Sarah Meyohas — Bitchcoin

2015

Artists: Sarah Meyohas · Year: 2015 · Medium: Artist-issued cryptocurrency backed by photographs of rose petals · Substrate: Artist-issued token on a Bitcoin fork; redeemable for physical rose-petal photographs from Meyohas's Cloud of Petals series · Place: New York, USA · Institution: 303 Gallery (exhibition, 2015) In 2015, Sarah Meyohas issued Bitchcoin — her own cryptocurrency, each token redeemable for one specific photograph from her ongoing Cloud of Petals series. The work was exhibited at 303 Gallery, and Meyohas conducted the token sale as part of the exhibition. Collectors could buy Bitchcoin the cryptocurrency, which gave them claim on the physical photograph; the token itself was tradable separately. The piece was two years ahead of CryptoPunks and six years ahead of the Beeple-era NFT boom, and it thought through the mechanics of token-backed art with unusual rigor. What Bitchcoin argued, in 2015, was that the art world's deep anxieties about authorship, ownership, and provenance could be addressed with cryptographic infrastructure — and that the infrastructure itself could be part of the artwork. Meyohas's piece is the earliest mature instance of an artist treating tokenization as an aesthetic medium, not just as a commercial distribution channel. The piece predates Quantum in its sophistication of concept, if not in its strict priority of existence. Meyohas has continued to work at the intersection of finance and art, with Cloud of Petals and related pieces extending through the subsequent decade. Her 2016 Stock Performance, in which she manipulated the stock price of low-float companies with her own purchases while recording the market effects, is one of the most conceptually rigorous finance-as-art pieces of the century. She is a working artist in New York. Lore Meyohas trained in finance at Wharton before moving to art at Yale. Her technical literacy in financial infrastructure is unusual among practicing artists. Bitchcoin was built on an early Bitcoin fork in collaboration with programmers; the token architecture predates ERC-721 by three years. She was acquired by the Whitney and by several major private collections. The Cloud of Petals photographs themselves were produced at the Bell Works complex in Holmdel, New Jersey — the former Bell Labs building. Sources • Meyohas, Sarah — sarahmeyohas.com • 303 Gallery — Bitchcoin exhibition records (2015) • Whitney Museum — Meyohas collection