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Digital artist Sam Spratt is living the artist’s dream. This week, he celebrated the opening of “The Monument Game,” his first ever art show. But it wasn’t a group show in some DIY space in New York, where it is based, as so many artists usually start, but a solo exhibition in Venice, during the biggest event of the year in the art world – the Venice Biennale . How did Spratt – an almost unknown name in the art world – make such a huge leap? With a little help from his friends, of course, including Ryan Zurrer, the venture capitalist turned champion of digital art.

“Something that the capital ‘A’ art world doesn’t recognize is the power of the group, sometimes it leans into the cult of the individual,” says Ryan Zurrer ARTnews during a preview of the opening. “But this show is supported by the whole community around Sam.”

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Spratt’s Venice exhibition was presented by 1OF1 Collection, a “collecting club” founded by Zurrer to nurture digital artists working in the NFT space. Since its launch in 2021, 1OF1 has been extremely successful in bridging the gap between the art world and the Web3 community. Last year, 1OF1 and the Rugby Club Art Collection donated gifts Anadol’s Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA to the museum, after almost a year on display in the Gund Lobby. Zurrer also organized the first museum presentations of HUMAN ONE Beeple, a seven-foot-tall kinetic sculpture based on video works, first showing it at Castello di Rivoli in Italy and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, before sending it to the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art American in Arkansas.

With “The Monument Game,” Zurrer once again places digital native art at the center of the art world. While Anadol and Beeple have large cultural footprints prior to Zurrer’s patronage, Spratt is much earlier in his career. But, what attracted Zurrer, he said, was the artist’s astute approach to building a dedicated, participatory audience for his work. He did that by making his art a game.

“When I first started looking at NFTs, I spent a long time figuring out who the players were,” Spratt told ARTnews. “The auctions were like stories in themselves, I could see people’s friends bidding, almost ceremonially, to give the auction some energy, and then other people would come in, and it would go competitive, emotional.”

Spratt released his first three NFTs on the SuperRare platform in October 2021. Selling those works, the first of his series LUCY, along with giving away a free NFT to every person who submitted an offer. Zurrer had been one of those underbidders (for the work Luci’s birth). Although Spratt said the derivative NFTs were essentially worthless, he wanted to give something back to all bidders. Zurrer, and others it seems, appreciated the gesture and Spratt quickly gained a following in the Web3 space. The offerings he gave, were called Luci’s skulls, became dedicated collectors of Sam who now go by the Council of Luci. 47 impressions were distributed and Spratt held back three.

All the times of LUCY can be seen at the Cantiere Cucchini Docks, a short walk from the Arsenale, past a swinging boat that doubles as a fruit and vegetable market and over a wooden bridge. While NFTs usually bring to mind glitching screens and monkey cartoons (ala Bored Ape Yacht Club), the ten works on display depict apes in a detailed, painterly style and emit a soft glow. Taking cues from photography installations, 1OF1 did away with screens in favor of prints mounted on light boxes.

“We don’t want it to look like Best Buy here,” Zurrer said.

Each work represents a chapter in a fantasy world that Spratt dreamed up. Although there is no book of lore to refer to, there seems to be some Planet of the Apes story in play where an intelligent ape lives alongside humans, babies, and ape-human hybrids. Spratt received an education in oil painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design and credits that technical training with his ability to bring warmth and detail to the digital works. He and the team often say that his historical art references originate in Renaissance and Baroque art, although the aesthetic—to my eye—seems to draw from commercial illustration and concept art. That’s not too surprising considering this is the environment Spratt started in after graduating SCAD in 2010.

“After school I was faced with the reality that the only path for a digital artist was a commercial one,” says Spratt.

He did quite well on that path, producing album covers for Childish Gambino, Janelle Monae, and Kid Cudi and bagging clients like Marvel, StreetEasy, and Netflix. Spratt also enjoys a huge fan following as he has migrated from Facebook to Tumblr to Twitter and Instagram, posting his hyper-realistic fan art on all platforms. Despite the apparent success, Spratt spoke of the work with bitterness.

“I knew to hire him. An impersonator, hired to be 30% me and 70% someone else,” he said.

Spratt’s personal life blew up when he was 30 and he traced some of the mistakes he made in his relationships to the fact that he had spent so much of his career “telling other people’s stories.” NFTs appeared as a way out of commercial illustration and a way into original art practice.

For his latest piece in the LUCY In the series, Spratt digitally painted a huge landscape set in this ape-human world called The Monument Game. For the piece, Spratt initially sold NFTs that would turn 209 collectors into “players” (since another issue of 256 NFTs was given to the Council to “curate” new champions”). Each player would then be allowed to make a comment about the painting. The Luci Council would vote on which three comments were best, and those three Players would receive one of the Luci’s skulls NFTs held Spratt back. By creating these layers of engagement, with its Council structure and players, Spratt is pushing digital collectors to give their work the kind of care that more traditional collectors do.

“Jeff Koons said that the average person looks at a work of art for twenty seconds,” said Lukas Amacher, 1OF1 Artistic Director and curator of the show. ARTnews. “Sam has found a way to keep people engaged with his work for much longer.”

The game that Spratt has designed for the Venice exhibition might seem too stylish to fit the art world’s idea of ​​art, but as Amacher and Zurrer suggest, in a Web3 environment, value is built by becoming find alternative ways to create investment and attention in what is normal. irrelevant digital artefacts. And it works. To date, the LUCI series has generated $2 million in primary sales and approximately $4 million in additional secondary volume. The challenge now, as it has been over the last three years, is to see if art gatekeepers will take this work seriously.

In the introduction of The Monument Game in Venice, an observation deck, built by the Nifty Gateway platform, sits in front of the installation. Participants can click on the painting on the screen and write their observations of the work in front of them, no NFT required. The first comment came from star curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, director of Castello di Rivoli and curator of Documenta 15: a tribute to the art dealer Marian Goodman. The second was from Zurrer. Who’s next?

“Sam Spratt: The Monument Game” is on view until June 21 at the Cantiere Pietro Cucchini Docks in Venice.

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