Joe Kennedy on Unit London, institut, and NFTs in the Art World | Unreleased NFTS.WTF Interview

Mar 31

Previously unreleased: this interview is published here for the first time.Joe Kennedy of Unit London and institut on why the traditional art world pushes back on NFTs, and what galleries and Web3 can learn from each other.Interviewed by David Cash. Book David to host, moderate, or speak: https://davidcash.ca

Joe Kennedy co-founded Unit London, a London gallery that grew out of pop-up shows and social media, and its NFT platform institut. Recorded live in April 2022 at NFC Lisbon, he talks with David Cash about starting the gallery in 2013 to open up a closed art world, why he sees the art world's pushback on NFTs as a repeat of its early resistance to Instagram, and the clash between Web3's fast trading culture and collectors who build over decades. They also discuss joy and play in art, institut's first physical NFT exhibition, what good galleries do to earn their commission, royalties and resale, the changing role of the collector, and plans for institut 2.0 with one of one works, editions, and a minting tool.

Watch on YouTube

Chapters

00:00 Intro live at NFC Lisbon
0:38 A closed art world and the start of Unit London
2:52 Instagram then, NFTs now: the art world's pushback
3:36 Launching institut
4:19 Two worlds: trading culture and generational collecting
5:31 What fine art can take from collectible NFT mechanics
6:26 The art world lacks joy
7:55 Community over audience
10:50 institut's first physical NFT exhibition
12:15 Rethinking how to reach traditional collectors
14:10 An artist-led gallery
15:05 What good galleries do for their commission
16:09 Royalties, resale, and flipping
16:50 Auction spikes and sustainable artist careers
18:25 The changing role of the collector
19:39 institut 2.0: a blank canvas for artists
20:48 Launch plans: one of ones, editions, and a minting tool

Speakers

David Cash, interviewer and editor-in-chief, NFTS.WTF
Joe Kennedy, co-founder, Unit London and institut

Key topics

Unit London's origin in pop-up shows and social media
Gatekeeping and access in the traditional art market
Why the art world pushed back on Instagram and now on NFTs
institut, Unit London's NFT platform
Trading culture in Web3 versus generational collecting
Community, utility, and game mechanics for fine art
Joy and play as the root of creativity
Physical exhibitions that connect artists with collectors
Gallery commissions and long-term career management
Smart contract royalties and resale
Collectors as curators, co-creators, and investors
institut 2.0: one of ones, editions, and a minting tool

In their words

"Whenever there's that kind of pushback, it's like a knee-jerk reaction, fear-based generally." Joe Kennedy

"That's how children learn creativity. And I think that's what art's about fundamentally." Joe Kennedy

How to cite

APA: Cash, D. (2022). Joe Kennedy on Unit London, institut, and NFTs in the art world [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/hw3Grnw-nh8

Chicago: Cash, David. "Joe Kennedy on Unit London, institut, and NFTs in the Art World." Recorded April 2022, Lisbon. YouTube video, 21:54. https://youtu.be/hw3Grnw-nh8.

About NFTS.WTF

NFTS.WTF was a Web3 culture publication and interview series edited by David Cash. It covered artists, collectors, and builders during the 2021–2022 NFT boom. It ran for two years and closed after a board decision by the NFTS DAO, which left many of its interviews unpublished.

Recording details

Recorded April 2022 at NFC Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. Previously unreleased. Published 2026 with chapters and captions.

Transcript

Machine-transcribed and reviewed. Timestamps link to the moment in the video.

[0:04] Hello everybody, welcome back to NFTS.WTF. My name is David Cash, your editor-in-chief, and I'm here live at NFC Lisbon, and I'm joined today with Joe Kennedy of institut and Unit London. I've been doing some amazing things in the space over the past year, bringing in blue chip artists from the traditional and digital art world. The new heights, I would say. You've made some amazing sales, and the platform launch has been really successful, I think. I know you have a new version coming out, so yeah, I'm sure some folks watching have already collected on your platform, but if you want to maybe give people a little bit of your background from your mouth, Yeah, for sure, for sure. How long do we have, by the way? 10, 15 minutes. Okay, perfect. So basically the art world is a very hierarchical, centralized place, and it's very corrupted, and often artists who are genuinely talented don't get the

[0:52] access to climb through the echelons of the art market because they don't have the access. They didn't go to the right schools, they didn't get the right education. Their dad doesn't know some gallerists. Right, yeah, so there's this kind of closed circle of the art world, which we wanted to break as artists. So my friend and I, when we left school, we were like, we want to break into the art world and we want to celebrate good artists, and realizing that good creativity exists everywhere, not just in those hyper-located places where you have institutions or schools. So we used social media and we decided to build a starter gallery, and at the beginning it was us just showing our own work in little pop-up spaces, and then one show turned into two shows, and we got kicked out of our space, and we found another space, and we were like dotting around London in empty spaces building a gallery, and using social media as a way to tell stories and build

