🦊 Everything you need to know about XCOPY

There are few names as synonymous with contemporary digital art as XCOPY's. That's no accident. He's a trailblazer and pioneer who's consistently pushed the boundaries of his medium and experimented at the intersection of blockchain technology and art like nobody else.In this installment of Deep Dives with Mr. Fox, the one and only Mr. Fox will take you right back to the start of XCOPY's incredible creative journey from obscurity to fame and beyond.But first, we've got a little something for you:

The Metaversal Badge is your key to adventure. These tokens will unlock exclusive opportunities, unique access, and extraordinary experiences. If you’re bold enough to become a Metaversalist, you can expect to get the best of what our ever-growing ecosystem of creators, partners, and projects has to offer. For those ready to follow us into the unknown, Badges will power your quest.

The more Badges you collect, the greater the possibilities.

So, fellow seeker, are you ready to explore?

We now return to our scheduled programming:

XCOPY's oeuvre — I'll argue — is also uniquely digital-first in a way that makes his influence even more significant. He's paved the way for countless artists who've been able to build careers online in his wake, and his incessant need to test new distribution mechanisms and embrace nascent technologies makes him, in my view, the most important digital artist of our time.

This is the story of XCOPY and everything you need to know about his art.

Before we get stuck in, a few notes:

1. Most of XCOPY’s art is animated, so to appreciate his work fully — and this piece — I encourage you to follow the included links. But because they can affect those with epilepsy or who are otherwise prone to seizures, I've opted to use still frames throughout this article.

2. XCOPY is famously anonymous, but on Kevin Rose’s November 4, 2022, episode of 100 PROOF, Rose details his meeting the artist and confirms XCOPY is male. Rose refers to the artist using male pronouns throughout the episode, so I'm doing likewise.

3. Much of today’s Deep Dive includes my interpretations of XCOPY’s work. They're pure conjecture on my part and shouldn't be taken as fact, as the artist himself is notoriously reluctant to talk about his work.

Right, let’s get straight into it!

The internet is unique in how it allows us to experience the past. For almost all of human history, we’ve been reduced to storytelling alone as a means of learning about what’s come before. Whether through spoken word, written text, music, video, or some other medium, retellings were as close as we could get to historical events. Although I can watch Saving Private Ryan or 1917, I’ll never be able to go back in time and walk through the battlefields of Europe with the soldiers. This will likely always be true of the physical world. But the birth of the internet and digital content creation tools have blurred this line for the digital world.

With each passing year, the time humanity has been online increases and our collective digital history becomes vaster. In some instances, we can experience a decade of the lives of others in a few minutes of scrolling. From adolescence to first partners, graduating high school and moving on to college, to starting into a career and perhaps even finding the love of their life. We have full purview into who liked or commented, when they did so, who was tagged, and where it all happened. Granted, the information is incomplete and fractured, but it’s nonetheless an evolution that gives us a new way of experiencing the past from a hitherto impossibly personal perspective.

This new paradigm is especially relevant when we start looking at the work of XCOPY. The birth of the artist’s public internet life, as far as I can tell, took place on Tumblr in August 2010 when he posted this GIF (click the image or caption to view the original):

He would post two similar pieces on the same day. They were pink and dark, they were lustful and pixelated, and, of course, they were glitchy. If you’re familiar with XCOPY, you’ll know that glitch — the pulsating and vibrating of an image with elements somewhat offset in each frame — is his signature style. What’s remarkable is that XCOPY started with this approach and has never waivered, still deploying it to this day. In past interviews, XCOPY has suggested that glitch was as much an artistic choice as it was a practical one: the artist wanted to differentiate his work from other Tumblr posts while adhering to the platform’s file format and size limits.

But I suspect there’s a lot we can infer from this aesthetic choice. In his work, it's clear XCOPY sees many issues with the status quo. From a perspective of artistic form, we can say there’s a connection to this worldview. To many, a glitch is an inconvenience, an error of technology, or an indicator that something's broken. So what does it mean to produce an entire body of work around this style? Are things eternally broken? Is contemporary life a constant state of glitch? XCOPY hasn’t confirmed these ideas, but if he’s still using glitch after nearly 13 years, you can be sure that a subtext exists.

