☞ First exhibited with the "MetaPride Land Festival 2022" collection on OpenSea as "The Shilling Of Fox Smoulder." This is the final image in a ten part narrative sequence.

When I met the artist CC: (@play_w_CC), who I’d known from Twitter Spaces since December of last year, while they were visiting New York, they said, “You’re very different in real life from what I thought you’d be like.” I had never really thought about being perceived through that particular lens: the small slice of Tony that one might try to extract through my periodic Web3 appearances – me, IRL, vis-a-vis Fox Smoulder.

It’s true – I am a natural performer, but by necessity. Often it does feel like it’s not enough to make good work in web3 to really make it here. You are expected to perform in the space as well as have consistent output. A common critique I’ve heard shared throughout the space is that everyone is performing. And those performances vary from the self assured crypto-bro, to the hard nosed, shoots-from-the-hip analog photographer (guilty of that I suppose), to the coquette who’s genuinely interested in what you ate for breakfast (haha, that one too). I guess when I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed and tired of the performance of expertise and the oh-so-serious conversations about art that can at times feel redundant, that’s when I want most to inject some silliness and levity into the space. That’s when the frolicking jokester persona within me comes out. Foxes are fabled trickers anyway. While that’s not who I am all the time - it isn’t a lie either. It comes from a true place. Still, it can be tiresome.

As an artist, you’re always negotiating how much of yourself to share with your audience - always interrogating where your life experience intersects with your work - intentional or not - and, especially as an artist working through self portraiture, meticulously self-scrutinizing in order to uncover and fine tune the relevance of your work and the persona that carries it through. How much do you embellish and distort your own image? How much do you pass off your work as a representation of your “identity” or rather your true self? It’s a delicate balancing act - always in flux - never as simple of self tokenizing - but with that as its nagging sense of culpability. How do you sell your work and yourself as an artist without an artist persona? Likewise, how do you sell in Web3 without a digital identity? The catch here isn’t entirely a new one, after all.

I dived right into being a Web3 artist at the end of 2021 with so much optimism and fervor, but very quickly found being in Web3, immersed in the great digital wilderness all the time, putting myself on display at odd hours of the day, chasing the sale to my great disappointment, was tremendously draining on my artistic practice.

I’ve had to learn the hard way the importance of pacing myself and doing this on my own terms if I’m ever going to succeed here.

Sequence Index: 10/10

Format: Animated GIF
Dimensions: 819 × 1000

Photo Assistance: Tyler “Six” Andrew

© 2022 Fox Smoulder