✅ Checking in with Jack Butcher (Issue #60)

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Last month, artist, designer, and Twitter superstar Jack Butcher launched a project that set the NFT world ablaze with a single sentence: “This artwork may or may not be notable.”

Checks is many things. It’s a comment on authenticity, notoriety, and the implicit (and explicit) power structures of web3 and the arts more broadly. It’s about verification in an era of blockchain technology, meme culture, and digital inequality.

It’s also an experiment in open editions, participatory artwork, burn mechanics, and how NFT technology can be both a distribution mechanism and a medium in its own right.

I spoke to Butcher this week about the project that’s upending how people think about NFTs, what it took to bring it to life, and what it teaches us about the future of culture.

Craig Wilson: When most people talk about NFTs they seem to be thinking about them as digital art or collectibles or access passes or that sort of thing. You seem to think about them more as a medium in and of themselves.

Jack Butcher: Yeah, I think this idea of the network as a canvas is something that I've been exploring for a long time. The advent of NFT technology just intersected with all the things I was interested in and playing around with for the last few years. I think yesterday I wrote this: “The connection is the canvas.”

All of the things that are so fascinating about this technology were not accessible to me as a practitioner without the help of someone like Jalil, who has the technical ability to execute and to add these different layers to the experience of the art.

That is, it goes so far beyond what this thing looks like. And that medium, and the combinations of those technologies and ideas, I think, created something that could not be executed another way. This is not something that would be anywhere near as philosophically rigorous if you executed it on any other technologies. We tried to build things on top of this infrastructure that really represent what it is capable of.

I think my favorite part of it has been watching how people interact with it. Half of the collection now is in the control of anybody who interacts with it. We have no degree of control over it, and that's, I think, a beautiful thing, considering we were able to deploy it the way we wanted to.

CW: Was that also part of the motivation for choosing CC0?

JB: The CC0 conversation is interesting because the [checkmark] symbol itself is CC0. There's a lot of cultural context embedded in the checkmark, and a lot of things happened in the last year or so that made it even more prominent a part of conversation. But nobody owns that symbol because it's so ubiquitous, it's reached, you know, the status of an arrow or an “X” or a shape.

That's ingrained in the project. There's an artistic rationale behind that. And then there's this thing that it unlocks in people when they see it and identify with it and have all this embedded context from all the interactions they've had with that symbol.

It also just created this really meme-able thing. The first wave of derivatives was kind of mimicking the grid layout. You have the 8×10 grid, which I think gives people enough room to put whatever their project is — or whatever they’re interested in — into it.

But the symbol kind of broke out of that eventually, and people were just integrating the symbol into work that might be more abstract, or original. This artist called Giles co-opted, and reinterpreted it with a Dali work. He also did one called “Genesis Check” which references the Sistine Chapel.

I think that’s been the most amazing quality of what's happened. What the symbol has represented for so long and what it can represent now: these ideas of bottom-up consensus, signing your own work, everybody is notable, Everybody can create art. It wraps up a lot of different things that have been very near and dear to my heart before I even knew what an NFT was.

It feels like a sort of dirty secret in web3 that, despite claims of immutability, you can change the metadata of a lot of NFTs. Do you think that's a bug or a feature?

Honestly, I think it's a feature, if it's part of the philosophy or the rationale behind the project, I think that is the key to whether or not it makes sense. And that's something we're trying to demonstrate between these two collections. You have this one collection that really represents an evolving connection between an artist and a collector — you can continue to have a conversation there and you can update the things that are being displayed visually.

And then, on the originals collection, obviously, when you make that migration from this non-immutable piece to having your own creative input and migrating to an on-chain version that is — depending on your school of thought — a pure execution of an “NFT” in inverted commas. Everything that is required to generate the piece of art is contained within the token versus having these external dependencies.

I'm not necessarily against either of those directions, and I’m obviously trying to play with both of those dynamics. But the thing that's interesting to me is that argument tends to be used as this blanket quality across NFTs. And it's not true in probably 90% of cases.

And for good reason — in a lot of instances it’s a very tense moment deploying a contract that you cannot change after the fact. All of the work you did came down to one moment of clicking one button. And if you made some horrendous error that you didn't account for you can never go back from that.

So there are definitely pros and cons. I think it's rooted way more in what the project means and what the project is trying to say or ask, than this blanket thing that [NFTs] should or should not be a certain way.

What has the project taught you about NFTs and the people who collect them?

People need some sort of constraint to create at scale. We've seen a lot of experiments and attempts in web3 to make something meme-able or to have the community make things. And one quality that I think this project has, accidentally stumbled into, is the idea that the symbol kind of transcends all these different aesthetics.

If there's some 10,000-character PFP collection and you don't identify with the aesthetic of it, it’s really hard for you to build or create on top of it versus something that has some constraints, but it exists at this different layer, this symbolic layer.