The artist’s style was evident from day one, but it took a little longer for his recurring subject to emerge. The month after his first Tumblr post XCOPY started posting work with faces or torsos in them, elements that continue to appear in his portfolio to this day. I’ve included some examples below.

We also see the pop culture commentary we’ve come to expect from XCOPY, but less common in his recent work is the “femme fatale” archetype that was so prevalent in his early Tumblr posts.

However loose, there does seem to be a connection between XCOPY’s earliest releases on Tumblr and the work his more recent work. Some of the best detective work done in this regard is credited to noochie, an NFT writer who profiled XCOPY in February last year.

The above sketch is one of the few posts in the entirety of XCOPY’s Tumblr history that is not glitchy. What’s more, noochie shows it’s an early iteration of a piece XCOPY would go on to mint. See the later piece below:

Interesting as these links are, the larger, more powerful conversation at play here, though, revolves around provenance. This idea of the internet allowing us to walk through the past is on full display, and whether deliberately or not, XCOPY has created his own artistic paper trail.

We can rummage through his digital archive and watch his evolution as an artist unfolds. As his fame (and prices) have grown, so has the interest in (and the value of) his early works, which we can contextualize thanks to time stamps, which let us situate them in time, space, and culture.

XCOPY had a distinct vision of what he wanted to put out into the world from day one. Despite relatively little reach or acclaim initially, he continued to create prolifically. It would be eight years on Tumblr before XCOPY would make any money from his art. And his first sale was for a meager £1. But that’s what makes him such a king: despite a lack of recognition or commercial success for years, XCOPY never strayed from his style.

While some artists try to chase trends, the work of others — like Kahlo, Kusama, Hopper, Pollock, or O’Keeffe — stands out because of the uncompromising commitment to self. I’d put XCOPY in the latter category. There is a message in his soul and a vision in his mind, and he seems to be forever compelled to produce art that gives us a window — however small — into this world, no matter how it’s received.

Tumblr was far from the only place XCOPY experimented before he reached platforms like SuperRare. Aside from growing followings on Twitter and Instagram, XCOPY was actively participating on platforms at the forefront of the tokenized art movement. Thanks to research done by Redlion and Da Vinci Threads, we have a fairly good idea of these platforms and how XCOPY engaged with them.

The now-defunct Ascribewas the first site XCOPY launched his art on. It was built on the Bitcoin network, and if you’ve read our Deep Dives on Rare Pepes (or tried to participate in this week's breathless enthusiasm for Ordinals on Bitcoin), you’ll know that interacting or transacting with NFTs on Bitcoin is very difficult. Ascribe hit these issues head-on and eventually shut down. Supposedly, only two XCOPY pieces survived this shuttering.

The first is Jesus Mob, saved by a blog post of an XCOPY admirer on a now-abandoned crypto discussion site known as steemit. XCOPY’s fingerprints are all over the piece, but it’s an unusually religious piece for the artist.

The second lost piece from XCOPY’s Ascribe portfolio has actually been saved and repurposed for SuperRare. Loading New Conflict… was gifted to collectors who supported XCOPY’s work on Ascribe. When the platform was shut down, XCOPY reminted and re-gifted the seven versions of the piece on SuperRare to the original collectors.

It is clear that XCOPY was (and remains) a pioneer by virtue of his inclination to always test new things. Ascribe wasn’t the only early art platform XCOPY toyed around with, he released work on RARE Art Labs, too. This time built atop Ethereum, some of the pieces minted here luckily continue to live on via their smart contracts despite RARE Art Labs also having shut down.

Cracked was XCOPY’s first piece on RARE Art Labs. Originally an edition of 10, only six remain in circulation, with the other four lost during the platform’s shutdown.

On the same day, XCOPY minted a different work called Dirtbag in an edition of 10, which you can see below:

Minted for $10 a piece, only half of the created pieces remain in circulation. Legendary crypto artist Coldie is among the first-ever holders. The highest recorded sale of the piece is 66 ETH (~$107,000), or an approximately 10,000x return.

