ART IS LIFE

I first visited Marfa, Texas in October 2014. A few weeks prior, I celebrated my last day working in architecture after seven years to pursue photography full-time, documenting art and architecture. With the anticipation of freedom that came with working for myself, I had rented a car, packed it with camping and photography gear and headed west from Houston.

I arrived after dark, set up camp at El Cosmico, and settled in for the night. Waking early the next morning, I ventured out to watch the first light fall upon the small West Texas town and to see for myself why it had such a mystical reputation. Around sunrise, I wound up on a sleepy dirt road on the edge of town with a property where chickens and an emu bathed in golden light, a rainbow stretching beyond them from some pre-dawn rains far off in the distance.

Marfa was immediately captivating.

In the coming days, experiences slowly accumulated that would make it a place I returned to often in the years that followed. I befriended Ryan, an artist and fabricator based in Los Angeles who was on a cross-country bikepacking adventure. One night that felt like a dream, Ryan and I would end up alongside an old weathered cowboy, smoking a joint inside of a teepee in a local bar.

Among many encounters with art, I toured the Chinati Foundation, learning about Donald Judd’s vision for the former military base and POW camp that would eventually house he and his friends' monumental permanent installations. It was my first encounter with installations of such scale and ambition, and it transformed how I thought about the intersection of art, architecture, light, and space.

Since that first trip, I have returned to Marfa dozens of times. Alongside those visits, I’ve spent countless nights under the stars throughout Far West Texas. The landscapes, flora, and fauna of the region have been an endless source of inspiration.

Eventually, the trips west began to include some of my closest relationships. In 2018, Sarah, my now-wife, and I would welcome the new year with close friends, including Erick and Mara and their two young boys. Through the years, we’ve returned to celebrate changing seasons, birthdays, and milestones to a place that had begun to feel like a home away from home. One that provided a peacefulness away from our city lives. Sunset drives down 2810, lazy hammock days at El Cosmico, shopping at Wrong, and taking meandering walks with nowhere in particular to go.

Erick and I had dabbled in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology beginning in early 2017, me always following his lead with a tinge of skepticism. Eventually, that curiosity turned more serious for Erick as he developed an idea for a platform that would allow artists to share and transact algorithmically generated artworks on-chain.

In 2020, the pandemic provided the space he needed to put his head down and build an early version of Art Blocks. It launched later that year into a burgeoning ecosystem that would become known as the NFT space. The following year was a fast-paced, experimental time warp in which those of us involved found ourselves completely absorbed.

In the beginning, we were a sea of people shielded by profile pictures and pseudonyms, but increasingly there was a desire to gather in person and deepen the connections forming online. Art Blocks’ success made it possible to consider what that might look like.

In keeping with his spirit of inclusion, Erick returned to his artistic roots knowing Marfa had to be the place.

The choice felt surprising to almost everyone except those of us who knew him well.

For the uninitiated, Marfa made no sense. Why not New York City or Los Angeles? The nearest airports, El Paso and Midland, are each roughly three hours away. Even for those of us in Houston, it’s a nine hour drive.

But there is something intangible that can only be appreciated by experiencing the Texas high desert yourself.

In October of 2021, Art Blocks hosted its first annual gathering, drawing around two hundred attendees from across the globe.

Five years later, the 2026 event had all of the ingredients that had evolved throughout the annual gatherings. By now, the weekend had spread throughout town: exhibitions, screenings, artist talks, and a bustling art fair centered around Saint George Hall. Though attendance was lighter than recent years as the market remained challenged, the energy was high and the programming rich.

One of my favorite experiences at the fair was an activation by Berlin-based artist Eric Pan. Pan is a jazz pianist who builds multisensory playgrounds around music, composition, and performance. For the artwork he presented, A Piano That Paints, participants sat with him while a stethoscope broadcast their heartbeat. Pan responded with improvised live piano, and the duet was captured by a pen plotter that drew the composition onto paper.

It was lovely.

And now, six years in, it’s a joy to still be surprised by artists arriving from outside the niche core of this community.

Earlier that day, outside of Saint George Hall, Brian Droitcour of Outland led a breakout discussion on taste. It was a small group, but a powerful and frank conversation about how we define taste and how it is reflected within this particular space.

And perhaps just as important, how it isn’t.