[1:49] community, which was always such a fundamental part of what we wanted to do. The art world is very closed, insulated, centralized. We wanted to tell the stories of artists to the widest possible audience, because why shouldn't artists be celebrated widely? So that was really the ethos of the gallery, was to break down the barriers of entry to market for artists and for collectors. Living artists. Yeah, living artists, absolutely. Particularly artists who didn't necessarily go to art school or didn't have good access. We were using social media like Instagram to find those artists and then platform them and tell their stories using digital content and community building strategies with social media. So the gallery has since become relatively successful, I would say. It's an international gallery now, an amazing program.

[2:36] We work with institutions and museums, lots of big leading artists from around the world, and it's tagged to this reputation of disruption within the art world, because as funny as it sounds, Instagram and social media is just like modus operandi now for everybody, but at the time when we started in 2013, the art world wasn't embracing social media, wasn't embracing ideas of community. It wasn't seen as serious as ways to champion artists or showcase artists or anything. So we've just seen this massive 360 happen with Instagram and social media within the art world, and I just see the same thing happening with NFTs now. So there's so much pushback from the art industry on NFTs. So we must be doing something, right? That's the thing. So whenever there's that kind of pushback, it's like a knee-jerk reaction, fear-based generally, because fundamentally the Web3 blockchain space challenges the fabric of what the big galleries have been built on doing.

[3:32] And so it's just a super exciting time for us, and last year we decided to open institut, which is the first art world platform for NFTs led by a gallery team, and our initial hypothesis was that we would onboard traditional collectors into the NFT space. And I think the last year or the last 18 months have been so illuminating for us, because we've just learned all of the nuances and facets of the Web3 space, and you start to realize actually it's antithetical to what the whole traditional art system has been built on. So ideas of accessibility, transparency, community, gamification, fun. All of those exclusivity, keep everybody out, privacy. Right, so it's like you have these two different worlds, like opposing ideologies, and then each community is different too.

[4:23] So in this space, everyone here is just tweeting all day, or we're on Discord or on Telegram, and there's this hyper-fast pace to everything that we do, and that kind of also trickles through into the collecting mentality, like when people collect NFTs, they don't necessarily want to hold them for 10 years. It's actually like there's a fun, more trading mentality and behavior in this space. Ephemeral, yeah. Yeah, right, and so in the art world, traditionally it's been like you build a collection over decades or generationally. And also the art world is like, either it's like in-person events or email marketing, or it's like Instagram, which is probably the most advanced, like broadly speaking, probably the most forward-thinking social platform that the art world really, really harnesses and uses.

[5:13] So they're on different platforms as well. So the big goal for us is like, okay, what are the shared values between those audiences, how do we reconcile them, if they even can be reconciled, and what's the best way to do that in order to really articulate what quality means in the NFT space. And I think up until now, the collectibles NFT market has been most driven, a lot of the value, like the big projects, the apes and the punks. But that is distinguished from fine art, like they're different categories really. But I think even whilst the aesthetics of those projects might not be like palatable to like traditional collectors, I think the mechanics of those projects, like what actually underlies the image or the file or whatever, yeah, like the actual mechanics, the contract, this idea of like community and utility I think can be applied.

[6:10] And I think there's a real future basically like where great curation, great artists fundamentally meet game theory, community and utility. I think where those two things intersect is where genuinely where I think the future of the art world will be. Because right now, for a long time, I've just thought like the art world lacks joy in many ways. There's like staunch serious kind of attitude. Yeah, and you know, like the press releases you read when you go to a gallery, it's written in a certain language, which is very alienating to people. And it kind of, in many ways, it can suck the pretentiousness of it all, can suck the fun out of it and the joy out of it. We use the term, but it's honestly the aesthetic distance, but it's actually almost too distant for a lot of people. Yeah, I mean, and it's done that like that for a reason, right? Because that's how they preserve value and you wouldn't understand.

[6:59] And then it's really like guarded, kind of like almost world where you shouldn't, you're not allowed to understand or you shouldn't understand it. And that's also why you shouldn't understand why it sells for like 50 million dollars, right? Don't worry about it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you wouldn't get it, so just don't ask. But I mean, there's this incredible sense of like joy and play in this space, which really like, you know, harks back to when you're a kid, when you're playing, that's when you're being creative. That's how you like learn creativity through play. That's how children learn creativity. And I think like that's what art's about fundamentally. It's about that creativity. And I really see that like explicitly in this space. All the game mechanics are being built into projects. The fact that artists are actually using those things now, it's like just fundamentally playful. And that's so cool, I think.