A final trio of pieces was minted by XCOPY to RARE Art Labs on June 27 and 28:

Only four of the original 10 Death Wannabe’s remain in circulation, with a high sale of $1.4 million. The same number of editions of Disaster Suit are still in circulation, which holds a record sale price of a comparatively reasonable $1 million. F is for Fuckup, a potently darker piece from XCOPY, even by his standards, has realized a top sale price of $1.2 million.

Provenance is undoubtedly king. It is with these mints that we see XCOPY make the move into character work explicitly, building the framework for what would eventually become pieces like Some Asshole or Right-click and Save As guy. More important here than the content of his work is the example he sets with it: by testing so many different platform options, XCOPY not only leaves us a provenance that we can explore but more opportunities for his art to survive the test of time.

Case in point: had Ascribe been the only platform XCOPY used to mint art, all of his early tokenized art might have been lost. Not only would that have reduced his potential royalties, but it would have left us less to learn from.

XCOPY would continue with platform exploration on KnownOrigin, where he released a number of editions. For whatever reason, Last Selfie, minted in early February 2019, seems to have become the most popular of this era.

In my research for this piece, I found a brilliant video posted by a gentleman named Eduardo Lima, who wanted to show the world how to buy crypto art. The demonstrative piece was none other than Last Selfie. Acquired for $10, the work has subsequently sold for nearly $800,000. If Eduardo has kept it all this time as he says he has (I haven’t checked his wallets to confirm), he’s earned a pretty penny for following XCOPY’s lead: digging deep into the weeds and experimenting with the new.

It’s one thing to be compelled to constantly make art, something we saw XCOPY do throughout his eight years of Tumblr posting before making a dime. But developing the aptitude and staying power to be willing to try numerous different platforms for tokenization and digital art more broadly — this is simply out-maneuvering the competition.

There’s a certain poetry to this behavior from XCOPY, the outcomes of some of his early work, and his insistence on centering his pieces around death. Reminiscent of Bergman’s 1957 film, The Seventh Seal, it’s almost as if XCOPY is playing a game with death, and taunting it as his work evades its grasp through the times. Some might see XCOPY’s creation as passion, others might genuinely believe he’s a talent sent from God, but I think there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that he’s simply a man who refuses to die, even if he’s acutely aware of how close around the corner death waits for all of us.

I think this is what pushes XCOPY past his contemporaries. Sure, many of them have shown incredible dedication to their craft and been prolific, but only XCOPY has experimented so much at the cutting edge of decentralized technologies.

It would be this continued curiosity in the possibilities of different platforms that would land XCOPY a spot among the first class of artists to populate what is now the premier digital art space in the world: SuperRare. And like that, after playing the field, XCOPY finally found the platform to call home.

Echoes of a Dead Earth would be XCOPY’s SuperRare genesis piece, highlighting his interest in stopping climate change and saving the world. The piece is just the 5th ever token minted on SuperRare — XCOPY would go on to also mint the next 11 pieces on the platform!

But before we continue with XCOPY’s 1/1 of creations, let’s take a pause and look at some of his work that comes in a larger supply. After all, XCOPY wouldn’t be XCOPY at all if he stuck to convention…

Aside from XCOPY’s 1/1s and smaller editions, the conversation around the artist’s larger collections is concentrated on three main fixtures.

1. MAX PAIN

Long before the current open edition trend in the CryptoArt world came XCOPY’s MAX PAIN AND FRENS. Launched in March of 2022, Max Pain generated XCOPY $23 million in 10 minutes. Each NFT could be minted for 1 ETH with no supply limit. The catch: the window of opportunity to mint was only 10 minutes long.

The final mint count would top out at 7,394 NFTs. Likely as a result of the profile picture focus of the market at this time, Max Pain resulted in some criticism being leveled at XCOPY for releasing a collection of identical NFTs. Today, this has become standard practice in open editions. There were also shouts for the London-based artist to deliver some utility to the collection (hosting events for holders, giving holders special access to the artist, etc.) considering its size and the amount he took in, but so far nothing has come of it. Max Pain was an open edition with no promised utility, and XCOPY is an artist, not a community builder or PFP project. He’s in the business of making art and has no obligation to do much more.

