ANNOUNCING A NEW HOME FOR RIGHT CLICK SAVE

Regular readers of RCS may recall that the magazine started life as the editorial arm of ClubNFT, a startup dedicated to supporting the new generation of digital art collectors. At a time when others were building marketplaces during the NFT boom of 2021, the company’s co-founders Jason Bailey and Chris King set out to preserve the assets themselves through a suite of protection tools that became a last line of defence against the NFT apocalypse. 

To this day, ClubNFT has backed up more than a million NFTs, now safely stored on the computers of the world’s leading collectors. However, following the sad but ultimately necessary decision to shut down the company’s backup service earlier this year, a new steward was sought for Right Click Save, which had been established to tell the story of the moment digital art went mainstream through the voices of its global community. 

Following a meeting in London brokered, appropriately, by the artist and engineer Xin Liu, it became clear that Tony Lyu shared the mission of RCS to preserve the cultural value of digital art at a time when it is still to be fully appreciated by the wider public. Having made his name as the founder of South Korea’s first crypto exchange, Lyu has since dedicated himself to supporting artists and institutions specializing in both analog and digital media. Here he speaks for the first time as owner of Right Click Save with the magazine’s founders Jason Bailey and Alex Estorick.

‍Alex Estorick: Tony, how did you discover Right Click Save and what can you tell us about your journey into collecting?‍

Tony Lyu: I had the opportunity to take some time off from work after selling a business I had started, a cryptocurrency exchange called Korbit. I spent a couple of years traveling and studying philosophy, and during that period I discovered fine art. At first, I collected simply for myself, but over time I wanted to deepen my understanding of how the art world operates, so I started investing in art-related companies and joining museum councils. Recently, I came full circle to my technology roots and found myself drawn to digital art. 

Through encounters with artists such as Anna Ridler, Tyler Hobbs, and DeeKay, I came to see digital art as a new frontier, and it got me thinking about how I could contribute to its future.

The “aha” moment came when I realized that digital art doesn’t need to be constrained by a physical display on a museum wall — its most natural home is online. Initially, I considered building an online museum, but concluded that an online publication would have greater impact by providing more context and shaping the conversation in real time. When I asked artists which publication they most respected in this space, they all pointed to Right Click Save.

‍Alex Estorick: Having built a crypto exchange from scratch and having witnessed the evolution of the market for digital assets, how do you see the relationship between finance and culture right now?‍

Tony Lyu: Art is to some extent financialized, but it’s important to distinguish between speculation and true value. The investor Benjamin Graham used to say that the market is a voting machine in the short run but a weighing machine in the long run. In other words, speculation is just people casting votes on price, but over time the market gravitates toward real value, whether in a stock or a work of art.

For me, the enduring value of an artwork lies in its emotional power, aesthetic qualities, and philosophical resonance — that’s what we actually treasure. 

In digital art, speculation certainly has been present, but what matters is focusing on the long-term, value-preserving questions. That is what Right Click Save has always focused on: anchoring the conversation in ideas that will still matter years from now.

‍Alex Estorick: Jason, you’ve been in the digital art ecosystem for more than two decades and have documented crypto art for nearly a decade. Where does Right Click Save fit in that story?‍

Jason Bailey: The crypto art space grows and shrinks in four-year cycles that are somewhat tied to the enthusiasm, growth, and pullback of the cryptocurrency market. But what has never changed is a need for serious conversation around the culture — the fast-changing culture — that is tied to the crypto space and now, for better or worse, digital art.

I haven’t talked to many collectors or artists who say: “you know what, I don’t like RCS or I don’t like the idea of a serious magazine that dives deeply into what these changes mean, or how these artists are reflecting our culture.” On the flip side, I haven’t always seen as much support for it as I would expect, considering how much reverence and appreciation there is in conversation for something like RCS. One can only talk about how Punks and Squiggles are going to go up in value before that gets thin and you have to ask: what else is out there? How does digital art reflect what’s going on in the world? What have we gotten right in this space in trying to adjust or evolve from the old art world, and what more should we be borrowing from it?

It is surprising to me that when things are good in a bull market, there’s a giant line of people who want to help support financially just about anything in the space, driven by speculation, and when times are bad it’s really hard to find anyone to support even the most useful things. 

We have to invest in infrastructure, which includes everything from the backup tools that we built with ClubNFT to the homes for serious conversation like Right Click Save.

I’m not against financialization because part of that conversation is about how to make it financially sustainable for people to be artists and to collect. If we still think of ourselves as architects of a new art world, which was the way we looked at things five or so years ago, we need to be self-critical and ask what it is we want. 

