Imagine a man barreling down a highway. His Cybertruck alerts him that he’s low on energy, so he pulls into a supercharging station. He’s thirsty, so he grabs a Celsius and guzzles it. While he waits, he checks his crypto wallet to see how his shitcoins are doing. Is it time to rug-pull? Not yet. He returns to his car, and queues up the latest episode of Joe Rogan. He’s in a hurry.
Where is he headed? It could be a thousand different places. The Eden Fine Art gallery at the Wynn in Vegas for an Alec Monopoly opening. The Wynwood Walls x Joopiter party sponsored by Uniqlo during Art Basel Miami Beach. Perrotin’s MSCHF opening on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Wherever he alights, he will throw a photo up on X. He is a “red-chip” art collector, and he’s gaining more traction in the art world.
When I first heard that term a few years ago, I might have misunderstood it. It popped up and disappeared during the boom of 2021, and seemed to connote expensive artworks by artists born after 1975—”ultra-contemporary” art by another name. I held onto the adage, though, and I’ve been honing my own definition, which I’ve found useful while reporting on the art fair and gallery circuit in recent years.
What is red-chip art? It’s not unrelated to Trumpism, and Trumpism’s aesthetics, but it is does not have an explicit political stance. (Red-chip art isn’t for Republicans, and blue-chip art isn’t for Democrats, as we already know.) Red-chip art comes in many guises, but certain visual patterns predominate: super-flat cartoons, a street art/graffiti aesthetic, and multi-colored chrome. A crypto component is always welcome.
Crucially, red-chip art is defined by its refusal to revere art history, perhaps as a part of a broader rejection of elite, specialized knowledge.
On a 2010 episode of 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin’s character, Jack Donaghy, quips, “We know what art is. It’s paintings of horses.” Those are the words of a Reaganite conservative, still in thrall to Old World taste, a runoff of Europe’s hereditary aristocracy. Today, a powerful Republican (or Trump-curious independent) delivering that joke would have to say, “We know what art is. It’s the bearbrick x KAWS collab.”
Red-chip collectors include mysteriously affluent millennials who like artworks that look like toys, newly wealthy techies that the traditional art world has never been able to capture, and hip-hop visionaries (as well as the people who have gotten rich off of them).
Everyday people who aspire to crypto dominance are also among red-chip art’s fans. The movement has plenty to offer consumers without the means to buy original artworks: limited-edition dolls, limited-edition NFTs, limited-edition fashion items, and memecoins.
There’s a pecking order to the artists associated with red-chip art, just as there is for the traditional, blue-chip art world.
Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami are not red chip, but they are key transitional figures in this story. (Call them purple chip?) They have revered practices rooted in art history, and they have been collected deeply by art museums, but they have also churned out products with the same tropes and trademark characters, offering something at every price point, though with mixed success. (The Koons x Louis Vuitton bags are a bit too high-brow, high-art for the red-chip crowd. They came and went. But Murakami’s recent collection with the brand had red-chippers lined up around the block in SoHo.)
The true, top-level red-chippers, I’d argue, are those who were tapped by Kanye West before he went completely dark: KAWS, George Condo (I know some will object), and Virgil Abloh. (Red-chippers tend to be male, which has historically been the case for blue-chippers, of course.) These are artists who manage, or managed, to keep one foot in the traditional blue-chip art world and one foot in the hypebeast, crypto, Supreme-drop world of red-chip art. Names like Tom Sachs, Alex Israel, Damien Hirst, Harmony Korine, Yoshitomo Nara, and Banksy also slot into this tier.
The canary in the coal mine: Kanye West performs in front of a Takashi Murakami illustration for his album Graduation at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008. The evening was sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum and Louis Vuitton. (Photo by Fairchild Archive/Penske Media via Getty Images)
Then there are the native red-chippers (the vast majority of the field): Alec Monopoly, Mr. Brainwash, Romero Britto (a trailblazer), Niclas Castello (remember the $11.7 million gold cube?), and any artist who has ever papier-mâchéd a print of Kate Moss’s face onto a big block of resin, then painted on it. These are artists who have never had the respect of the fine art world, but still glare at its inhabitants from the fringes.