The current floor price of MAX PAIN AND FRENS is 0.834 ETH, a nearly 20% discount to what the collection minted for. Perhaps this is the entry to the XCOPY universe you’ve been looking for…

2. Grifters

Touted as XCOPY’s unofficial profile picture collection, Grifters is a set of 666 unique faces.

Powered by an art platform called Async, Grifters minted for 0.25 ETH a piece in December of 2021. These XCOPY avatars haven’t received the recognition they deserve, sustaining a higher floor price than most top profile picture collectives for months. At roughly 20 ETH, a Grifter goes for more than a Mutant Ape, Azuki, Moonbird, Doodle, or CloneX, albeit at a dramatically reduced supply. Grifters is a great middle-ground for those looking to make a strong investment in XCOPY without having to break the bank for a 1/1 or smaller edition. Be warned, though, as with Max Pain, no utility is expected as part of the value proposition.

3. Right Click Share: XCOPY + Deca

XCOPY’s collaboration with Deca is another example of his desire to create something new by pushing the boundaries of the old.

Right Click Share is a fantastic demonstration of leveraging social experiments to produce art. Reminiscent of the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s bathroom wall, where users could draw a pixel at a time to form a coordinated mural, Right Click Share relies on the collaboration of its group of holders to form an XCOPY piece.

The art you see above is comprised of 1,024 pixels, each its own NFT. Therefore, holding one pixel is akin to holding 1/1024 of an XCOPY 1/1. It’s a version of XCOPY’s infamous Right-click and Save As guy, a 1/1 that last sold for $7 million to Cozomo De Medici.

To actualize the pixelated XCOPY, each pixel holder must “attest” it to the piece. Essentially, all pixel holders — or a large majority — must attest their pixels to form some semblance of the creation. Deca and XCOPY make this more interesting by removing the attestation of a holder’s pixel every 365 days, meaning for the greater piece to stay alive, holders must be continuously interested in upholding it over years. It’s as much a compelling social experiment as it is a display of the commitment to the purity of a love of art.

I like to think of it as a commemoration — a digital statue, if you will — of the contributions XCOPY has made to the digital art world for more than a decade now. I’d even suggest there’s something almost religious about Right Click Share - there’s something deeply fascinating about its sacrificial undertones in the name of a larger cause that one begins to pick up on further inspection.

The current floor on one pixel of Right Click Share is 0.63 ETH. Summing all 1,024 pixels, that gives the 1/1 an approximate value of 650 ETH, a modest amount more than what the average XCOPY 1/1 currently trades for.

Right, now that you understand some of XCOPY’s supply side experiments, let’s get back into what people really love about the 21st century’s greatest digital artist, his 1/1 work.

Notable works

All Time High in the City

Arguably the XCOPY piece with the most apparent yet meaningful narrative, All Time High in the City sees Death taking a banker down a blood-filled river. One of the artist’s oldest pieces on SuperRare, it’s the single most characteristic of XCOPY’s artistic style and commentary. Many members of the CryptoArt community suggest that this is XCOPY’s magnum opus.

summer.jpg

It was August of 2021, and it was an up-only market if there ever was one. If you held any NFT at this moment in history, it likely tripled or more in value within a few weeks. The summer that NFTs exploded was well-documented by this XCOPY classic. The jovial, literally bubbly, and bright piece exists in stark contrast to the majority of the artist’s work, as you can perhaps tell.

We look back on it now and wonder whether XCOPY had also been caught in the euphoria, or if he created summer.jpg as a warning of the crash to come. Another intriguing facet of this work is that it lacks XCOPY’s trademark glitch style. It is perfectly static, and only a few pieces in all of XCOPY’s portfolio are. It’s another reference to what will forever be known as “JPEG Summer,” where images backed by NFTs set the world afire.

Right-click and Save As guy

XCOPY is as much a defender of the NFT space as he is a critic of it. Minted in 2018, Right-click and Save As guy is a defense against one of the weakest and most common criticisms of NFTs. While many believe the piece is an attack via caricature, I think it’s subtler than that.