I’ve learned — and now have evidence — that there are people who are incredibly creative, but who never thought of themselves as artists, or would never mint any work because they felt like they didn't have the skills or, their observations weren't relevant in this context. But if you can create a canvas that is malleable and restricted and constrained at the same time you can inspire all sorts of creativity from them.

NFTs are underpinned by cryptocurrency, which tends to attract certain sorts of personalities who, inevitably inform some artists’ aesthetic decisions. Do you think that most NFT art is crap?

(Laughs) I think most of everything is crap. I don't think it’s exclusive to NFTs. But that’s also kind of the beauty of it: the permissionless nature means there’s a low barrier to entry, and it’s much lower than when you’re putting something physical out into the world. I think as a function of the low barrier to entry there's just so much garbage.

That's the internet in general, right? Like 99.99% of the internet, you would not want to have in front of you at any given time…

Right, because most of it’s porn and a lot of the rest is garbage…

Yeah, scams, you name it, man, just crazy, horrible stuff. But the 1% — or 0.1% — is what makes it all worth it. There are hundreds of artists and collections and things in web3 that I have been inspired by and respect and think are incredible.

When something is so immature, it's interesting how it gets like, pocketed under the technology versus when it has room to breathe and it's matured, you just refer to it as the thing, right? Even me saying “NFT community,” like, my toes curl a little bit.

That's another thing that's holding back great artists and great creators from using this technology. They see something like Deranged Something Camel Club and they’re like, “Yeah, that's not for me.” But it’s like saying you're not going to make a website because there are shady websites out there, right?

There’s obviously crazy behavior and crazy outcomes — the permissionless nature of it is just going to accelerate all of that — but in my mind, the upside far outweighs the downside. And we're still kind of finding our feet in all of this stuff.

Sure, like generative art, which has existed for decades, but really seems to be having a moment.

Yeah, for sure. That's a really powerful 1+1=3 scenario where there are all of these talented people who have been creating things that are so beautifully paired with this technology. But, before it existed, they were making ads for Verizon, or something.

I used to work in ad agencies, and we used to hire incredibly talented artists who, if they had the blockchain as a medium, probably wouldn't have had to do the stuff they were doing five or 10 years ago.

These markets are creating the opportunity for people to make things and share them with people who actually want to collect them and build relationships versus, you know, having to fund this thing you're really passionate about by doing things you don't really want to do.

It would be naive to say that this technology fixes that problem. Because, obviously, there are still power laws at play, and people who have distribution and big advantages. But some of the things I hope we're starting to explore with Checks is this idea that you don't have to build your own entire body of work from scratch, you don't have to build distribution from scratch, you can contribute to this thing that's greater than the sum of its parts and benefit from it in some way.

We're just scratching the surface of what that means. If you're a developer, and you want to build a piece of software that plugs into this thing, or you want to make a limited edition piece of artwork that references it and tap into the audience that already appreciates the idea and the aesthetic you can.

That's a much more viable way to monetize your skills — at least in the short term — than trying to build something from absolute scratch shouting into the void. I think there are really fundamentally different economic models being formed. It’s really early, obviously, but to me, that's incredibly exciting.

That's been part of my work for the last three or four years, in a really adjacent field. If you're a graphic designer, how do you build proof of work, build a network, and land better-paying client work? But this is kind of one meta layer above that. How do you make art and get paid for the art you make? This technology definitely makes it more feasible for a lot of people.

What’s next for you or Checks?

The next phase is going to be more of the same, really. We were totally transparent about how we were going to build the project, and we’re going to be totally transparent about how we're going to communicate the evolution of this thing.

The people I've met through the project have led to lots of ideas about what can be built. There’s a lot we want to do on the philanthropic side. Can we take the degree of transparency with which we built this and put it into the delivery of aid?

Yeah, it’s nice when you're talking about collecting art and things of that nature. But if you can put economic energy in somebody’s hands in two seconds, from where I am to where somebody who's in a much more precarious situation than me is, that to me is another compelling angle for what Checks means, and what this idea of peer-to-peer value exchange can represent.

It’s wild how quickly you managed to get Checks to market. How did you pull it off?

I’ve got to give insane props to Jalil and Traf who helped with the front-end stuff and had a huge impact on the ability to execute this in a short amount of time — the implicit amount of trust I have in them and the degree of talent they have is incredible.

I've known them for years and I met them through basically the same practice of sharing ideas on the internet. If I’d come up with the idea but had to go out and interview people or ask people to do it, it probably wouldn't have come off the way it did.

It was a perfect storm of things that happened and connections that I’d already made. That probably informed what I knew to be possible — the conversations I've had with people that just resulted in being able to have the idea. Then it was about having some Discord chats, and getting it built… but it certainly was not an easy process.

Those guys gave up a lot of sleep. I’ve also got a six-week-old baby right now. So shoutout to my wife, who has been incredibly supportive and patient while I've been bleeding my eyes into a computer screen for 20 hours a day.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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