At the time of writing, I’ve been blogging for over 11 years and have published more than 150 blog posts, of which more than half document my discovery and exploration of blockchain-based work. These entries trace my development and progress as an artist, and I genuinely enjoy looking back to see what I once set out to do and where this road has led me. Naturally, I also wanted to write down my thoughts at the start of my newest four-year commitment to crypto art: the beginning of my PhD in Art History at the University of Zurich.
The idea of doubling down on my passion for blockchain-related art and knowledge production has been on my mind for more than two years. During that time, I had numerous conversations with professors from North America and Europe. I pitched my idea to explore and document crypto art in depth. Interestingly, two observations stood out in those initial conversations:
First, most professors will truly challenge you, and often try to dissuade you from pursuing a PhD. They want to ensure you really, really want it, that you’re willing to make the commitment, and that you’re driven to complete it. They’ll present plenty of alternatives, such as pursuing more practice-oriented, artistic frameworks within an art academy or writing a book outside of academia.
Second, in my case, I underestimated how controversial blockchain-related art still is in academia today. Several professors openly stated that they were not interested in, or supportive of, this field, frank opinions I can actually appreciate. Besides, after nine years working as an artist in the blockchain space, one develops a fairly thick skin.
Knowing What I Got Myself Into
Again and again, I heard that working on a PhD would be lonely, tedious, and would push you to intellectual and emotional limits. Yet somehow, I feel I come prepared. I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching and building my crypto art timeline, and a significant amount of that work was done in isolation during the pandemic. It earned me the nickname “crypto art historian,” along with opportunities to speak and present on the subject. In retrospect, starting my art history PhD also makes me feel like it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When I started the crypto art timeline, much of the discussion on social media revolved around CryptoKitties vs. CryptoPunks, and the timeline helped steer the narrative toward earlier, more conceptual works. Today, the grassroots movement feels utopian, misrepresented and misappropriated. Venture capital is creating and pushing narratives that are often inaccurate, repeatedly perpetuated, and tailored to opportunistic, even self-serving, purposes. I feel that academia is one of the few places where you can level the playing field.
PhD in the Age of Information Abundance
One of the fascinating aspects of starting doctoral studies in 2026 is doing so amid cultural upheaval driven by artificial intelligence. I remember watching an ex-OpenAI exec’s keynote a few years ago in which they claimed that knowledge is becoming available to everyone, one prompt away, challenging the status and necessity of higher education.
In that sense, I find it interesting to write this post now and to look back on it in a few years. In a time when a few prompted sentences can generate entire book chapters or novels, how will AI transform how we work with and within academia? Right now, we’re seeing a so-called flattening of the internet: people increasingly use chatbots and AI browsers to retrieve information rather than search engines, proprietary websites, or platforms. How will it transform knowledge production? I wonder whether this abundance of information will foster generalists over specialists? In the end, will we seek out deep work and deep specialist knowledge? Will it all matter? While I can’t answer any of these questions, I’m curious to find out.