I view RCSA (as the piece is referred to in shorthand) as a mirror held up to its subject. But rather than attacking the merit of the ‘right-click-and-save” argument, it’s focused on the intent of the aggression. To me, it’s brilliant because it gets at the core of what the right-click-and-save conflict is: not an honest intellectual discussion (the savers have no ground to stand on), but an assault from those who refuse to give change a chance. Right-click and Save As guy forces these critics to stare at their own reflection and grapple with the baselessness of their position.

Some Asshole

Where the pieces we’ve discussed thus far either tell a story, capture a moment in time, or act as an ideological defense, Some Asshole represents a constant in XCOPY’s work: the artist’s throughline. Although never appearing identically twice, the subject can be felt everywhere in XCOPY’s portfolio. And even when Some Asshole isn’t in a piece, their presence can be felt. This is the embodiment of the soul of XCOPY’s work, and Some Asshole serves as a direct portrait. Speculation over interpretation is likely futile, but what makes this character great is its anonymity: is it a foe? Is it a representation of an institution or group of people? Is it the face of all of society, or is it simply me?

A Coin for the Ferryman

Perhaps A Coin for the Ferryman doesn’t carry equal significance to the overarching brand of XCOPY as some of the other works we’ve discussed, but I’d be remiss not to include it simply based on it being my favorite piece by XCOPY. The colors pop and come together on this piece in a way that I think isn’t just a personal best among XCOPY’s work, but across the entire digital art landscape.

Further, there’s a devastating richness to the story told in just a few frames: in a suit and tie, the subject prepares for his office job, looking at the ground in despair. He knows he is already dead, and that he must prepare a coin for the ferryman to carry him across the river Styx and to the afterlife. To my mind, this piece is thematically a precursor to All Time High in the City. If I could own any NFT in the world, it would be this one, no question.

Beyond XCOPY’s journey and notable works, there are other contextual pieces we need to include in the puzzle to get the full picture of who XCOPY is as an artist and what makes him the greatest. Let’s start with the reuse licenses surrounding his work.

CC0

The industry-high prices XCOPY’s work sells for distracts people from how often the artist is ahead of the curve. Demonstrated by how culturally conscious his 1/1 work is, it’s clear XCOPY is ultra-current with what’s happening in the space, even if he doesn’t chime in on every minute detail.

For those who’ve never heard of CC0 (or “No rights reserved”), it’s a type of licensing a creator can apply to their work, that dictates how others can use it. Under traditional copyright, it’s illegal to use most songs in your YouTube video without securing a license to use it, usually via a fee. CC0 removes any and all reuse restrictions. If a work exists under CC0, anybody can use it to do anything they want with it. Full stop.

Given the attention CC0 garnered thanks to Nouns DAO, CryptoDickbutts, and CrypToadz in 2021, one can’t claim XCOPY was early to it. But using it to put all of his work into the public domain was unprecedented.

XCOPY had toyed with CC0 by making Right-click Save As guy CC0 early into 2022, but I don’t think anybody had even considered the possibility of a crypto artist moving their whole portfolio into the public domain using it. Just hours later, Grant Yun — another massively respected and hugely successful crypto artist — also announced a complete move to CC0.

It’s too early — and we’re too deep in the current crypto winter — to tell whether XCOPY’s CC0 move is good or bad. But as the digital ownership and Metaverse theses play out, many will eagerly observe how creators will reuse and repurpose XCOPY’s work, and what effect it will have on his collectibility.

For many, CC0 seems the most rational approach to digital creation in Web3. Driven by mimetic behavior, many believe it’s advantageous to have their work remixed and rebounded around the web because it brings more attention to the original work. Furthermore, in the digital world, where it is so easy to download, duplicate, and disseminate the works of others, it’s almost silly to try and restrict it.

To my mind, the move reflects XCOPY’s beginnings on Tumblr and seems almost pre-ordained. is art started out free of financialization and available to anyone with an internet connection, now CC0 returns it to the people.

