On emptying my bank account and purchasing a kGM

I don't need to write this, but I wanted to. This story may be fruitless to most who read it, but I hope at the very least some of you may have had similar moments in your collecting history, and perhaps these words will bring us all a bit closer together.

I've been a participant in the fxhash community since July 2022, albeit under a different moniker on Discord, etc. A late comer by many standards, but happy to be along for the ride and grateful to share some exciting moments with the community as we watched some incredible artists get the recognition they deserve.

My first month or two here, having come from ETH, I couldn't help but marvel at how "cheap" everything was. Let's face it, price for quality on Tezos in the NFT art world is a magnitude of order better than on Ethereum. So, it was easy for me to just start buying things without thinking much of it.

Though I accumulated a handful of things I liked, I soon realized I was rarely buying things I loved. On top of that, I was often paying premiums above floors for things without really thinking about what that might mean to me long term. I by no means have deep pockets, and I soon found them essentially empty.

I looked at my collection. Sure, I had a small handful of things I loved. But, for the most part, I found myself feeling at best I had paid too much for something I just sort of liked, and at worst owning something which I felt totally trapped by (no love for the piece, and no liquidity to exit the collection).

I began making a couple of changes with my collecting:

1) I started trying to be more careful about what I was minting, with the goal of only minting pieces that really resonated with my artistic tastes.

2) I started trying to offload whatever I could which I didn't like -- even at a loss -- to gain some purchasing power back.

3) I resolved to do my best to collect grails (sorry, gralis) I loved. Pieces which have proved their value, but where they also resonated with me deeply.

Now, all of this has been a learning process. Of course, I still mint things I think I love at the time, and ultimately grow disenchanted by. Many things I want to offload I simply can't even at basement bargain prices. And... well, as for collecting grails..

I started really discovering Zancan's work due to, let me be real, the hype that was building up around all of the work he was doing in support of the Lush Temple series. Essentially top buying, but at least I was aware of it. In fairness, I had previously avoided exploring his work because it all seemed so out of reach for me.

To me, Zancan had clearly reached a level of notoriety as an artist in the scene which eclipsed Tezos as a blockchain, and I saw good reason for this. His art is incredible, and it resonated with me deeply in terms of my aesthetic tastes. 

I started collecting what Zancan work I could with spare capital I could come across. I of course first gravitated towards the more "affordable" Versum items before digging a bit and purchasing an ABF as my first "toe dip" into deeper waters.

Meanwhile, I had fallen into a trap in my pursuit of long term "value investing". I started to believe I could make up for my lack of capital by "gamble minting", which is a term I'm maybe coining but which I think you all will understand. I started minting anything I thought might stand a chance at appreciating directly after mint, and flipping them for whatever profit I could get.

Now, this had two major drawbacks:

1) I wasn't winning. At best, I was probably breaking even. Like penny stocks or crypto, there is often no rhyme or reason to the market, and it's hard to win this game. For example, I am a massive jeres fan, and I recently sold a Coronado for 23tz. Yikes.

2) I wasn't holding onto things I actually liked, and several of these pieces which I flipped for next to nothing wound up doing quite well (see: Coronado). This ate away at me if for nothing else than the fact that I knew they were worth more than I sold them for when I sold them.

These things all compounded into a resolution:

I wanted to find one piece, just one piece that I would over commit to. A piece that would help me start anew as someone who not only would want to be more precious about my minting choices, but also would be forced to. It had to be a smart investment from a "long term value" probability perspective, it had to be something I loved, and it had to be something prohibitively expensive for me so that the risk of getting it wrong would be too high.

I spent countless hours browsing Contras, Hollows, Fragments, Dragons (oh how I love Dragons, and of course now they've run out of reach!), RGBs, and many more.

I actually didn't love kGM as an overall collection the first time I flipped through it. The framings often felt odd, the compositions often riddled with too much of one thing or another.

But, the more I browsed, the more I grew to appreciate the playfulness of them all. The more they started to resonate with me at this point in my life.

You see, I'm a father of two young children. I'm also going through a rough patch. Between work, my marriage, my finances, my children, my hobbies, and so many other responsibilities, I've lost the glimpse of serenity I once could always find in younger days.

But when Shawn Kemp put the #30 kGM up for sale and I saw it, I just knew. Something about it instantly reminded me of my son & daughter. The seating of the blocks in the big tall grass as opposed to the small grasses so many other kGMs have (or are they very large blocks?) felt like two entities harmonizing, my son and daughter. The huge faces of the sunflowers instantly triggered memories of my daughter and I picking wildflowers in the summer. The blocks emblematic of my son's recent futile attempts at playing with simple toys, and the growth I know he'll come into in no time at all.

And then something about it reminded me of me. The juxtaposition of blocks amongst a communion of nature... almost lost, but yet somehow closer to some holy truth. My position as someone for the first time really understanding what's important to me in life. The relationship of a city to the world around it, and time immemorial. The perspective of youth which I had let slip away, the wide eyed world I lost sight of but so deeply cherish in my children.

All this while slowly discovering Yazid's work more intimately as well and coming to appreciate him in his own right.

In fact, just before this piece came up for sale, I started to really marvel at the idea that two artists who will no doubt go down as legendary in the NFT & generative art scene created something together which so wholesomely managed to capture elements of importance from both of their styles.

Truly, kGM is special for this alone.

And, ironically (or perhaps intentionally), Yazid recently posted this picture of Warhol & Basquiat together which captures the sentiment I feel about such a union perfectly:

So, really, it became a no brainer. That is, of course, except for the fact that I didn't have the funds to purchase it.

I decided to make a commitment to figure it out. Over the next 10 days, I sold off almost all of my ETH collection (90% at a loss, mind you), as many pieces from my Tezos collection as I could (some for loss, some for profit), and set aside the entirety of what I had in my bank account to spare.

I couldn't get 4900tz together (what Shawn was asking), but I got what I could and made an offer of 3500, hoping to be able to still have some capital left aside for other purchases. 7 hours later, no bite.

I, as an artist, would never try to do a back door deal where an artist didn't get the royalty they deserve. But I thought about what 3500tz meant for Shawn with a 20% royalty, and figured maybe it wasn't really a fair offer given where the collection was at. I decided to up my offer to near the entirety of what I had scrimped and saved together, to what I thought was a fair deal, and moments later for the price of 4000tz became the owner of kGM #30.

People change. Perhaps in a month, a year, or a decade, I'll part ways with this piece which has taken me on such an emotional journey already.

But, as I sit here, all I can think about is the chance to pass it on to my kids one day (will Zancan allow 2 prints perhaps?! Would Yazid sign?!), along with a zany story about how their dear old dad spent all his money on Internet art coins in his 30's.

I am happy to be able to play some part, even if small, in supporting both the great artists and collectors of this community. Thank you all for being so amazing! And if it's not too much to ask, perhaps you all can run kGMs next?...

;)