Art Blocks is the leading platform for generative art and one of the most well-known brands in the entire NFT space. Some of the most valuable NFT artworks have been launched on Art Blocks and new innovative projects are added every week. I will highlight a few of the most iconic ones later.
Knowing about Art Blocks is essential if you’re curious about generative art and its history. And since many Art Blocks projects are still rather affordable, it’s also a great place to begin your journey as a digital art collector. This guide will help you do just that.
Full disclosure: I own two Art Blocks pieces myself.
A quick primer on generative art
The art you can buy on Art Blocks is what’s called generative. Generative art is a huge and fascinating topic in and of itself and I won’t attempt to define and explain all its nuances here. Check out this article if you want a deeper dive.
In the context of Art Blocks, you can simply think of generative art as digital art that’s created by an algorithm. Rather than creating a piece of art by hand or with an illustration software, the artist writes a piece of code that can then automatically generate a digital artwork.
Furthermore, the same code can automatically generate hundreds of pieces of art, all similar enough to fit into the same project but without any of them looking exactly the same. Thus, you can be sure that any piece you buy from Art Blocks is completely unique.
While generative art has been around for a long time, it wasn’t until the advent of NFTs that an actual market for it was enabled. With that came a massive opportunity for generative artists and collectors alike. Art Blocks was the first platform to see and facilitate this.
Art Blocks enters the scene
Art Blocks was founded in late 2020 by Erick Calderon, aka Snowfro. Being an artist and coder himself, Snowfro saw the need for a platform that makes it easy for artists to launch and sell their new generative artworks.
In fact, Snowfro himself was the very first artist to mint a project on Art Blocks when he launched the Chromie Squiggle on November 27, 2020. It’s also the logo for Art Blocks itself and remains one of the most iconic and popular of all generative art projects.
How Art Blocks works
Any new project on Art Blocks launches at a specific time with a set price and number of artworks. When the project goes live, you and everyone else can connect to the Art Blocks website with a crypto wallet and buy (aka “mint”) a piece from the collection. All payments happen in the cryptocurrency ETH.
You can see the artworks that are minted in real time when a project launches on the Art Blocks website
While you obviously know the project you’re minting and have seen some samples beforehand, you don’t know exactly what your piece will look like until after the fact. That’s because the algorithm only creates each piece of art at the moment someone clicks buy.
This concept is a key element in the allure of the Art Blocks platform and generative art in general. But if you want to see the full collection and pick out your favorite piece before buying, you can always go shopping on OpenSea afterward.
Pricing
You will encounter two different pricing formats on Art Blocks: The fixed price and the Dutch auction. In the case of the former, an artist may drop 200 pieces at a price of 0.1 ETH each, for instance. Very straightforward.
In a Dutch auction, the price starts at a certain level and drops in increments until it reaches its final and lowest level. For instance, the auction may begin at 2 ETH and drop by 0.2 ETH every half hour until it reaches 0.4 ETH. You can buy whenever you want — until the project sells out, that is!
Launch schedule
On most weeks, a new project will launch every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6 pm UTC. You can stay on top of new mints on the homepage of the Art Blocks website or in the ‘upcoming-projects’ channel in their Discord server.
You can also go to the Art Blocks website and filter projects based on their ‘status’. If you select ‘open’, you’ll see all projects that are currently minting and how many pieces are left. The most popular projects sell out fast though, so you need to make sure you don’t miss out on a great opportunity.
Upcoming mints on the Art Blocks website
The projects’ style, popularity, and price will vary a lot. The latter is essentially a function of the supply relative to the estimated demand. And the demand is highly correlated to the artist behind the project.
Art Blocks makes sure you’ll only find the very best artists on the platform though. Some are just a little more prominent than others or further ahead in their creative careers. Art Blocks allows for this and lets more artists launch on the platform by grouping each project into one of four “collections”.
The four Art Blocks collections
The curatorial board of Art Blocks has always placed projects in different “collections” based on their quality and innovation within the generative art medium. These collections remained in place for two years after Art Blocks was launched. Only recently, in October 2022, did they get a significant update as part of Art Blocks 2.0.
