The Magic of Marfa

Marfa doesn’t really make sense until you get there.

At first glance, it’s this unremarkable little town of ~1500 people in west Texas, but as soon as you arrive and acclimatize, something clicks. The buildings that look run down on the outside have thoughtful interior design. The food is higher quality than you’d expect. There are little art galleries scattered around the town and the owners are often from LA or NYC.

It feels like an odd mash up between urban energy and small town serenity that somehow just works.

The reason I went to Marfa was for Art Blocks Weekend, which is a 3 day “conference” focused on generative art and the culture that has grown around it. Of all the crypto-related gatherings I’ve been to this was the most unique and by far my favorite. I want to try and capture why that’s the case as I kill some time waiting to catch my flight home.

Since Marfa is so far away (I drove from Austin which took 6.5 hours), Art Blocks Weekend ended up only attracting people who truly wanted to be there. So, I found that automatically everyone I met was cool & shared a lot of the same interests. It was so fun to refresh old relationships and meet some online friends for the first time as well. Nothing beats seeing the look on people’s faces when they meet in real life and realize they’ve known each other for ages on the internet.

I don’t know exact numbers, but I heard about 500 people attended this year and that sounds right. The small size made the weekend feel approachable and community driven. It was basically summer camp for digital art and culture nerds – in the best way – and that stands in contrast to the more mainstream conferences where thousands of folks attend, and everybody is scattered across their own tracks and side events.

I spent most of my time in Marfa volunteering with Glitch which is a digital art gallery run by friends of mine Derek, Maddy, Steve, and Zack. There were panels, mixers, parties, art displays, and artist signings. The events covered generative art, digital fashion, AR/VR, art markets, and more. And in my down time, I checked out Art Blocks programming which consisted of multiple activations, panels, displays, meals, and other shenanigans.

What sticks out to me about all these different events across the whole weekend is the through line was celebrating digital artists and their work. But more than that… it actually felt authentic: artists, collectors, VCs, traders, enthusiasts all coming together to pause for a moment and realize that together we’ve built a little scene on the internet (and in real life) that is magical. I’ll be back next year.