2025 has flown by at some velocity, with the Summer & Autumn seeming to make up most of it. As we near a new year, I want to go through some of my favourite things that happened in this one, across art, chains and platforms.🧵↓
For me, and undoubtedly a lot of my friends and peers in ‘the scene’ of avant/gay NFTs, the launch of @vvvdotso, the minting platform that has become home to many of my favourite collections this year, was possibly the most important moment.
A launch pad made by artists, where the devs explicitly tested with artists, with functionality that had been asked for by users for years – that is what we finally have.
Many have tried to copy what VVV has created and proposed, and none of course have come close. It is rare to see culture form this organically in a market that is constantly bought out and funded by huge VC funds, extractive devs and bad actors. Of course, this didn’t come from nowhere: we’ve had years of this scene developing; the devs have ties to Galerie Yeche Lange, the one brick and mortar space for art of this kind in NYC; endless complaints from people in the community of what the NFT space on SOL is missing.
In no small part, thanks to VVV, we saw for the first time some sort of formal liquidity flow towards the Avant/Gay NFT scene, both money and attention, and while that now seems so long ago, with the recent market down-turn, it to me appears as a premonition, or test, of what is to come. The plans the guys at VVV have for the next leg-up are going to be hugely impactful on how artists and collectors experience minting works on Solana.
While it’s been great seeing on-chain developments, one of the trends I’ve noticed and enjoyed this year is an increasingly physical relationship between the artists working here and their art.
Mifella’s (@MMifella) monthly auctions on Exchange were one of the highlights: from scribbled ballpoint pen drawings that are reminiscent of a teen graffitiing his textbooks, to multi-media collages using IKEA bags, Monster cans and lots of tape, the works are an obvious expansion on the already chaotically canonised persona we’ve seen come to light digitally. The speed & prolificacy of Mifella’s digital art is translated to these works, which appear to be done under ferocious time pressure. Another aspect of Mifella’s work I’ve enjoyed is his repeated timeline updates of the large scale Mifella painting currently at his(?) studio, as slowly more elements are added (foodstuffs and other household items covered in paint; a frequently changing design on the tshirt of a giant Mifella; A4 printouts begging to be saved by Charlotte Fang).
FairyBaby's (@fairybaby420) ‘Squishy Drifters’ book is a highlight, and sets a tone for what I believe will be an uptick in high quality physical publications next year. It’s vividly saturated, and has a flow that should be impossible to work as well as it does given it’s intense content, but of course he’s made it work. The essays ground it in the fact it is serious, albeit seriously silly at times, art.
Bosch (@supermetalx) has continued his seemingly unceasing craft, including physical kits for Metal Mons, his chess-like boardgame, as well as his Pokemon, Little Swag World and ‘Mons’ ceramics, from his own GAN creations in 2022-2023.
These ‘Mons’ ceramics were a part of possibly the most important physical show of the year, a duo show of Bosch and Evil Biscuits work titled ‘One Of Us Is Real And It's Not You’. Bosch’s contributions were in the form of making lore from Metal Mons physical: ancient Obelisks bearing the symbols that make up the game, beautifully crafted concrete boards for playing on, and the small figurines that make up the pieces of the set being scattered all over the gallery. Evil Biscuit’s (@bis__cut) work was the start of what came to be my most important drop of the year, in the form of the 3rd installment of the Drifella series. Printed and then added to via various materials, as well as being framed in thick slabs of gray, imprinted with ‘333’ across the bottom, these Drifella 3’s finally transcend the shackles of their physical realm and come alive in the gallery space. This is of course true for the Drifella 3 collection on VVV that also released this year – where we are presented with a Triptych of painterly Drifellas, all displayed in a gallery, with small figures (Drifella’s ‘toys’, per Biscuit), as audience. It’s a move away from the maximalist pop-culture references that came to define not only the first two collections, but the scenes ‘traitmaxxed’ aesthetic as a whole, redefining it outside of the hyper-citational practice of in-jokes and ‘very online’ imagery, and instead creating a world in its own right, far more akin to painting practice than ‘digital art’.
Yeche (@Yeche_Lange) has continued to pioneer incredible physical art, such as Jim Spindle’s (@jimspindle) ‘Scarecrows’, which were on display alongside Kenny Schachter’s (@kennyschac) work for the duo show ‘Upside-down Promises’. These scarecrows preceded the launch of VVV, by testing the customisable mint page on the Yeche site itself, where you could mint the digital component of the project, as well as showing off the physical redemption ability that may have helped to spawn the release of a lot more physical works this year.