Peak red-chip art is Mark Zuckerberg commissioning Daniel Arsham last year to make a large sculpture of his wife in Tiffany blue. It is also a scrum of crypto bros bidding up Maurizio Cattelan’s banana piece, Comedian (2019) to $6.2 million last November, and the winner, crypto-king Justin Sun, eating it (apparently pretending, for the benefit of the media, that he believed he was eating a $6.2 million banana).
Red-chip art has been building in popularity since the early Kanye albums, but it became a force to reckon with in 2021, when Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) sold an NFT of his collected works (largely juvenile digital drawings) for $69 million in 2021. (Big money, publicly flaunted, is key to red-chip art.) The sale suddenly opened doors for him in the old-line art world. Soon he was showing at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy, and M+ in Hong Kong and meeting with Hans Ulrich Obrist.
If blue-chip art is Louise Bourgeois spiders, Donald Judd stacks, and Jackson Pollock splatter paintings (pricy work buoyed by decades of industry consensus), red-chip art is Damien Hirst dot paintings that can be exchanged for an NFT, MSCHF’s giant red sneakers, and Kidrobot vinyl action figures that glow in the dark: things that do not necessarily look like they should be worth enormous amounts of money, that have the look of digital, ephemeral images, that can be understood by very online, self-selecting in-groups. When red-chip art does take a more traditional look, it tends to shout its status as “fine art,” as in Condo’s interchangeable Picassoid paintings. (Peter Schjeldahl’s classic zinger about Condo’s “infatuation with paint, distinct from any special use for it” comes to mind.)
Red-chip artworks look great on screens, and they are often designed to be traded like Beanie Babies, with various types of artificial scarcity. A prime example: the many variants of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, but the less said about them, the better. If I look at red-chip art for too long, it makes me feel like I’ve stood too close to a microwave.
Emmanuel Perrotin in a pair of boots by art collective MSCHF. Photo via a tipster.
Earlier this year, I went to a talk on the art market where the veteran advisor Amy Cappellazzo spoke, searingly, about the influence of algorithms and AI on collecting taste, especially among new collectors who grew up as digital natives. At one point, she described a type of person who sounded to me like a red-chip collector. These people are “heavily digital,” she said, and “because they live in an immaterial world—this explains why so few of them started art collections. Their own status creation and accomplishments are not material. So they’re not really attracted to physical things.”
“The physical world matters to them less,” Cappellazzo added. “They care more about experiences, maybe.” Red-chip art usually has that experimental element: you eat the banana, you strap on the boots, you buy it on a digital marketplace, flex it on Instagram, savor for the serotonin boost, and then sell it again. The instinct mirrors the fast-fashion trend that sees thousands of teenagers reselling their Shein garments after wearing them only once. It is algorithmic art, boosted by social media, popular because everyone agrees it is popular, because the feed keeps saying it is popular. When you surrender your taste to an algorithm, you “lose something essential to yourself,” Cappellazzo said.
I am not arguing that we should smash the machines, like the Luddites. I recently visited a prominent painter who has been experimenting with AI and NFTs, making a radical shift after decades in the business. “This very well may be the new Cubism,” they said as they toyed with AI graphics tools. Their new work looked strange, genuinely experimental, elusive—everything that red-chip art usually is not.
I’ll close by returning to that Cybertruck driver. He enjoyed the Alec Monopoly show, and he’s comfortable these days at places like Perrotin, which once seemed so snobby and inaccessible. Red-chip art is continuing to infiltrate the art world’s upper crust. It is no longer compartmentalized in the tackier satellite fairs in Miami, it’s in the main tent. In just the past couple years, KAWS has shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Andy Warhol Museum, and the Parrish Art Museum out in the Hamptons.
Where will the Cybertrucker be driving next year? The four mega galleries have so far decided not to go all-in for red-chip art. Hauser and Wirth, Pace, and Gagosian have flirted with some of those safer options, like George Condo, Yoshitomo Nara, and Alex Israel, respectively, though they each have their own blue-chip bona fides. But it is not hard to imagine them entering the field in earnest. Meanwhile, industry-leading museums like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney have been steering clear. Will they all continue to hold out as money flows into red-chip art?
Red-chip art may not need the traditional art world to keep growing. I’m not confident that the reverse is true.