On our last night in town, my wife and I slipped away to a reading by author Andrew Durbin at Bull Room. We entered the historic former cattle auction barn, now a performance space opened by Ballroom Marfa, to find a room filled with locals eager for conversation. The atmosphere carried the relaxed energy we’ve come to expect from the town’s cultural programming, which remains surprisingly ambitious for a place defined as much by solitude as art.

The discussion was to be moderated by poet Eileen Myles. Minutes before it began, however, it was discovered that she wasn’t in town due to a miscommunication.

How charmingly Marfa.

Meanwhile, back in town, the Art Blocks house was hosting its annual backyard cookout. After the dinner and remarks from Erick and the team, Adam Weitsman would host a closing party at the Palace Theater, originally opened in 1905 as the Marfa Opera House. The event was branded as the CREEPZ Closing Party, named after a mutant-lizard-themed PFP project launched in 2022.

Energized by the experience of hearing Durbin discuss The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, we planned on ending the night quietly before the long drive home the following morning.

Before the book reading, I had overheard rumors of a drone show and remember thinking how out of place that felt in a quiet dark-sky town like Marfa.

Sure enough, as we stood outside chatting after the event, someone pointed back toward town with a chuckle.

I turned around to find a giant display of lights in the form of an enormous green mutant lizard with the words “THE PALACE IS OPEN” floating above it.

I was struck with an immediate sense of embarrassment, as if everyone present might associate me with this obtuse display of modern internet culture overhead.

As someone who straddles two worlds that mean so much to my identity, one deeply connected to this place and what it has historically stood for, and another energized by the possibilities of this new digital art movement, I found myself questioning who I was and what I represented in that moment.

I am deeply proud of what Art Blocks has become and what it has enabled me to do in my own life and career.

What was happening above the town did not feel like a reflection of either.

Since returning home, I’ve thought a lot about this reaction.

At one point, a Chromie Squiggle danced through the sky with the words “ART IS LIFE” floating above it.

What bothered me wasn’t the drone show, and certainly not the Squiggle.

ART IS LIFE hung over the desert in bright lights, making me increasingly unsure of what exactly “art” meant in this context.

Seeing this phrase proclaimed with such certainty only sharpened my own uncertainty about what exactly we were celebrating.

Following the Squiggle, an array of profile pictures and illustrative artworks moved through the sky. In photos, videos, and reactions that surfaced afterward, they were met with the same enthusiasm that had carried through the weekend.

Perhaps that was what unsettled me most.

Not the selection itself, but the sense that everything was celebrated equally.

Earlier that day, a group of us had spent an hour discussing taste. Standing there, I found myself wondering where discernment fit into the equation.

Is taste simply another form of gatekeeping?

Or does a culture that celebrates everything eventually struggle to articulate why certain work resonates more than others?

As I reflect on this, I realize that, selfishly, I am seeking my own validation.

Perhaps the tension is that all of these things genuinely do belong together.

Maybe what unsettled me wasn’t seeing them side by side, but to be confronted with the fact that I’ve spent six years participating in all of them.

All of this leads me to a larger internal debate around my own involvement in the NFT ecosystem and the arts.

Over the years, I have played many roles: collector, artist, advisor, curator, evangelist, advocate, skeptic.

After six years of nearly daily participation, thousands of miles traveled, deeply formed relationships, and life-changing financial success, I still find myself trying to make sense of what it all means.

By collecting early, I was able to cast an incredibly wide net as experiments poured out across platform after platform. I often saw myself as supporting artists of all levels, helping provide opportunities to pursue their work full-time and on a global stage.

My personal taste frequently came second to the belief that I was supporting something uniquely experimental.

Six years later, I have more NFTs than I know how to properly digest myself, let alone share with others in a way that feels deserving.

Among those thousands of digital objects are works I deeply connect with.

Works that have something to say.

Sitting alongside them are hundreds of NFTs acquired purely through financial speculation.

And somewhere in between, comprising much of the collection, is a body of underdeveloped work that has received an outsized spotlight because of the circumstances of a particular moment in time.

As someone who has moved so fluidly between the traditional art and architecture worlds I associate with a place like Marfa and this emerging digital art world, why did this affect me so deeply?

Perhaps what I’m really seeking is validation that this thing which has consumed so much of my life over the past six years belongs within a larger artistic lineage.