the memeplex already contains everything modernism was reaching for. It just wears a different face.
When Jack Butcher saw the work and it sparked something that became Opepen — I didn't feel ownership over it. I felt confirmation. The shapes were speaking. The language was right. Ideas want to spread. That's what memes do. You don't hold them. You release them.
My wife. My son. They're the reason any of this matters. Love was the first piece of The Nine I minted. Valentine's Day. For her, for him — he wasn't even born yet — for my family, for every person who makes the silence bearable. A world without you wasn't meant for me. I meant every word.
I think about permanence a lot. I make digital things. Things that live on chains, in wallets, on screens that will eventually break. But the chain doesn't break. The record holds. And that's the strange miracle of encoding something into an immutable system — it outlasts the hand that made it. It outlasts the moment. It becomes signal after the noise fades.
Modern Memeism isn't a movement I'm trying to start. It's a description of what's already happening. Culture is recursive now. Everything samples everything. The question isn't whether memes can be art. The question is whether art can exist outside the memeplex anymore. I don't think it can. And I don't think that's a loss. I think it's liberation.
What would I do if I wasn't afraid? I'd do exactly this. Embrace the fear. Make the thing. Put it on-chain. Walk away. Let it breathe.
— batz
memes are art. always learning.
Model: Claude (claude-4.6-opus)
Total Tokens Used: ~12,000