I had a chance to interview Kevin about his thoughts on the Forever Rose and the potential for blockchain and art. Kevin explained how the Forever Rose project came about, but wanted to start with his I Am A Coin project to provide the proper background. The overview of I Am A Coin according to his website:

World-renowned visual artist Kevin Abosch has created 100 physical artworks and a limited edition of 10 million virtual artworks entitled "IAMA Coin"

The physical works are stamped (using the artist's own blood) with the contract address on the Ethereum blockchain corresponding to the creation of the the 10 million virtual works (ERC-20 tokens)

In my interview with Kevin, he provided more background and detail on both the I Am A Coin project and his Forever Rose. In his words:

My I Am A Coin project really is the culmination of everything I am about: Identity, existence, value, human currency. And it's just a function of me being an artist with a bit of success and feeling a bit commodified... as I have said in the press already. And I started to imagine myself as a coin. In fact, I started looking at of all of us as coins, and wondered what that would look like, all of us as coins in the hands of the masses, and wanted to do that in some kind of elegant way. So naturally I started to look at the blockchain. And this was on the heels of months of friends of mine in tech asking, "Hey, should I do an ICO?" and I was like, "Fuck ICOs" for a number of reasons. Aside from that, there is clearly a lot of regulatory stuff happening and you do not want to be on the wrong side of that.

But still I was thinking, "I'm an artist, I'm not trying to raise money for a company, so I will tokenize myself..." and you saw how I did that - the blood, the physical work, and the virtual work of my I Am A Coin project. It has been a bit of a challenge for some people as to how an ERC20 token itself can be a piece of virtual art, or it is a placeholder for art, whichever you prefer. I think when it comes to blockchain plus art, this would be a rather extreme position.

Now that I had the background on Kevin's I Am I Coin project, I asked him to share a bit more about his Forever Rose.

So I thought about a symbol of love, and I gave in to my worst desire, which is one of my kind of exercises I do from time to time. I never thought about photographing a rose, nor did I, upon thinking about it, think that I wanted to, but that sort of negativity associated with it made me think, "Okay, I should probably do it as an exercise anyway." And then when I did it, I kind of liked it.

No photograph was ever sold. There was a token called Rose, or Forever Rose, and that token represents my picture. That token is a proxy for my picture. The same way that my photograph is a proxy for the real rose, this is a proxy of a proxy. So no photograph was sold, okay? It was a single ERC20 token that was divisible to one decimal place, in other words, ten parts. So it's ten people owning a fraction of the single token. And those tokens cannot be divisible any more because the contract says they can only be divisible by one decimal place.

After hearing this, I was no longer sure if it made sense to include the Forever Rose in an article about photography. My takeaway was that the Forever Rose was about the conceptual act of selling ten shares of a single token and not the photograph. Kevin corrected me, saying:

Well, it is and it isn't. If you have seen the photo... first off, anyone can just download it onto their phone or their computer and look at it. It's there for them to see it if they want to. If you you've seen it once, maybe you never want to see it again, maybe it left an impression, maybe it didn't. I think it's very healthy to back off the materialism of having to posses a physical artwork -- not for everything, but at some point it is rather refreshing and healthy to untether yourself from the physical.

Kevin pointed out that he was ultimately driven to participate in the Forever Rose project as it was an opportunity to raise money for charity. The $1m went to the Coder Dojo. Coder Dojo is a charity which teaches children around the world to learn to code.

While I like the photo of the rose just fine, I personally think the Forever Rose project is best enjoyed as a conceptual exercise. I had a great conversation with Kevin that went much deeper than the excerpt above and plan on publishing it in full. He was extremely generous with his time, and I really enjoyed his line of thinking. And in case you are wondering, Kevin still has the photograph and is considering whether he may want to sell that at some point.

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