[7:46] And I think there's genuinely a future for art, which is based more around the idea of play or the idea of gaming. Well, the gamification has been really true to the space, I think. There's a bunch of things I want to touch on, but I think that one thing that, from my perspective, I think really led to a lot of the success you guys are experiencing now in the space, is like even when you guys were in Web 2, and like in a Web 2 company, you know, pushing through social media, you said it. Your word was community. It wasn't an audience. I feel like a lot of people, and we make this distinction as much as possible, but a lot of people in social media and Instagram would kind of talk at their audiences. But you always had this talk to, you know, you always had open DMs with anybody who wanted to collect, like there was always this open line of communication, which is very true to Web 3. And now I feel like, you know, your team's able to perpetuate that through, like

[8:30] you said, Discord, Twitter, other social media outlets, but really it's the same goal, if that makes sense. It's just to reach the most people and to not try to harness the art community, but to create your own art community, which has allowed you to have the collector base that you guys have today. And shared beliefs, you know, find people who have the same beliefs as you do. When we started the gallery at UNO London, it was always like, fuck the art world, we're doing things our own way, we're going to tear down that system. Especially in London as well, like there was such a, you know, I mean there's a lot of contemporary art galleries, but there's still, like you said, the gallery system was very hard pressed, I don't know, yeah. It's hard to get into, man. If you don't know the right people, it's almost like impenetrable. It was the tape, the only one that came out in the past, like 20

[9:10] years was major, other than the art. Yeah, I mean, you know, and it takes, you have to have money, you have to have those social connections, and it's not, I mean, it's a thing, it's a gatekeeping thing, but it's like, when you go to the studio, the experience is so fundamentally different, it's like, Yeah, it's immediate, and it's about the work, it's playful, it's interesting, it's all about the, how do you like get rid of all the bullshit, and just focus on the work, and I feel like this is a great place to be able to do that, you know, not this place necessarily, right here, but like, you know, the NFT space, I feel like is just this amazing connection to just a lack of pretense. I mean, the flip is maybe you can go too far into like the trading mentality, and it can be too market-driven, and too speculative, but at the same time, I think like focusing on the positives, I think there's a lot to be said for artists who

[10:03] are doing really thoughtful projects where they genuinely want people who have the same vision as them, who believe the same things, the same ideologies. There's way more of a collaboration between the, I feel like now, in the NFT space, and I feel like you guys really do help perpetuate that, and really try to cater to both groups as authentically as possible, and we talk about this a lot, you know, you mentioned it, there's this immediate relationship with the artist now, but since artists are able to play now more, and I feel like we almost needed this fresh start for the space, because you know we've talked about it before, but the art world hasn't really changed in terms of the gallery system since like the 1800s, like Baudelaire's handwritten letters are still used as code now, which is insane, but I think the NFT space, you know, it allowed us to think about it with a fresh mindset, and okay, what would we do if we could do it again?

[10:46] And I think you really perpetuated that, physical openings, metaverse openings, trying to, you know, I'd love to talk about it and kind of segue it into what you guys are doing now, but your first show, you know, integrating almost 100 artists, both NFT artists, traditional artists, to kind of bridge that gap. Do you want to maybe speak on that a little bit, and why that was so important to you? Yeah, I mean I feel like, I don't know if it's still the physical show of NFTs, I'm sure that's, I'm sure it's been in the past now, but at the time, last September, it was the biggest physical showcase of NFTs, and the project put together, yeah 120 artists in the end. Some who had minted their first NFT, some who were like OGs of the space, and everybody in between. And physical exhibitions, conferences like this, you know, like the big art fairs, just big moments where you can actually like, meet

[11:37] the people behind the handles. Which aim is this? So important, like so important. And you know, there's people who've spent, you know hundreds of thousands of pounds on our platform. We met for the first time, just bumped into an event, and then you know, Wait a second, yeah. Yeah great, nice to meet you. And also for like, for the mainstream audience to kind of be educated, and I think when we started institut, the hypothesis was that we would just bring on board all these like traditional collectors in, but that was collectors that we'd never met before. That was really exciting. Which was so cool, and then, and also it made us kind of like rethink a little bit, like what the position of institut should be. And I actually think like, rather than focusing on how do we get these old, I hate calling them old guys, because they're also our clients.

