Repeatedly, throughout many of my favourite collections, I see the usage of Rothko works.
lowbie (@archivepilled)
Originally posted Sunday, November 2, 2025 · Archived Feb 28, 2026, 2:43 AM
Repeatedly, throughout many of my favourite collections, I see the usage of Rothko works.
His quiet, deeply emotional, and often misunderstood art is put in contrast with the ‘traitmaxxed’ aesthetic – layers and layers of individual images piled on top of one another.
What does it mean to contemplate Rothko in this context? ↓🧵
I have a terribly pretentious relationship with Rothko, as I always tell people he was the one who made me understand art.
I remember one of the first times I visited the Tate, I must’ve been in my mid-teens, and stumbling across the Rothko room, felt an intensity overcome me as I had never felt before. I sat in that room for 20 minutes, the longest I’d ever looked at an art piece in my life, and felt so profoundly moved that I genuinely believe I was changed forever.
I never wanted to paint like Rothko – he didn’t inspire me towards abstract expressionism, and he didn’t make me religious or spiritual (that came later through Jon Fosse). However, it felt like ‘art’ had been unlocked for me, and I could finally understand a part of the world I now know to be the most important part of my life.
Interestingly, this feeling has only ever hit me a few times since. One of them was when I first got into the space, and saw Drifella 2 and SolfusSisters0.
I can’t describe it in any other way than a sort of come up, a rush, as well as a sort of restlessness when viewing these pieces for the first time. The restlessness for me comes from wanting to see more, wanting to see them all, but also a wish to create myself. The work that gets me going the most is anything that forces me out of bed to go and create something beautiful.
I wonder how much of this emotional relationship to Rothko got me into the Avant/Gay scene, with it’s many elements forcing a strange abstraction?
SolfusSisters0, despite it’s central figure and, when you get close, somewhat clear set of images that make it up, is extremely abstract in it’s overall aesthetic. Looking at it from afar, I am compelled by how the colour combinations swirl together into new shapes, creating framing devices that overlap one another, giving importance to elements that you wouldn’t be able to conceive of creating if this was a manual process (Solfus was made with Hashlips, out of 4000~ individual images).
Solfus, in it’s extreme push towards a ‘traitmaxxed final boss’ actually strips itself of the many images that make it up, and melts them together to be surprisingly cohesive.
When I look at Rothko’s work I am drawn to individual elements – single brushstrokes - but always I must step back and look at the full picture. There is a similar effect with Solfus, sometimes a trait will catch me, but always I am distracted by the sheer volume of it all, and I must step back and view it as a whole again.
[images: detail from Rothko’s Seagram Murals / detail from SolfusSisters1130]
The more explicit inclusion of Rothko pieces in traitmaxxed collections is always interesting to me, and slightly disconcerting. How does this extremely sparse, yet emotional work coincide with this hyperfinancial world of crypto art?
This ‘Maf Rothko’ trait depicts a shirt that has been made to look like a Rothko piece, and actually originates from the Milady Maker collection, but was used in Mifella 2.
There’s something absurd about seeing the commercialisation of Rothko laid out this plainly: the cheap fashion piece is easily worn by these hyperfinancialised assets. The tees are cleaned up, there’s no brush strokes, no emotion attached, but it being based after ‘a Rothko’ is obvious. Is this an attempt to kill the modern artist, to make way for something new? Or is it just the way all art ends up commercialised to the max – Monet and Van Gogh hoodies constantly seem to litter the aisles at H&M and Primark...
For crypto art (new net-art?) to succeed, is it important that we destroy the past, or possibly show it for what it is? To give way for something new we must show what is wrong with the old, what the perks of the new are? To me, this is a stretch too far – I think the deconstruction of Rothko in this way is much too similar to the way people talk about his work in X threads, conversations between people with no art knowledge and who have never stood in front of Rothko commenting on how ‘its just colour, its just slop, my five year old could do that, etc.’.
I’m interested in the way this Rothko shirt is cleaned up, given the shiny veneer of ‘Fashion’ – it breaks it down to it’s simplest terms, removes all emotion and makes it a digestible package for a consumerist public to buy into. It presents the idea that Rothko is nothing more than a colourist, something he rallied strongly against.
This breaking down was done in the opposite way recently with Steen’s (@STEENMS2) 'Lazy Lions 2’, where the traits of many collections from the Avant Gay scene were used to create a remix of Lazy Lions.
Lazy Lions are a classic example of the ‘rugcore’ aesthetic – a set of NFTs defined by their typical use of plain colour backgrounds; sparse, acceptable accessories; an animal as the main character; a rushed ‘Fiverr’ art style.
