Richard Prince’s Blockchain Coin (or Not)

Jason Bailey has an enthusiasm for art and advancing technology. He has spent the last few years exploring the possibilities for better understanding artists’ markets through the use of data in innovative ways.

Naturally, that led him to look into all of the enthusiasm surrounding the blockchain and digital currencies. He began with a tour of the blockchain horizon as it pertains to art. In the process, he came across the Ready-Made Token which was presented as a digital crypto-currency sponsored by Richard Prince. A little digging provoked a Tweet from Prince disavowing the token.

Going further, Bailey discovered the identity of those behind the project who happen to own the Twitter handle @RichardPrince. Except the “artist” here is a man named Olivier Sarrouy.

Bailey contacted him and they began a correspondence to answer the question, Is Richard Prince the sponsor of this crypto-coin:

Not directly. In fact, we had tried to get in touch with other artists before […]. But of course, none of them have ever answered our mail. To fulfill our idea – about Ready-Made, Dada, and so on – we needed a signature. So we decided to create a signature of our own: Richard Prince. Richard Prince is the name of a Twitter account we hold so we told ourselves that it would be fun to play with the homonymy and see where this would lead us. We’d also find it fun to play over this kind of double identities for a Dadaist project. That worked like a experimental gesture.

In the end it’s even us who directly pointed Richard Prince’s manager toward our project to see his reaction – which was not that good. Given his work, we had thought that maybe it would find the project fun and interesting and would have agreed to play our game. It seems that he did not 🙂

Interview With The Man Behind the “Richard Prince” Ready-Made Token (Artnome)