Important and hangable are different questions, and they produce different lists. Work can matter enormously and still be a thumbnail: made for a feed, a profile picture, or an argument. What is on this page works at a metre. It holds from across a room, and it survives you walking up to it.
Nothing is here unless we hold a file that stands up to being printed. That leaves out work we would otherwise hang, and the fix for it is a better file, not a bigger upscale.
Every room sent something, including the ones where almost nothing trades. Nothing is cropped to fit a grid, so the wall is uneven, the way a wall is.
Generative
The largest room, and the one holding the most work that was designed to be printed.
Fidenza
Tyler Hobbs
Three scales of curve at once: the sweep, the ribbon, the grain inside it. It composes from across a room and holds up under a close look. Hobbs paints and plots by hand as well, so this was never only a screen object.
Ringers
Dmitri Cherniak
Black line on flat ground, no rendering, no depth to age badly. It behaves like a drawing, which is why it survives being printed at any size.
Meridian
Matt DesLauriers
Horizontal bands that read as landscape without depicting one. Tall, quiet, and the easiest thing here to live with for a long time.
Anticyclone
William Mapan
Grain, stroke and pressure: it looks handled rather than rendered. Closer to paper than to pixels, and it wants to be seen large.
Terraforms
Mathcastles
Not an image: a character grid, type all the way down. Printed, it reads as a plan or a score, which is what it is.
Autoglyphs
Larva Labs
ASCII in one colour and nothing else. The most severe thing in the building, and the only piece here a printer can reproduce exactly.
Chromie Squiggle
Snowfro
One line, wide format, full spectrum. Legible from the far end of a corridor and still worth standing under.
Natively Digital
The nineteen projects Sotheby's sold as a single lot in June 2021. Two here; several of the others hang in Generative.
Photography
The quietest room, and the one that needs this page most. Almost none of it trades, and all of it was made for paper.
Twin Flames
Justin Aversano
Shot on film, one twin pair per frame, printed and shown before any of it was minted. Photography that was already wall work when it arrived.
ZZYZX
Gregory Halpern
California under hard light, published as a book first. The most respected photography in the building and the work the market has said least about.
Sequels
Joel Meyerowitz
Six decades of negatives edited into pairs by the man who shot them. It hangs as a sequence; a single frame gives away half of it.
Guy Bourdin
The Guy Bourdin Estate
Fashion pictures staged like crime scenes, brought on-chain from the estate. Saturated enough to carry a wall by themselves.
Red Trucks
Alejandro Cartagena
Shot from above, the same framing fifty times. Hung together they are one work; hung alone they are fifty pictures of a truck.
AI
Two of these were built for wall-sized screens rather than paper, and are hung here as what they are.
Machine Hallucinations · NYC
Refik Anadol
Motion rather than stills: it belongs on a screen that stays on. Anadol builds for buildings, and the scale shows.
Unsupervised
Refik Anadol
Trained on 138,151 records from MoMA's collection and shown in MoMA's own lobby. Made for a wall that size.
Life In West America
Roope Rainisto
An America that never happened, rendered as documentary. Grain, light and framing all borrowed from film, which is why it hangs like film.
Genesis
Claire Silver
Painterly, warm, and consistent across five hundred images. The work in this room that most resembles a painter’s output rather than a model’s.
Crypto-Native
Careers made on-chain, and screen-native work. Not all of it survives being printed; these four do.
MAX PAIN AND FRENS
XCOPY
High contrast, hard edges, a loop that refuses to settle. The most aggressive thing here, and it needs a wall to itself.
EVERYDAYS: 2020
Beeple
Loud, dense, and built for a screen. One frame on a wall is a different object from the daily feed it came out of.
REPLICATOR
Mad Dog Jones
A machine drawn as a machine that copies itself. Detailed enough to reward a close look, which the concept alone would not be.
Two Worlds
Jeremy Booth & Orkhan Isayev
Flat western figures against a rendered landscape: two drawing languages in one frame, with the seam left showing.
Art World
Artists who arrived with a wall practice already. The smallest room, and the least surprising cut.
The Currency
Damien Hirst
Spots in enamel on hand-made paper, numbered and stamped. Roughly half the holders chose to take the paper and burn the token, which tells you what it always was.
Geometries
Frank Stella
Twenty-two sculptures released with their AR, VR and printable files. Stella meant them to be made, not only held.
Rocket Factory
Tom Sachs
Parts, assembly, launch. The pieces are components in a process and they look like his studio, which is the whole joke.
Conceptual
Where the object is a document. The house keeps its own work in this room, and the one piece of it hung here is the one that exists as a physical object.
生涯 · Genesis
Ikigai Labs
Ours. A block was named in public before the chain reached it, and its hash painted this. It exists at 190 cm on brushed aluminium, which is a shorter argument for hanging it than anything written here.
Bitchcoin
Sarah Meyohas
Issued in 2015, backed by the artist’s own photographs. The certificate is the work, and it is designed like one.
Culture
Not made as wall work and mostly not pretending to be. Three that survive the print anyway.
CryptoPunks
Larva Labs
Twenty-four pixels square. Enlarged to a metre it becomes a portrait again, and the constraint reads as a decision rather than a limit.
Nouns
Nouns DAO
Flat colour, thick outline, SVG held on-chain. It scales to any size without losing anything, which almost nothing else here can claim.
CrypToadz
GREMPLIN
Drawn badly on purpose and released into the public domain, so printing one costs nothing and infringes nothing.
Keep reading