Thinking about XCOPY from physical and digital perspectives

It is my belief that XCOPY’s art inherently stands head and shoulders above much of all other crypto art for one simple reason: it moves. I credit David Koblesky for opening my eyes to this vital aspect of XCOPY’s body of work, especially if we consider it in the context of future virtual worlds. He writes: “You could have a gallery exhibit of Beeple’s work as high res prints, but this would never make sense for XCOPY. The work would have to be displayed in motion, so a gallery would have to have large panels to display the motion… because that is the art.”

Movement necessitates that the piece is shown digitally, which to us, is more internet native than pieces that can be shown identically in virtual or printed formats. This isn’t to say that art that doesn’t move is digitally invalid — there’s plenty of iconic, static, digital art — but rather to argue that art that does is perhaps more true to the medium.

We think this is an important consideration, not just when appreciating XCOPY’s work, but in digital art curation and collecting generally. If you hang digital frames in your home or display art in your virtual gallery, which style might be more affecting, static or dynamic? (Consider Chromie Squiggles — of which we are proud collectors — in this context: Snowfro designed them with the ability to move).

Crypto Artists influenced by XCOPY

As new as the Web3 world is, XCOPY has been around long enough to begin influencing the styles of the second generation of great crypto artists (some may refer to these folks as the crypto art Class of 2021). Here are just some of the most notable names who produce work that is in part inspired by XCOPY:

OSF

The most interesting example of XCOPY’s influence to my mind is OSF, one of the newer names to the glitch art scene. Also based out of London, OSF was once the big banker XCOPY seemingly targeted in much of his work. OSF quit his job at Barclay’s trading desk to pursue Web3 full-time and, eventually, release art of his own. Dealing with similar subject matter in his work, one can’t help but wonder if XCOPY had any influence not just on OSF’s art, but his decision to quit the traditional finance world too.

In addition to his art, OSF is the founder of the successful profile picture project, rektguy, and the NFT investment fund and incubator, Canary Labs.

Alpha Centauri Kid

Although not as clearly glitch or as XCOPY-influenced as OSF, I’d still argue Alpha Centauri Kid (widely recognized as in the highest echelon of crypto artists), carries strong traces of the Glitch Godfather’s work. ACK even has even created direct homages to XCOPY with pieces like All Time High on Centauri:

JakNFT

Finally, we have JakNFT, who self-identifies as a glitch artist. His portfolio drips in with XCOPY style, but with a more contemporary touch. It’s almost as if Jak is XCOPY’s artistic son. There is something more erratic, louder, and fiercely modern that Jak has mastered with his glitch work. The work has congruent commentary, but unlike XCOPY who links his work through their titles, Jak does so through color. There’s a palpable sense that the neon palette Jak works in is the artist’s way of saying something about the superfluousness of the status quo.

Making the Case for XCOPY as the GOAT

Thanks to the access our digital world offers, we’re afforded the ability to peer back in time and witness XCOPY's rise. This is part of XCOPY’s brilliance, he is a member of a select and mighty group of internet users who were both creating and documenting their journies in what we now call Web3 simultaneously. Traveling down his road of art, we saw his humble beginnings on Tumblr, experimentation on any and all early art platforms, and finally, finding a place to call home at SuperRare.

If XCOPY’s early pioneering efforts aren’t enough to convince you of his importance, his art surely is. We detailed the glitch master’s most important works and why they are so intensely revered. Layered with skill, comedy, philosophy, and contemporary rhetoric, it truly is everything a legendary body of work should be.

The artist’s mastery of the technology and vision for the future should leave no doubt of his status as the greatest of all time. Purposed as CC0, XCOPY’s art is free for the world to not only marvel at, but to use. Considering the increased prevalence of virtual experiences, XCOPY’s art is created with dynamics in mind, making it inherently the most digital of digital art.

His influence on the crypto art ecosystem of today is tangible and reflected in much of the work of many other top artists. And while that is typically the mark of a legendary creator, it’s not enough for XCOPY. The reality is that XCOPY’s art doesn't just influence new work — without it, the digital art ecosystem might not exist today. Or, if it did, it would be but a shadow of what it now is.

XCOPY has created a legacy from nothing. He's changed the course of digital art and left an indelible stamp on it. Through unrivaled persistence, XCOPY has secured himself a spot forever on the list of greatest artists ever.