‘I could go full throttle for decades’: How generative art sensation Tyler Hobbs defies a shrinking NFT market

Besides an elevator wallpapered with hacker mantras like “you can’t spell culture without cult” and “fear kills growth” was a gray cement basement where two Bright Moments Gallery employees guarded an iPad that was the key to owning a Tyler Hobbs original. The artist was upstairs with the live band, serving sushi rolls and champagne. Dozens of NFT artworks generated from his algorithm were presented to the New York gallery’s applauding audience, as collectors moved downstairs to point-and-click their way into the digital art collection.

The “incomplete control” exhibit happened almost a year ago when speculators turned NFTs into a $60 billion market as the price of cryptocurrencies shot through the roof and public interest in these blockchain-based collectibles increased. By that December night, collectors had snapped up about $7 million worth of artwork, making Hobbs feel like he’d really made it.

“Digital art was usually a statement about poverty,” he later explained in an interview with Artnet News. Today, it’s his bank account, a vehicle for celebrity and an opportunity to make history.

There are only a handful of digital artists that have survived the crypto crash and the plummeting sales records from the NFT market. Hobbs has distinguished himself as one of the few artists to emerge relatively unscathed with a flock of loyal collectors from the tech world and the stamp of approval from the traditional art world. Next year, he will exhibit physical works at Pace Gallery, as more galleries sell NFTs and major museums put digital art in their lobbies.

“This has been the longest year of my life,” Hobbs said. “But fortunately, it has almost been positive.”

Tyler Hobbs Fidenza #61. Embossed June 11, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Phillips.

Most collectors know Hobbs because of Fidenza, a series of 999 NFTs generated by a computer algorithm that he coded to produce images resembling Mondrian paintings—that is, if the Dutch artist had taken a squeegee to the canvases while the paint was still drying. In August 2021, Starry Night Capital bet on the Fidenzas, spending nearly $5 million in a buying round that increased the floor price of the artworks over the next month by 12 times their previous value to nearly $900,000. Months later, the artworks purchased by Starry Night were the subject of a bankruptcy scandal linked to the collection’s hedge fund owner, Three Arrows Capital. In October, a liquidator took possession of Fidenzas.

Within the traditional art world, being associated with a $3.5 billion bankruptcy can doom an artist’s market to the dumpster; However, the world of crypto art greatly rewards those who are close to spectacle and risk. Hobbs also resists the idea that he has to rationalize how collectors fund his NFTs.

“I don’t lose sleep at night thinking about who owns my artwork,” Hobbs explained. “Someone in the traditional art world is probably used to working closely with a gallery and having control over who collects their work. A fact of life with NFTs is that you don’t have that kind of control. It is much more open to the market, for better or for worse.”

Hobbs, 35, only began to consider himself an artist in the past decade. He worked for years as a software engineer at a local startup in Austin, Texas that built open source tools and distributed databases. His artistic training came from private instructors and online classes. Then he began to use the knowledge of writing code in his practice. As early as 2014, he blogged about his discoveries, which often included graphs in which he attempted to map the relationship between randomness and polish in artistic production—everything from 19th-century paintings by William Adolphe-Bougeureau to 2000s Backstreet Boys tunes.

“Not only is it easy to introduce randomness at any point in the composition, but the randomness itself can be controlled in many ways,” he wrote. “In some ways, the artist just sets up a perfect environment to discover great accidental works.”

Watching him interact with fans during the Art Blocks weekend in Marfa, Texas earlier this month, Hobbs looked like a Backstreet Boy. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, wire-rimmed glasses and a sweater with Raymond Pettibon’s artwork for Sonic Youth’s 1990 Goo album. During the weekend parties, Hobbs was often flanked by his crypto groupies, mostly young men in their 20s and 30s, eager to learn what’s next from their idol.

“Tyler Hobbs is an artist who was dedicated to this craft when generative art was a relatively niche medium,” said Erick Calderon, the founder of Art Blocks, an NFT marketplace that served as the platform for Hobbs’ breakthrough Fidenza series. “His art has a formality and simplicity that is instantly recognizable and understandable, which I find insanely difficult to achieve.”

Some buyers describe collecting the artist’s work as an obsession. Andrew Badr lost his job as a software engineer last year during the pandemic. “I found myself with all this time and energy that ended up going into the NFT world,” he told Artnet News.

An episode of crypto investor Kevin Rose’s podcast talked about the token boom, and Badr, who dabbled in digital art in the past, started paying attention. Hobbs was a clear standout, so the new collector bought into his work. Badr now owns more than 20 Fidenzas, having sold a handful during the bubble. His collection has grown to include nearly 500 NFTs, including works by Dmitri Cherniak, Emily Xie, and Matt DesLauriers. The collector has also become a creator, producing a generative art series of typographic NFTs with artists Emily Edelman and Dima Ofman.

Tyler Hobbs, QQL (2022). © Tyler Hobbs, courtesy of Pace Verso.

One could say that Hobbs has a generative effect on collectors like Badr, inspiring them to create their own works of art. His upcoming exhibition at Pace Gallery in April 2023 will feature nearly a dozen paintings based on his latest series QQL, a collaboration with another artist named Dandelion Wist Mané, which allows buyers to indirectly adjust the algorithm until they are satisfied with the randomly generated results. Collectors who create artwork also receive a two percent royalty on secondary sales, which Hobbs said was his way of acknowledging their contribution to the creative process.

The QQL the release defied bear market expectations with collectors spending $17 million on nearly 1,000 stamps. A month later and buyers had built a $28 million secondary market – a shocking statistic when trading volumes had fallen 97 percent elsewhere in the NFT world. Sales have since declined as collectors use the mint passes to produce works of art. When this happens, Hobbs often likes to highlight his creations on social media.

“The thin lines allow the colors to really blend, creating a nice richness in perceptual colors,” Hobbs recently wrote of a purple QQL created by Thomas Lin Pedersen, another generative artist.

But the artworks included in the Pace Gallery exhibit will be entirely hand-painted by Hobbs. The exhibition was the result of a meeting over the summer between the retailer’s digital strategist, Ariel Hudes, and the artist, who met at a Pace Verso event for the release of John Gerrard’s recent NFT project, Petro National. Hobbs had been skeptical of the traditional art world, but the exhibition impressed him.

“Tyler represents an upper end of the NFT market similar to what a Pace Gallery artist represents in the physical art market,” Hudes told Artnet News, explaining why she thought Hobbs was ready for her debut with the megadealer. “He is the one who defines this room.”

Not that Hobbs necessarily needs the money. His secondary sales have made him a millionaire several times over. Asked how long his Austin, Texas studio with five employees could run if he never sold another piece of art again, he did a quick calculation.

“Without selling anything? We can have full throttle for several decades.”

Follow Artnet News on Facebook:


Do you want to be at the forefront of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest news, eye-opening interviews and sharp critiques that drive the conversation forward.