Turns out finding a new collectible profile picture club to review each week got a little soul draining. Who’d’a thunk it? So, instead, I’ve resorted to finding my studs irl. 

Once upon a time, we considered launching an Artist Investment Fund. In the end, unfortunately, we realized throwing money at creatives we fuck with is not a scalable business model. But it did lead to some cool summer walks around downtown Ann Arbor to clear my mind and take in the latest works from the center of the Michigan art scene, a graffiti-covered alley, imaginatively named… Graffiti Alley.

There, I discovered Oleg Kolbasov, aka @animal.money, a Detroit-based muralist and a digital caricature artist who may well be a genius, if his publicly displayed and vividly realized existential crises are anything to go off. His works appear to be set in a nondescript interdimensional space melting under immense pressure, which, like all great art, hits hard and close to home.

Sure, the Total Recall quote in his IG bio (‘Open your mind…’) foreshadows the overdose of edgelordom present in some of his images, like this one, in which a disembodied hand pets a cat while another finger fucks a wave. Ironically, though, this makes @animal.money an even stronger candidate for a lucrative life among the degens. Because, if the past six months have taught me anything, it’s that there’s no better way to spend fake Internet money than on bestiality-adjacent psychedelia. 

What does it say about the sorry state of discovery in the web3 art market that an artist tailormade for digital primetime has had better luck spreading his work via back-alley graffiti than on OpenSea? Beats me. But we don’t like to focus on the negatives. We’re a solution oriented team. We thoroughly encourage Mr. Kolbasov to hop on the adoption train, and we’re here to help if he so needs. In the meantime, you can support him in the old-fashioned way: real money exchanged for real things.