Introduction

As 2025 kicks off, there are only five days left to view one of the most significant Web3 art exhibitions launched in 2024: the “ART OF PUNK” exhibition, showing simultaneously at the Museum Francisco Carolinum in Linz, Austria, and within the Voxels metaverse.

Curated by renowned OG CryptoPunk holder Julia Staudach (known in the community as @tschuuuuly), the exhibition is made up entirely of works created by CryptoPunk holders, ranging from traditional physical paintings to innovative digital and on-chain creations.

The Francisco Carolinum has a strong track record with NFT collections. It was the first museum with an exhibition of NFTs, delving into their history in 2021, and its city of Linz is the home of Ars Electronica, an annual new media festival.

Art Is More Important Than Ever

In a space where so much of human experience has become swept up in market forces, creativity and community for their own sake, as highlighted in “ART OF PUNK”, become even more important. This notion is thrown into sharp relief by current events; in the last few weeks, rumors about a possible sale of Punk IP by Yuga Labs, touched off by the X-based crypto writer known as Wale, sparked a high-volume CryptoPunk trading frenzy and floor price rally.

• Against the backdrop of the crypto market’s optimism about a favorable regulatory environment under the new administration, on Jan. 17 President Trump released a $TRUMP memecoin on Solana, driving much of the crypto space’s liquidity into the coin, which quickly peaked at an all-time-high market cap of $33B.

• The euphoria of memecoins and the uncertainty of rumor-fuelled trades are a sharp contrast to the steady, focused work of artistic creation. Pindar Van Arman’s virtual creativity or the magical, emotionally affective visual fairytales of Claire Silver are the result of many years of often-frustrating practice.

How do you represent the metaverse half of the show in the meatspace half?

There is one huge wallpaper in a connecting aisle that shows all the Punks that are represented in the metaverse—they don’t see the artworks, but they see the Punk heads and numbers, and the artists’ names. And then there’s a QR code—you can simply scan it, and then you immediately jump, with your phone, into Voxels.

• Since there are not only Punk-holding artists who work with either NFTs or physical works that you can touch and hang on the wall but there are also many Punks who are filmmakers, producers, or musicians producing music videos, I wanted to do something special.

• So since there are so many works that are actually movies or videos, I hired the cinema theater which is a five-minute walk from the museum, for two dates. The first showing was on the fourth of September, one day after the opening event.

Conclusion

Punks came to DJ the opening night without asking for any compensation. They came. They paid for the travel. They paid for the hotel rooms themselves. They DJed. They brought their equipment, brought people out, and activated people spreading the word. There are so many people who have been helping to make this great, and I didn’t even ask for that, you know, that’s just really people asking me, “Hey, how can I help?” And the appreciation I’ve been getting is incredible and helps me go through all these weeks of almost no sleep and intense work; the thanks are amazing.

I am curious how this ecosystem of crypto craziness and art will develop in the next years, but I am sure CryptoPunk holders will play a big role.