Each project on Art Blocks is placed within one of the following collections: Curated, Presents, Collaborations or Explorations. Only the Curated Collection has existed since the beginning. But even that has seen some changes in the recent update.
The Curated Collection
Projects in the Curated Collection are hand-picked by Art Blocks’ own curation board. They only include the very best projects deemed to push the technical and aesthetic boundaries of generative art.
According to Art Blocks themselves, the Curated Collection is the best representation of their vision as a platform. It has also featured some of the biggest artists in the entire NFT space.
Up until recently, the Curated projects were grouped into quarterly series. However, this ended with the conclusion of Series 8 on October 19, 2022.
With Junia Farquhar’s Dipolar on December 14, 2022, a total of 71 projects have been added to the Curated Collection since Art Blocks’ inception.
You can filter the Curated Collection by ‘series’ on the Art Blocks website
Generally speaking, the Curated Collection is by far the most exclusive on Art Blocks. It’s also the most expensive. Some of the most iconic Curated projects trade for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the secondary market. I will highlight some of them later in this article.
New curated projects typically launch with the Dutch auction format and a starting price of a few thousand dollars (priced in ETH). The most popular ones sell out instantly and can be extremely difficult to get your hands on.
Luckily for us, we’ve got some great non-curated options as well!
Explore the Curated Collection: Art Blocks.
The Presents Collection
Before the recent revamp, Art Blocks had two collections titled Playground and Factory. The Playground Collection was for artists who had previously been featured in the Curated Collection. While Playground projects also had to meet a certain standard, the curation wasn’t nearly as strict as for the Curated Collection. Experimentation was also encouraged.
The curation criteria were even more relaxed for the Factory Collection. As opposed to the Playground Collection, Factory artists hadn’t been featured in the Curated Collection either. At least not yet.
Now, Factory and Playground projects have been consolidated into a new collection titled Art Blocks Presents. Projects in this collection have still been handpicked by Art Blocks but haven’t quite made it into the Curated collection.
Letters to My Future Self by Ryan Struhl is one of the most popular Presents projects (formerly Factory)
Presents is a great place to find some truly amazing and unique artworks from extremely talented artists. You may even be able to spot the next big superstar before they’re discovered by the masses — and before their prices skyrocket.
Many new Presents projects launch with price tags around $200. Some of the older and less popular Playground and Factory projects are trading for less than $50 on OpenSea right now. Others have gone up significantly since their launch.
Explore the full Presents Collection on Art Blocks.
The Collaborations Collection
As the name implies, projects in the Collaboration Collection are launched through collaborations between Art Blocks and other organizations. The first collaboration is with Pace, one of the leading international art galleries. Pace represents some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, including Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, and Mark Rothko.
Three projects in the Art Blocks x Pace collab have been launched so far. The first one, Petro National by John Gerrard, minted on June 21, 2022, before the Collaborations Collection was established.
3 pieces from the Contractions project by Loie Hollowell
Since then, QWERTY by Tara Donovan (October 10) and Contractions by Loie Hollowell (October 28) have launched as well. Floating World Genesis by A.A. Murakami is scheduled for December 21, 2022, with a starting price of 4 ETH (~$5,200).
Explore the full Collaborations Collection on Art Blocks.
The Experiments Collection
Last but not least, the Experiments Collection is for commissioned projects that have been conceptualized and created in collaboration with the Art Blocks team. One of the goals of Experiments is to pioneer how generative minting can affect the human experience.
The first project in this collection was Friendship Bracelets by Alexis André in collaboration with Erick Calderon (founder of Art Blocks). Every Art Blocks collector was able to mint two digital bracelets for free, encouraged to give one of them away to a friend. More than 26,000 bracelets have been claimed so far.
3 pieces from the Friendship Bracelets project by Alexis André
The second and latest Experiments project was Marfa Yucca by Daniel Calderon Arenas. The 298 pieces were inspired by flowering yuccas on one of Daniel’s summer trips to the desert city of Marfa, Texas.
