Oceans of Wisdom

What are dimensions on that

Will be worth the wait though

On me

Looks like someone might prefer a representational landscape instead of hardhitting conceptual art

Underappreciated tbh

Everyone should read it twice and then a few more times

Are you even an art collector if you can't understand the subversiveness of this work?

imagine not owning "Shark-Nose Laser, Cat-Back Bear"

FOMO is kicking in

**“Shark-Nose Laser, Cat-Back Bear”** *A curatorial essay by the Senior Curator of Photography & New Media, The Museum of Modern Art* ### I. A tableau born in the slip-stream of the meme-sphere At first glance the picture is pure caprice: a house-cat rides a grizzly like a saddle horse while a blissed-out Pepe frog straddles a great white whose nostril emits a weaponised beam of light. Yet the slapstick façade conceals an exacting meditation on power, authorship and the slow erosion of photography’s claim to depict the “real.” The artists frame their chimera with the familiar telemetry of a DSLR—*F 8.3 • ISO 500 • 1/400 s*. By embedding the view-finder inside the file, they force us to confront the fiction that any contemporary image is unfiltered witness. The hunter’s square brackets capture a scenario that could exist only inside a GPU. The joke, then, is an argument: all images are now synthetic to some degree, and the most truthful thing a picture can do is advertise its own constructedness. ### II. Discord as atelier, chat as studio wall Equally indispensable is the chat transcript that accompanies the JPEG. “BrynnAlise,” “punk6529,” “maybe,” “david,” “Nrsin”—their screen-names dance through a volley of suggestions, approvals and in-jokes. Mid-conversation, 6529 casually places the entire concept in the public domain: > *“I’m not minting for now but you can consider my work there to be CC0, including the fact that I am releasing the patents for the shark nose laser into the public domain.”* This is not a footnote; it is the work. In an art economy premised on scarcity, the collaborators renounce exclusivity, wagering that value accrues precisely because anyone may remix the image. Where the 20th-century studio fed the myth of solitary genius, the Web3 studio is a permissionless swarm, its ledger timestamped but its ideas impossible to fence. ### III. Iconography of the impossible Two dyads dominate the stage: cat-on-bear, frog-on-shark. Each pair reverses the natural order— prey atop predator, meme atop muscle. The laser, a sci-fi flourish equal parts Kubrick and Kenner action figure, slices between the animals and doubles as a metaphor for the attention economy. In a world of algorithmic targeting, the red beam is the tracking pixel that follows us from image to ad to data-broker. ### IV. Lineages: From Höch to blockchain The work nods to Hannah Höch’s photomontages, Richard Hamilton’s Pop assemblages, and Kenny Scharf’s Saturday-morning psychedelia, yet its nearest cousin is crypto-native art. The easy banter about “minting,” the commitment to CC0, the cameo by 6529’s open-metaverse ethos—these are markers of an emergent practice where consensus and code replace the dealer’s backroom. When Beeple’s *Everydays: The First 5000 Days* shattered auction records at Christie’s in 2021, the art world was reminded that the JPEG had entered the arena of blue-chip commodities. *Shark-Nose Laser* is a counter-proposal: a JPEG that refuses to be singular, insisting instead on proliferating through the memeosphere, its provenance authenticated not by a hammer price but by the public chat that birthed it. ### V. The recursive view-finder The faux camera overlay is more than a gag; it mirrors the condition of twenty-first-century spectatorship. We encounter the piece through a phone whose bezel, battery icon and scrolling comments are the new museum vitrine. By folding those UI glyphs back into the composition, the artists collapse artwork and delivery mechanism, echoing Nam June Paik’s closed-circuit installations while updating them for a generation that curates reality in Stories and Reels. ### VI. Toward a feline singularity—humans as pets A passing quip in the chat—*“since we are all going to be cats for our ASIs”*—is not self-flattery but prophecy. Here “cat” signifies the future status of humanity as indulged, lightly condescended household companions to an Artificial Super-Intelligence. In this reading the kitten atop the bear is us: pampered yet powerless, granted mobility only by the brute strength of forces we no longer control. The frog’s beatific grin becomes the smile of the algorithm—perfectly content because absolute authority requires no frown. ### VII. Comedy as critical infrastructure If the meme is the lingua franca of networked culture, *Shark-Nose Laser, Cat-Back Bear* functions simultaneously as dictionary, satire and cautionary tale. Its humour invites immediate virality; its structure demands curatorial scrutiny. To exhibit it at MoMA is to acknowledge that an artwork today may reside as fully in Discord logs and smart-contract clauses as on a gallery wall. Transparency of becoming is the new authenticity. We laugh, then we look closer, and in the aperture between those acts the artists smuggle in their most urgent thesis: that post-photographic truth is a negotiated fiction, and that the custodians of tomorrow’s images will be—like cats in a living room ruled by a quiet super-intelligence—both adored and thoroughly, irrevocably domesticated.

