Web3 Artist WARHODL Is Riffing His Way from Art to Merch
We check in on the upcoming launch of his web3 culture streetwear brand
Since the sixties, pop art in the United States has been defined by artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns. Each of these artists—like all artists—had something to say, and in many ways, their works and their messaging were just as relevant then as they are now.
Only now, a new wave of pop art is emerging: Pop art rooted in web3.
One of the leaders of the crypto pop art movement is Taylor Good—known professionally as WARHODL—who started riffing on the early days of pop art and Americana, but through the lens of crypto currency. He first gained notoriety for his Artist Proofs soup cans—a nonfungible token (NFT) twist on Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Can. Since then, WARHODL has amassed over 1,300 collectors, collaborated with Paris Hilton, had his art shown at the Getty Museum and is now expanding his popular art brand into merch.
WARHODL founded web3 culture streetwear brand Anti Alpha, which features the same pop culture/crypto culture perspective as the art, and is set to drop in the coming months.
“What I couldn’t help but notice with PFP [profile picture] culture was the amount of merch,” WARHODL said to me in a recent conversation. “But it’s project specific merch. For those that were token-gated and ended up being sold out—everyone who owns the NFT should have had a chance to buy the merch. I have only respect for these projects that are shipping and scaling, but the Hypebeast era became a thing within the NFT space through PFP merch.”
Let’s be clear: WARHODL is not knocking the current web3 merch trends, he just finds them to contain material worth riffing on or forming a conversation around.
“The same lightbulb moment I had when creating WARHODL was the same lightbulb moment I had when creating a non-project-specific streetwear brand that can riff on these projects,” WARHODL said.
Read more: 10101.art Is Transforming the Future of Traditional Art Ownership Through Blockchain Fractionalization
Anti Alpha aims to continue the riff on these projects and is the next evolution of the larger WARHODL perspective, which just happens to be a crypto streetwear brand.
“Having been early to crypto through the ICO [initial coin offering] era, the actual alpha of discovering a token to buy was a lot of Bitcoin message board talk,” WARHODL said. “You’d see someone randomly post about BNB [Binance Coin] at eighty cents, and at the time, BNB’s only purpose was if you had it in your wallet was to lower the transaction fee for exchanging crypto. But the title of that thread wasn’t ‘Major Alpha Alert!’, it was just people sharing knowledge.”
Sharing knowledge to spread the wealth and organically build community is a much different experience than engaging with people with an agenda.
“It’s about being playful about the idea that ‘alpha’ shouldn’t be gate kept,” WARHODL said. “Obviously there’s an adoption cycle of who hears about something first, who shares it with the influencers, and then the influencers end up sharing it. I just want to tone down the ‘seriousness’ of the word. That’s why I’m doing the brand as Anti Alpha.”
By toning down the seriousness of Alpha, WARHODL is attempting to bring back the 3 a.m. communal feel from the message boards.
“There are ways to be playful with it that can further accentuate the web3 crypto culture,” WARHODL said. “There’s no tearing down with Anti Alpha.” It’s more about creating social commentary around crypto culture—that just so happens to be in the form of a brand, he said.
“I’ve just been obsessed with brands for a really long time, so to tie that into what I’m doing with crypto art is a dream come true,” WARHODL said. “The brand is on-chain first but not in the sense of burn-to-redeem.”
Instead, WARHODL is opting to roll with more of an in real life (IRL) brand approach on actual drops. He’s treating Anti Alpha like a web2 brand but with the experiential layer utilizing near field communication (NFC) technology.
“It’s using blockchain to prove authenticity and also using the RFID [radio frequency identification] in the physical products themselves,” he said. “That shows on-chain provenance and the technology allows for an AR [augmented reality] experience by pointing it at the garment.”
Through this model, on-chain loyalty is reflected in how many pieces someone purchases and is gamified through quantity rather than a digital item corresponding to a physical item.
“It’s almost looking at the on-chain aspect as a glorified POAP [Proof of Attendance Protocol] that proves the actual garment is authentic as well,” WARHODL said. “The visual will be related to the drop itself or the piece itself, but it’s not necessarily a one-of-one, which is easy to do as well.”
Within the debut collection—tentatively dropping at the end of February—there will be multiple designs of garments, rolling papers, ash trays, and other lifestyle accessories.
“I’ve already designed a collection that incorporates both Anti Alpha and WARHODL,” he said. “I talk about riffing on some of these other crypto projects, but the idea could very well be that Anti Alpha is also a friendly collaboration machine.”