Iconic Art Blocks projects
Below you’ll see five of the most iconic Art Blocks projects, all from the Curated Collection. I’ve added their descriptions from the Art Blocks website along with some key information and links to OpenSea.
Chromie Squiggle by Snowfro
“Simple and easily identifiable, each squiggle embodies the soul of the Art Blocks platform. Consider each my personal signature as an artist, developer, and tinkerer.” — Snowfro
11/27/2020 | 10,000 pieces | Curated Collection | Buy here (13 ETH / $16,600)
Three pieces from the Chromie Squiggle project by Snowfro
Ringers by Dmitri Cherniak
There are an almost infinite number of ways to wrap a string around a set of pegs. On the surface, it may seem like a simple concept but prepare to be surprised and delighted at the variety of combinations the algorithm can produce. Each output from ‘Ringers’ is derived from a unique transaction hash and generated in Javascript in the browser. Feature variations include peg count, sizing, layout, wrap orientation and a few colorful flourishes for good measure.
01/31/2021 | 1,000 pieces | Curated Collection | Buy here (73 ETH / $93,000)
Three pieces from the Ringers project by Dmitri Cherniak
Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs
Fidenza is by far my most versatile algorithm to date. Although the program stays focused on structured curves and blocks, the varieties of scale, organization, texture, and color usage it can employ create a wide array of generative possibilities.
11/06/2021 | 999 pieces | Curated Collection | Buy here (85 ETH / $110,000)
Three pieces from the Fidenza project by Tyler Hobbs
Archetype by Kjetil Golid
Archetype explores the use of repetition as a counterweight to unruly, random structures. As each single component looks chaotic alone, the repetition brings along a sense of intentionality, ultimately resulting in a complex, yet satisfying expression.
02/27/2021 | 600 pieces | Curated Collection | Buy here (32 ETH / $41,000)
Three pieces from the Archetype project by Kjetil Golid
Gazers by Matt Kane
On the surface, Gazers function as a lunar calendar, algorithmically synching closely with Moon phases in the sky, joining the blockchain with one of humanity’s longest running lineages in art. Gazers seeks to create a community of collectors celebrating the change of our perceptions that happen over time, our collective goals in crypto, and our love of color theory, astronomy, and generative art.
There’s a lot to understand about this project and the description above was just a small snippet. You can read the full description here.
12/06/2021 | 1,000 pieces | Curated Collection | Buy here (36 ETH / $46,000)
3 pieces from the Gazers project by Matt Kane
Edifice by Ben Kovach
Edifice is a series of 976 massive, deteriorating structures built on strange terrain. It is an exploration of buildings being conceptualized, constructed, and eroded away under a wide variety of conditions. Edifice’s outputs run the gamut between minimal and maximal, with some showing few large, static blocks of color, and others many small, highly textured and warped shapes. Each image is progressively constructed in front of the viewer’s eyes. It is a system full of surprises that I’m excited to share with the world.
11/08/2021 | 976 pieces | Curated Collection | Buy here (2.65 ETH / $3,400)
Three pieces from the Edifice project by Ben Kovach
Closing thoughts and additional resources
Many serious NFT collectors will tell you that Art Blocks is the most important platform in the history of NFT art. I agree. And while more platforms have entered the space, Art Blocks continues to be the go-to place for generative art and will likely always be recognized for its historical significance.
Art Blocks hasn’t been immune to the rampant speculation that’s been going on in the NFT space at large over the past year either. As always, I highly recommend you approach NFTs as a collector rather than an investor.
Simply put, buy the stuff you like and actually want to display at home, regardless of the future price development. With the wonderful selection on Art Blocks, this shouldn’t be an issue.
In addition to joining the Art Blocks Discord, I recommend following their Twitter account and the ‘After Dinner Mints’ series on YouTube as well. There’s also a great ‘Learn’ section on the Art Blocks website.
But what I really recommend you do first is simply to go explore all the amazing projects on their website. Read the descriptions of the ones that appeal to you and check out the interviews with some of the artists. And, above all else, have fun with it!