Another collection that dealt with the gallery space/viewing experience was Tojiba Brand Manager’s (@m_m_____m____mm) ‘The Same Old Gag’, which appears as the antithesis to the traitmaxxed Drifella III. 777 gallery spaces, many imperceptibly different from the other, filled with ambience, occasionally littered with a bit of art, some graffiti scratched into the wall or trash on the floor. It felt like a comment on the scene Tojiba himself had a hand in creating and coining, inline with his previous collection ‘The Dog NFT’, which simplified his practice down to the tropes and traits often seen in ‘rugcore’ NFTs (PFPs using animals and minimal traits, plain backgrounds, a ‘Fiverr’ art style) while keeping his signature pixel style intact.
‘The Same Old Gag’ is my favourite collection of the year, for its use of metadata to create a written understanding of the art, which feels similar to conceptual artists’ use of data and index cards for recording the art rather than visually representing it, and its sharp minimalism, at odds with the aesthetic that has dominated the Avant/Gay scene.
Outside of Solana, my other favourite work of on-chain art this year is ‘Wanderer’, by Jan Robert Leegte (@JanRobertLeegte). As part of Photo Paris 2025, Jan made ‘an autonomous, digital flâneur, an internet-based entity that roams the map of our physical world through an endless sequence of directional choices, recorded immutably on the blockchain and visualized through web-based map services’. It started at the Grand Palais, in Paris, and has now made its way West, deep into the countryside.
Walking pieces have been a staple of conceptual art, from Stanley Brouwn’s ‘This Way Brouwn’, where he asked strangers to draw him maps of directions he had asked for, to Vito Acconci and Sophie Calle’s following pieces, where they elected random strangers to trail until they lost them (either through entering a building or general disorientation).
I love Jan’s work here, the mix of autonomy and monotony, a never-ending trek across the globe that is totally decided by randomised transaction hashes on the blockchain. It feels like a work that should’ve come out during the lockdowns, but still feels fitting with the rise of AI and the fears around the autonomy of such technology. An exciting addition to the canon of ‘walking as art’, updated for the 21st century.
There’s so much more I could list but these things must have a conclusion. Other works I’ve enjoyed, in no particular order, and that relate to what I’ve talked about above, are: Terrorism’s cards, Runway Show (Dido Pynell), both of Mika Ben Amar’s releases with Verse, Planet Peppa (Guppy & Hungry Bug), Goobdles (Goob), Gay Mouse Crisis Centre (Gremlins2Movie), Profile Pictures (Parker & Xanthrax), Artie Gallery drops (very impressively curated), the amazing Tezo’s artists who I have finally been introduced to and whose work I have come to love (Sabato, Manta_Timing (Heaven being a special favourite of mine this year), Salawaki, Aegniis, Moeshit), all of DucDeBerry’s works, 1333's AngelGotchis and their magazine, $VAJ, $CRYPTO, Downy Ducks (newartprogram), Artifact Magazine #2 (DuGucciPourMonChat), and probably loads of others that I’m missing and people will be mad about. Sorry!
Finally, from me, I’m immensely thankful for everyone who has supported me this year, from minting out two collections (POSTCARDs2 & PRAY4LOWBIE), to Exchange, Verse and VVV for letting me host writing and spaces with them. I’m honoured to be in the position I am and have some plans to push much harder in the new year.
Thanks as always to @exchgART & @bonk_inu Art Masters for the help in publishing this. A huge thanks to @JTLissPhotoArt, the man himself, for getting me in this position, as I’m so grateful to have a place ot publish writing of this ilk.
Links: VVV: https://vvv.so Mifella’s Monthly Auctions: https://exchange.art/series/MiFella%202025%20Auction%20Series/nfts… FairyBaby’s Squishy Drifters book: https://shop.fairybaby.xyz Bosch Ceramics: https://supermetalmons.com ‘One Of Us Is Real And It's Not You’, Bosch & Evil Biscuit at Galerie Yeche Lange: https://yl.baby/nyc-galerie?show=one-of-us-is-real-and-it%27s-not-you… Drifella 3: https://vvv.so/drifella-iii ‘Upside-down Promises’, Jim Spindle & Kenny Schachter at Galerie Yeche Lange: https://yl.baby/nyc-galerie?show=upside-down-promises… The Same Old Gag: https://tensor.trade/trade/the_same_old_gag… The Wanderer: https://wanderer.leegte.org
Thread by @archivepilled · 11 tweets · Sunday, December 21, 2025 · Archived via ThreadPilled · Original
