Dakota Blue, creator of Dusko, on Artists as Market Makers & Rainmakers on MEV, Modularity, & Starting a Fund.
NFT Comic Series Dusko discusses the formation of markets with NFTs and Rainmakers such as Aric Chang and Julia Lipton breakdown complex concepts.
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From the Community
All about threads this week.
Aric has been writing incredible summaries on Twitter breaking down complex topics such as MEV (Miner Extraction Value), and modularity. Find them below.
Julia Lipton wrote about her learnings accrued from starting her own fund.
Dusko: on Artists as Market Makers, NFTs, and Personal Mythologies with Dakota Blue
Recently, I have been working with the founder of Dusko, a man by the name of Dakota Blue. Dakota is an incredibly talented, multi-media artist who’s been writing the surrealistic, satirical comic book series, Dusko, for seven years now. Based off his time in the service industry, the series paints the world as a sort of technicolor dystopia — frenzied, bright, and misaligned.
In between penning future volumes, an in-print book, and developing the series for TV w/ Paradigm Talent Agency, I sat down to hear about how he understands the operations of networks, NFTs as methods for collective value capture, and the nuance of an artist as market maker online.
D: What’s the history behind Dusko? When did you start writing it? What prompted you to start writing it? Was there a genesis story that you sought to capture?
DB: I’ve always been drawing and writing stories. These illustrations and characters were pretty disparate though, until coming together with the inception of the Dusko universe in 2015.
At the time I was juggling a pretty messy schedule: evening shows for my band, followed by 4AM opening shifts at the coffee shop I worked at. Somewhere in between, depraved of sleep and near delirious, Dusko was born.
The scenarios, storylines, and characters are all inspired by customers and coworkers I dealt with over the years. Waking up for a job that didn’t matter to me, to sell things I didn’t care about, quickly came to feel like some surreal cartoon stuck in a loop. One day after work, I sat down to draw and Dusko just started writing itself.
D: Why NFTs? Obviously, NFTs allow for more immediate value capture for your work. But I feel that is only scratching the surface.
DB: Okay, so a few things.
Personal value capture. I’ve been sharing my music and art digitally for years now. I was reliant on Instagram to spread word about my latest record or sell copies of the original Dusko comics. Promotion like this makes me feel I’m aimlessly tossing my work in the void in hopes someone would see it. It devalues both the art and the artist in the process. It’s honestly degrading. NFTs sort of solved this, collapsing advertisement and asset into one single item, and making it so I’m able to sustain a living off my work — a luxury in its own right.
Collective value capture. Being a successful artist is, to some degree, about market making. I understand the phenomena of marketing making like this. People self-organize around certain causes to form networks. When networks form, markets emerge, strengthening the networks they emerge from For artists, NFTs make the formation of markets in online networks exponentially easier.
In the past, a fan’s experience of interacting with me would work like this. They discover my art. They buy a print and wait for it to arrive. It arrives, they cherish it for a while, grow attached, but then need some money. They find a like-minded community online, and (hopefully) identify and sell it to another fan who they believe would value it as they did. They ship it out. The speed, or lack thereof, of “trade” in this network reduces its ability to succeed.
Now, with NFTs, they can buy and sell the JPEGs, the thing that caught their eye in the first place. This eases and accelerates this market making, and thus the value (and general) retention of my network of patrons.
Further, with the whole pfp trend, it’s so easy to tell who is a fan. To boil it down, NFTs allow artists to leverage the scope and speed of online distribution while increasing the value retention of their network by expediting the process of market making.
Immersible multimedia experience: NFTs, combined with the tooling out there, allow me to provide my community with a more interactive project. For example, they could (and probably will) be used as ways to vote on what character I should add to the next volume, what characters they want more of, or where they want to see the story go next. The possibilities are pretty endless, especially as the TV series gets going.
D: What’s your creative process? What are you listening to right now? Do you have an optimal workspace or time of day to work?
DB: I’m not sure if I have a specific creative process, or optimal time. I feel like the right time, the right place, allows for excuses to not work.
I’m always listening to music when I draw. What that music is varies drastically, but recently it has been some Genesis, early Ozzy Osbourne, and a substantial amount of experimental jazz.
D: So why not use Discord, why Urbit?
DB: Discord’s a wreck. We wrote a thread about this for launch. It’s like this bad neighborhood honestly, where you run the risk of clicking the wrong link and potentially losing money or NFTs. It’s in no way conducive to onboarding new patrons also, people not yet. Urbit, on the other hand, has none of that. No phishing, no hacks. It’s invite only, and offers file storage, blogging — features communities string across a series of different platforms when they’re confined to Discord. It just makes me feel safer, with all the hacks, again today with BAYC, it just makes me feel safer, and lessens the noise and things I have to manage. No artist wants to run a Discord server.
D: What are other NFT projects you draw inspiration from?
I love watching what Sartoshi is doing in the space. What he has done with his mfers is really interesting. His commentary about the realities of buying and selling jpegs are humorously spot on.
But yeah I’m a fan of a ton of projects out there: Deadfellaz, Milady, Tiny Dinos, Easy Cowboy, Dankbots, Sad Girls Bar. The list goes on and on.
D: What’s planned for the future of Dusko?
DB: I have a lot of future plans for Dusko. Obviously, the comic will continue. I’m working on a lot of new stories right now. But up next, I’m putting the three volumes already out into print — free for Dusko holders. A bit ago, I signed with Paradigm Talent Agency, who also represents people like Brian Cox, Stephen King, and Sydney Sweeney. Together, we’re developing Dusko into an animated show for TV. I’ll be putting on a party in NYC towards the end of May. Keep your eyes peeled for a teal colored poster. A few characters of mine from the third volume have been reserved for the Archmission, this non-for-profit sending digital time capsules up into space, moon mission with Space X at the end of the year. I have some ideas for how music is gonna be more prominent for Dusko. I’m most stoked though by making physical goods down the line: merch, Dusko figurines would be great. We’ll see.
Mint Dusko’s Second Collection of 137 Here!