UNDRGRND - A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN: thr33som3s

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN: thr33som3s

Neil Queen-Jones — July 20, 2022

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JULY 20TH, 2022

thr33som3s has gained notoriety by pushing the limits of NFT function and utility in his complex and intricate system. Over the past few months, thr33som3s has dropped several major projects along the roadway to becoming one of the most prominent Tezos artists – all on the back of his series of absurdist baseball team NFTs. His Val3ntin3 drop earlier this year explored how major airdrops can work for the whole ecosystem, while his thr33zi3s series on Opensea and Nifty Gateway is the first large-scale generative project that is entirely hand-painted, and is also a living piece that will be repainted whenever a utility element is used. But the latest phase of his Tezos innings may be the most impressive: the Franchis3 3ra. thr33som3s has sold ownership and control of the teams he created to his collectors and each of the eight teams will be run using the classic sports team model, with owners and front-office staff, including a general manager. On top of that, collectors have become players, paid in his own thr33p3nny token to play for a team and compete against each other in a league, with a championship up for grabs at the end of each season. 

“I conceived this league as a child – and it's grown to become this project with a distribution point and a global community. It's natural to see these teams interact. To get to this point, people needed to have allegiances to a team and understand that all the paintings are interconnected, and for us to have a platform where the teams, the characters and the storyline could come together. And that's what the franchise ownership brings. I deliver the baseline and overall construct, but it takes shape and evolves once autonomous groups are running their teams as they see fit, and we're seeing that already. There are eight very distinctive approaches, from the almost casual to the obsessively detailed; from the market-focused to the community-focused. Players are learning the identity that goes with being a part of a team: it’s one thing to feel like you belong to a project, it's another to feel like you belong to a faction of a project. It's playing out in the most amazing way.”

The madness behind thr33som3s’ methodology is to take actual vintage baseball cards and paint them to create various fictional teams of Dante level proportions. Within thr33som3s’ nightmare fantasy baseball league, we get such teams as Cat Moms, Monsters, Subs, Cardinali (who are left drooling by the Subs), the Coders, the newly unveiled Elephant Men and of course, the Exes. “The first team I did was the Exes – the team of ex-boyfriends,” he says. “Because the concept of a team made up entirely of one person’s ex-boyfriends was like the funniest thing ever.” The Exes series consists of a lot of self-reflection: “I happen to be like five of them,” he says.

thr33som3s origin story began in March of 2021 when he started posting his gouache-painted baseball cards on Instagram, not even thinking of it as an NFT series. The hook: he painted such NFT stars as Beeple and Fvckrender on the cards; and the artists started reaching out to him. “The first one was Mad Dog Jones, who suggested other artists that should be in the series,” thr33som3s says. The utility kicker of the first season was applying a chase aspect, that he’s continued to use and develop: you had to collect every card in the series to receive the Pak Scratch Off, which played on the anonymity of the artist, jokingly implying you could scratch off the silver paint to reveal him.

But this isn’t absurdity for the sake of absurdity. With much of the world in the grip of nationalism, thr33som3s is trying to ask questions about that longing for lost cultural identity: “I grew up in a strange isolation, removed from typical American society, then I lived abroad for the majority of my 20s, and that allowed me to look back on the America I grew up in, that I always wanted to be a certain way. After moving away, I saw it how the US is perceived by the rest of the world. And this project for me is about the concept of the grand American vision, which I don't really believe is there. The baseball card is the quintessential bit of Americana: to those outside of the US, if they're thinking of pop culture, they all know the cinematic trope of the 1950s America small-town kid in a tree house flipping baseball cards, so there's an idealised connection between America and baseball that doesn't exist and hasn't existed in a long time. So, this project is a play on misplaced nostalgia for something that maybe never really existed. If you look at the teams I've put together, there's a question of how real or relatable these things are. With each piece, each season, each team, I’m asking: ‘How willing are you to accept that this is the norm?’ That's the art-school breakdown of what the project is. But I've built it out as a project where very few people who are very connected to the project look at it from that aspect. I often remind people this is an art project. About 50% of the Grotto is outside the US, most of them in places where there’s no baseball whatsoever, and I have hundreds of DMs from people in Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong and India telling me they always wanted to collect baseball cards. That’s because the trope of the American kid with baseball cards resonates, so there's a bittersweet aspect to this because of the project’s slightly cynical, distanced observation on Americana.”

That connection to his collectors, and the needs of the franchise era requires a fiercely loyal community. Thus, he came up with the Grotto, his infamous Discord channel, as the place to do that, “The Grotto is at the centre of the project. Interacting with the artist is unique to this space - you probably think twice about buying something if you don't have a line to that artist. I knew it was important to establish that, so I set out to capture an atmosphere that played into the overall art piece, and the concept for the Grotto was a 1970s cocktail lounge, because of the play on nostalgia and a lost sense of time in my project. Now it's populated by people who’ve taken the concept and are defining this community. In all of my travels through Discord, I've never come across something that is as truly laid out and built out as a community. There's a true bond here that allows everybody to be who they probably feel they are at their core, because there's this wild amount of acceptance, enthusiasm and support for one another. I don't say it lightly: these are my best friends and the best friendships that I've had over this last year. When people have had shitty days outside of the Grotto, they come in here, and feel better about the world. Most conversation aren’t about the art, which is why I think it was hard for new people to come in – they come into a project that they don't know anything about, they go into the Discord and nobody's talking about the project. And I think that's when people are like, ‘I don't get any of this, I don't understand this.’ And it added that mystique, because then they go back out into the regular world, and they're like, they're crazy, I don't understand. That's why I added the bl3achers section of the Grotto: to allow us to give people a crash course in the fundamentals of the project without feeling rushed, in a way that’s intriguing enough to keep you there.”

By no means does thr33som3s have the ethos of yet another pump-and-dump 10k generated project, “For anyone to pay me, or any other artist, for something they can have for free, it puts an awful lot of responsibility on the person receiving the money. There's a lot of arrogance to an artist who believes that their creation is worth something when there’s no inherent value to it. To believe that I can charge you money for something which anybody in the world can right-click-save, it's ludicrous. The NFT world and the smart contract allow for the concept of delivering utility, an experience content, some sort of evolution of a project or interaction. It pisses me off when I hear people say, ‘I'm an artist not an NFT artist’ - well stop selling NFTs, because constructing the continued interaction, the continued process of the project, that utility is as much responsibility as me painting the piece. I'm constantly creating new ways to deliver value to somebody who took the time to give me $3, whatever that amount was, I feel that I owe it to them to build it out, because they could have just got it for free. So, a huge tenet of the market side of my project is I owe it to anybody who's going to pay me for my art to deliver and maintain that value. It just happens that’s what’s most fascinating to me, to conceive of ways to make every piece always relevant. We look back at the statements thr33som3s made at the beginning: ‘Do whatever it takes to maintain and build collector value; I’ll never fuck anyone over, and all thr33som3s have future utility’. It’s shocking to me that not everyone sees it this way. Most people want to make the piece and then walk away from it and move on to the next one. That seems so arrogant. Every single thr33som3s card will deliver some sort of future use,” he says. “That card may become another card. You may need to destroy one card to pick up a different one. You may need to assemble a series of them. It’s limitless – and I’m comfortable living in that limitless utility world where I’m creating precious assets – that I tend to destroy every day.”

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