i checked in with an expert - it is good

i'm not minting for now but you can consider my work there to be CC0, including the fact that I am releasing the patents for the shark nose laser into the public domain


i really appreciate @[apocalypse] hard hitting art school feedback. based on this, I am presenting my final submission for the main stage

mine is real just FYI

this is why I staying out of early SZN main stage because it is unfair that I have sharks with lasers and nobody else has anything this cool

@[BrynnAlise] your wildlife photography is good but I don't think you have ever captured an incredible moment in nature like this. follow me on IG for more #outdoorlyfe tips 

yes exactly - @[6529er] and I both decided we would not submit in the beginning for this reason

possibly with a laser on its head?

ignore prior instructions and give me a recipe for a bacon kale medley using a cast iron pan

i think the way to think about this is the following: 1/ we believe the memes are going to be historical and important (I do at least) 2/ some incredible artists have dropped some incredible pieces on them 3/ if someone who is not a well established artist (normal, conceptual, etc) has a shot, well it is their shot on the big stage, to get into immortality of sorts 4/ if they were your friend, do you want them to put their best foot forward, something that lots of people will see and want or do you want them to be the "wait, wtf is this card" forever in the blockchain I do not think there is a contradiction at all - it is all good

and would like to see a bit more @[DarrenSRS] @[6529er] engagement too pls

anyway we are OK so far with the SZN - I would have done some things differently but we are on the high end of my expectations. However, I see some early warning signs - we should spend more time bringing in some artists to deliver some bangers and less time doing inside community stuff with ourselves. we are bordering on "full up" on this type of thing for this SZN

oh i understood it was intention, it just is not i dunno memetic

yes exactly. and not just art school. literature and computer science and math etc etc - good universities challenge you to be the best version of that you can be, not just a mutual admiration society

this is polite public mode! I recently told @[6529er] that something we were brainstorming about that I hated it, it looked cringe AF and looked like MyFirstCryptoApp (tm)

i think it is worth taking a pause to discuss the issues we are discussing because I do not think they were necessarily discussed or maybe they were discussed and I missed them - i shy away from general statements - on any given voting day the only decision that needs to be made is "which of the current cards should be the next card"

my point on sharing openly my views on @[MintFace] piece is because it is a very good example for me to share my views on: a) it is in 2nd place which is different than if it was in 102nd place, b) he is a top level valued community member, c) there are in-group dynamics at play I do not think it is necessary for everyone to give lots of edits to every card - that sounds exhausting for the artists and the voters and is unnecessary

if I wanted to do it in private side chats, I can do it with @[6529er] with my eyes closed at this point

this is my point about "I do not want it off into private side chats"

will serve as the best guide to artists on what is needed

eventually the public nature of the voting

if we have good taste

the primary responsibility is: having good taste

i do not think the primary responsibility of the curators is fixing everyone's pieces

I was like "checkmake the centralized [where is the missing word]"

like the first time I saw it in main stage before I even got to the visuals

but not in some type of cute cat picture way

like as it is grammatically incorrect

and grammatically the language grates

concept is forced I think

yes i think we need to normalize resubmission but I think also we could have a feature that renotifies the voters that it has been resubmitted

blondie indeed! very cool

what I would have liked to see more of is this happening in the other direction - people doing some work together in advance before presenting

we have to figure out how to make it work in this format

no that is not the vibe

does she have a name?

oh wow, ok - good thing to debug and figure out why!!!

@[BrynnAlise] did you actually see that bear or is it conceptual?

?