What Steen did was show how dissimilar our scene’s work is from this form of Rugcore: how easily our traits can ‘upgrade’ an image and give it a more interesting look. It’s a funny collection, one where it is almost laughing at (with?) us and our obsession with our works as a new form of ‘very important art’. If Lazy Lions 2 is so genius to me, does that make Lazy Lions, the original, just as important in the canon?
It’s one of my favourite collections of the year, especially as it’s a sort of reality check that really all PFP works aren’t so far away from the 2021~ era aesthetics that came to symbolise NFTs to a general public. I also think it should spawn a whole essay in itself.
Back to Rothko now, and while I’ve said above it seems strange to me to see his work in this hyperfinancialised arena, it isn’t so shocking in context.
Rothko understood his work in spiritual terms, less so monetary terms, although his relationship with both of these ideas was complex.
He famously said of his work, "I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on - and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them."
That ‘religious’ relationship with painting is what I understand him for, but he inevitably has a history in the art market, and with money.
One of the most important examples in outlining this complex relationship is about the first works of his that I saw: the ‘Seagram Murals’. These were borne out of the acceptance of a commission in 1958 from the Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram Building on Park Avenue - Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson's modernist masterpiece.
The fee was extraordinary: $35,000 (about $370,000 today), making it the most lucrative commission in contemporary American art at the time. According to his son Christopher, this single check was more than Rothko had earned from all his painting sales up to that point in his career combined.
As he worked on it, he explicitly stated his hostile intentions. According to John Fischer's Harper's Magazine article, Rothko said: ‘I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.’ He wanted to make the restaurant feel like ‘a place where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off’.
However, the decisive moment came when Rothko actually dined at the Four Seasons with his wife, Mell. Seeing the space in operation - the wealthy clientele treating it as a status symbol, the vast windows, the curtains that would be drawn to display his paintings like trophies - he was horrified. The paintings would become mere decoration, expensive wallpaper for the elite. Rothko returned the check and withdrew from the commission - an almost unprecedented act of artistic integrity. He kept the paintings, refusing to let them enter that commercial context. As he told John Fischer: ‘Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine’.
The story perfectly encapsulates the contradiction at the heart of Rothko's career: an artist who wanted to create spiritual, contemplative experiences found himself increasingly entangled with extreme wealth and commercialization. The Seagram commission forced him to confront what his art would mean in the context of conspicuous consumption.
I think this dichotomy brings up many questions pertinent to the net-art, surrounding ideas of networking spirituality, the relationship between artist, audience and money, and how enmeshed these things are. This seems especially true in a space like ours, where we exist as gallerist, marketer, accountant, collector, trustee, etc. – we are all roles, never just artists.
Our art is bought to be flipped, to be laundered, and hopefully to be enjoyed. I find myself at a strange intersection, having never made money from my art, to be being able to mint out a collection about my death in a few minutes. Rothko makes me extremely contemplative, and his inclusion in the scenes canon is an important one, one that raises a lot of questions about what it means to make art.
Footer: As always, thank you to @exchgART and @bonk_inu Art Masters for helping with the publishing of this article.
Links: Drifella 2: https://tensor.trade/trade/drifella_2… SolfusSisters0: https://tensor.trade/trade/solfussisters0… Mifella 2: https://tensor.trade/trade/mifella_2 Milady Maker: https://opensea.io/collection/milady… Lazy Lions: https://opensea.io/collection/lazy-lions… Lazy Lions 2: https://tensor.trade/trade/lazylions2… Rothko's Abstract Transcendence: https://artsy.net/article/patrickriot-rothkos-abstract-transcendence… Park Ave Modernism: https://nycurbanism.com/blog/2019/11/20/park-ave-modernism… John Fisher - Mark Rothko, Portrait of The Artist As An Angry Man: https://scribd.com/document/289639878/John-Fisher-Mark-Rothko-Portrait-of-the-Artist-as-an-Angry-Man… Mark Rothko, A Painter of Ideas: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2023/07/11/mark-rothko-a-painter-of-ideas/…
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Added Nov 4, 2025, 1:21 AM
how sweet !
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Added Nov 4, 2025, 2:19 AM
thank you kindly <3
thank you sm!
appreciate it, thank you
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Added Nov 4, 2025, 6:29 AM
thanks always brother🤝
appreciate it <3
thank you!
🤝 thank you for your thoughts, very good
Thread by @archivepilled · 19 tweets · Sunday, November 2, 2025 · Archived via ThreadPilled · Original