[12:28] Traditional. Right. Classic. These kind of like traditional collectors, like rather than trying to appease them, and like play to their sensibilities, how do we like just take all the best parts of Web3, and make that aspirational for those guys? Because at the moment they look at it, and they just don't understand digital ownership yet. It's like, you know, like when I talk to them about buying NFTs, they're like, oh, so what would I do with it? I was like, well, it's in your wallet, and then people can see it's in your wallet, and then you'd be part of this community. They're like, I don't even have, they don't have a wallet. They don't understand like the idea of digital ownership to them is just not a thing yet. They're like, where do I put it in my house? Yeah, that's exactly it. And so, and so, yeah, it's kind of getting beyond that a little bit, and going well actually, maybe it's just not your time yet. You know, you'll learn eventually, but like for now, I

[13:17] think it's like we can take the great artists that we know who are doing really interesting, authentic things, and then like blend their practice with like these amazing like new concepts. I think that's also really important what you just touched on. It's like the active process of what a gallery looks like today, right? Because you definitely do provide a ton of value for the artists who are, you know, in your system, and I think that's really important. You know, as you said, we want to allow artists to play again in this kind of new space, and in order to do that, you know, it's amazing. The ideal sense is to just let them make art, and then, you know, have somebody else figure out all the rest. I feel like you make that a possibility for people by championing them. You know, I feel like the idea of championing an artist, unless there's some huge name, is kind of foreign to the art space, but you've been doing

[13:57] that for years, and I think that, you know, artists who have come up through your system, you know, now as you've seen, and as you, you know, I see on social media, you know, some people do a 100 print, 1000 print edition, and it'll just be sold out in a moment because they've come up with you. So how is that, you know, fostering of artist relations? I mean, it's always been key because, you know, we're an artist-led gallery, fundamentally. I think now people who've discovered Unit London for the first time now are like, oh, you know, these guys, you know, there's almost this perception of like blue chip somehow that we started out. It's like, no, the story of the gallery is like me and my best mate when we were 22 just It's just doing well. selling our own work in like pop-up, tiny little pop-up shops around London, you know, and it's really grown like that, and so it's always been very organic. Like, artists just trust us because they know that we have their

[14:41] best interests at heart. So we've always been artist-led as a gallery. We didn't come from like collecting families or from the art world. Like, we're going to set up a gallery. Like a Rothschild or a Habsburg or something. And, you know, we never knew, we never had any collectors that we could sell to, so that's why we were so hell-bent on building community because, like, if you don't have a community, then we're literally just sitting here in a shop. at the same time, yeah. Yeah, right, and so, but, you know, there's also this, you know, obviously the modus operandi in terms of like commission and revenue splits in the NFT space is much more heavily in favor of the artist. Which I think it should be because most platforms, you know, you're just essentially providing a marketplace where you can mint and then, you know, collectors can use it to find. But the good galleries, not all galleries, but good galleries, when they take their

[15:27] 50% commission, there's a 50-50 artist split, they really earn that commission. Like, we as a gallery, you know, it's like, it's not selling the work. That's just a tiny part of it. It's selling the work to the right people. It is kind of like, you know, placing them in the right collections, introducing the artist to museums, basically ticking all of the boxes to validate their profile and brand. And also, I think, as you've mentioned, your vision is a little bit longer term for artists than maybe theirs is, you know. Right. You don't think about this sale specifically. You think about, okay, this collector might collect them for the next 10 years. Right, exactly. And it's also, you know, making sure that that collector then doesn't go to auction and flip the work and sell it. You know, and that's also another interesting dynamic with the NFT space is that in the art world there's... Well, there's less control, no?

[16:08] Yeah, way less control, but also, you know, there's a built-in royalty system to improve our contracts. So, is reselling even bad? Some artists even encourage reselling because they're like, this is great, I'm making money. And you can always track where the work is, right? A lot of them sold for tiny, tiny amounts and now they're reselling and that's their profit. Exactly, yeah. And I think that's great, you know, and I think it reframes the whole thing of, you know, flipping culture in the art world is like really, really like, it's just the worst thing you can do as a collector, right? If you buy a work from a gallery and you put it in auction next year, you're never going to get a work from that gallery again. They're just going to be like, no. Because ultimately the gallery is trying to control the artist's market and build value. Yeah, you're supposed to add provenance to the piece in a hypothetical,

[16:48] ideal sense. Right, exactly. And so, as soon as something goes to auction, it's then free market, like the public decides the price, the gallery and the artist can then... Could be completely re-evaluated. Yeah, re-evaluated. And you know, sometimes it goes for just insane amounts. And then, you know, if an artist is 22, like Flora Jugnovich is a young painter in London, she was selling work for $5,000 a couple of years ago. She's now selling at auction for like two and a half million, three million pounds. And you just wonder like, when you're like 26, 27 years old, how long can that price point last? Is that sustainable? And as soon as it doesn't achieve those numbers again, then the whole thing crashes. And so you can really, you get this horrible cycle of artists who just, you know, they soar high for a few years and then they just crash and no one ever hears them. And then once that's happened, there's no way back for the artist.

