Brace yourselves
No need to freak out, but a bunch of Creeps & Weirdos are coming to NFT.NYC. Many New Yorkers’ initial reaction to this headline is most likely to be, so what? The city is crawling with creeps and weirdos already. It’s what makes New York City beautiful. And it’s true, but these Creeps & Weirdos are uniquely different from your run of the mill subway kook or questionably intoxicated Wall Street banker wandering like a zombie at 3 am. These Creeps & Weirdos are very rare. And, until recently they were very hard to find — like finding a cab at 5:30 pm on Friday in midtown hard.
But now there is a good chance if you’re in Times Square or Soho that you could magically bump into one of these magnificent creatures like Coy Catrina or Los Bichos. More likely though, you’ll hear about them in conversation, naively labeled NFTs. Even though, generally speaking, they are NFTs, the Creeps & Weirdos are undeniably a digital art collection. Art with a capital A. PFPs they are not.
The Creeps & Weirdos is a curated collection of 108 unique digital artworks created by 30 artists on DADA’s collaborative art platform. Each drawing is part of a bigger visual conversation between artists from all over the world, speaking to each other not through words but through drawings directly created on the DADA canvas, creating a collaborative artwork. The Creeps & Weirdos collection was released on Halloween, October 31, 2017, apropos of their subject matter.
The 2017 ERC20 Creeps have a total of 16,600 digital editions with 5 different levels of scarcity. Historically speaking, this was one of the first collections of its kind, only preceded by the Cryptopunks, from which they got their smart contract. DADA modified this smart contract to include royalties for artists for the first time in NFT history. Also, even though they are ERC20s they also have individual print index numbers, making them actually non-fungible.
In 2019, the Creeps & Weirdos got themselves a makeover and became ERC721 contracts. The supply was halved, the 2017 contract was paused, an ERC721 NFT was airdropped to every 2017 collector and the collection went on hiatus.
The plan was to reissue the Creeps & Weirdos, but in March 2021, it was disrupted by a group of NFT “archeologists” who uncovered the collection and unleashed the Apestorm. Cue dramatic music. Hundreds of people “aped”; that is, snatched up the collection that had been off market for two years. One hiccup unforeseen by these apes was that the NFT collection could not be traded on the secondary market because OpenSea did not honor the royalties programmed into the contract.
This was of course befitting a collection of Creeps & Weirdos. Who else could have been out so early that created an odd situation where there were two collections of the same art? And the solution was not going to be any less strange. In order to have one collection, one would have to be burned. This was an unpleasant scenario and one that made everyone at DADA cringe. So, why do it? Why not just have two collections and honor and document for posterity their beautiful and bizarre history? Hence, the same artwork is represented in two different tokens with very different attributes, a 2017 ERC20 Creep or a 2019 ERC721 Weirdo.
Weird? Perhaps. Creepy? Not really. Historic? You bet.
The story doesn’t end here. DADA continues to develop alternative thinking for artists, collectors, and our community within the NFT ecosystem. Creeps & Weirdos is not only a digital art collection, it is the driving force that influenced our vision for the Invisible Economy: a new model where 100% of the revenues go into the DADA fund and are then distributed to all contributing members. This is just the beginning. The artists, technologists, collectors and contributors that make up the collective continue to work on this model that we believe can have a positive impact on society.
So be on the lookout for the Creeps & Weirdos on the streets, in Times Square and on our pop up gallery where they will be up to no good. It’s time more people fell in love with a Creep, met their match with a Weirdo. Did we mention our party? Keep your eyes peeled.