[17:37] So that's one thing that good galleries do, is they like sustainably manage the artist's career over long periods. And I really don't think many people consider that. Even in the NFT space, I feel like, as you said, like this PFP mindset, you know, I do appreciate, we do have some collectors in our, you know, in our ecosystem who are like these one-on-one collectors who really care about like an artist's career and look in. But I feel like that's a mindset shift that's happening. And the space is now, I think, starting to facilitate it through platforms like yours, Super Rare, some of these, and really trying to champion artists who you champion, like IX shells, Chris, John, you know, all these kind of pillars of the space kind of institut and platforms like it. I think that, you know, it's very mutually beneficial. You know, you push them forwards and keep championing them and they in turn, you

[18:16] know, continue to work with you and want to keep working with the gallery and push things forward. I think that's how the space is gonna, that's how it's gotten this far. For sure. And I think that that's, you know, that's the near future. And I think also the collector, like the role of the collector now is so different. Because you have collectors who now... Well, the collectors are almost like investors more than collectors now. They have like some kind of an active part in the system. And a lot of the collectors have a direct relationship with the artist. So, you know, they're very close. Like the collector and artist are so close that, you know, with galleries... With all of them. Yeah, I mean, the old gallery system was like, you know, the collector and the artist can never speak. They can never meet. The collector, gallery, artist. Everything is mediated through the mouthpiece of the gallery and they control the

[18:53] narrative in many ways. And that's something that we've always rallied against as a gallery. Like, you know, like you said, like that two-way dialogue between artists and collectors is something we've always tried to foster. And in the NFT space, now like the collectors are the curators, which is, you know, there's like conflict of interest potentially there. But also, you know, like co-creators, like you said, investors. There's like a really shifting role of this notion of the collector, which I think is super interesting. And I mean, it's kind of empowering because, as we mentioned, we have the option to redefine what that means. Yeah. And now collectors, since they are taking a more active role, it kind of gives people the option. For sure. But, you know, being the gallery, I feel like you can mitigate that and you can see how active, you know, the artists or the collector want to be in the system and then act accordingly.

[19:40] And I think the role of the gallery or the platform now is just to empower the artists. Right. What we want to do with where we're doing a 2.0 build, which goes live at the end of summer, it's really about like just giving artists a blank canvas. Like, what's your wildest idea? How do we bring this to life? And I think that is, for me, that's like, you know, I was speaking to a couple of people here earlier and we were talking about all the opportunity to really like be so imaginative and break down doors with metaverse environments and blockchain and like just different types of work. And what you do see a lot of is like we just build the same structures, but in the new world. And I think the more we push against that, the better. What can we add to reality? Like, how can we go beyond reality? Right. What we currently have. And yeah, I mean, that's amazing. I'm really excited for the new platform.

[20:26] And I think that one of the things that you all do extremely well, you know, having worked together and, you know, seeing how everything's grown, you ask questions. You actually ask the artists and you ask the collectors what they want. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It sounds fundamental, but a lot of operators really don't do that. Yeah, yeah. It's obviously worked very well. So I'm really excited for this new platform. Yeah, man. To see how you've added to 1.0. Yeah. Anything that people can expect or that they should check out if they want to be there for that launch? So, we're launching it with a physical show in London around Freeze, which will be a generative artist show. So some of the big, big names in the space are going to be in that. But then the core thing of the platform is really focusing on one-of-one works, which is what the platform does already really well. We've had some amazing sets of big artists for one-of-ones, but then we also want

[21:11] to build a minting tool. So we'll have a one-of-one space and a special value addition. Awesome. So the people, you know, who don't have 500K plus to spend on a one-of -one, they can start to participate in multiple addition drops. as part of your ethos. In the gallery side with prints? Yeah. So it's kind of built into our offering with institut. Amazing. Super exciting. Everybody please go check out institute.co. And check them out on social media, also Unit London. Joe, thank you so much for taking the time. It's a pleasure as always. As always. Yeah, thank you so much for watching. This has been NFPF at WPF IRL. Signing off from Lisbon. Thanks so much.

David Cash https://www.davidcash.ca