Do we want everyone fighting for a handful of projects or do we want to architect a system that supports a larger number of artists and collectors, and maybe involves more dialogue than excitement around the potential for the price of things to go up or down?

We’ve come a long way rapidly, but a lot of that was built on experimentation — for a time royalties and even owning digital things seemed radical. When you’re in a small group, you can be innovative and do risky, crazy things. But when you’re in a big group, the benefit should be that you have guardrails in place that protect people, even while you lose some of that rapid experimentation. We lost the rapid experimentation, but we didn’t necessarily get the guardrails that I would expect to come with scaling.

‍Alex Estorick: Tony, as digital art continues to evolve — from NFTs to generative AI — it raises questions about whether the existing structures of the art world are still fit for purpose. How do institutions and systems need to adapt to support these new art forms and digital substrates, and what role can platforms like Right Click Save play in that process?‍

Tony Lyu: Traditional art-world entities such as galleries, museums, and fairs each serve very defined functions. These roles evolved for practical reasons: the logistics of transporting, displaying, and conserving physical works, and the need to gather people for viewing or transacting. But in the realm of digital art and time-based media, many of those constraints disappear, which means that the old divisions of labor may no longer be the most effective.

What I’m trying to do is break down the functions of these institutions and rebuild them in forms better suited to the digital age, a process we might call “refactoring” in the technology world. 

Today’s art world is increasingly hybrid, spanning both digital and analog media, but most institutions continue to privilege painting and sculpture. My hope is that newer entities such as Right Click Save can propose a different approach: one that embraces the scale and speed of digital networks and helps shape a more adaptive and inclusive art ecosystem.

‍Alex Estorick: One of the things about running a publication that seeks to drive critical discussion is that one spends a lot of time interrogating ideas that are often derided. During Art Basel’s Digital Dialogues earlier this year, two people actually left the room when someone mentioned NFTs, and I often encounter the same reaction to generative AI. How should we be covering digital culture when the technology on which it relies, and which it often usefully critiques, is rejected by the mainstream?‍

Jason Bailey: For me, art is at its best when it is powerful and I get nervous when it’s limp. I don’t think that all art has to offend, upset, or placate, but it sure as hell should do something. 

To me, the fact that the acronym, NFT, literally scares people out of a room is great, and if you find that funny or surprising imagine trying to give away 300 AI artworks on the blockchain and having people yawn and wonder what you’re even doing there. 

I think it’s good that people take all these rapid changes seriously. I also think that artists should play around with new technologies and interrogate them in a public forum in order to help us understand changes that happen too quickly to grasp. I’m almost surprised more people don’t walk out of rooms when things are mentioned because we’re drinking out of the fire hose of technology right now.‍

Alex Estorick: What do you see as the legacy of what one might call RCS 1.0?‍

Jason Bailey: When we say legacy, we usually mean something that has wound down. But, first and foremost, I’m grateful to Tony that RCS will carry on and I also hope it goes in a new direction. We’re in a space that changes rapidly and so I think its identity should also change. 

If I revisit why I wanted to develop RCS in the first place, while I had had a lot of success with Artnome, I would argue that I received more credit than I deserved for my ideas. Artnome was at its best towards its end stages, when I realized that the platform was actually more useful when I let other voices in. 

My worry is that media today are too polarizing. Maybe the legacy of RCS V1 is that it offered an alternative: a space for constructive disagreement by a plurality of voices and communities. 

We were also at this magical spot where a lot of the heroes of generative art — from Vera Molnar to Roman Verostko — who hadn’t received a lot of attention, were coming to the end of their lives. We had a short window in which to capture their voices and preserve their legacies. The interviews that we held noticeably expanded the literature that exists for some of these people, and you did a very important job there, Alex, in a way that goes beyond any of us — something that contributes to human history.

‍Alex Estorick: What’s next Jason?‍

Jason Bailey: I get condolences these days for having to shut down ClubNFT or sell RCS. But I had four years when I got to handpick and work with the smartest, hardest working people that I could choose to be around. 

We backed up millions of NFTs that are now stored locally on some of the biggest collectors’ computers with works by the best-known artists as well as lesser-known creators. 

I’m incredibly proud and satisfied with what we did with RCS and ClubNFT, so I’m not licking my wounds or feeling like it didn’t turn out the way I wanted, other than my investors were phenomenal from day one, and I wish I could have gotten them a return. 

I’m more of a Type B personality and I enjoyed the opportunity to lead. But I’m often most satisfied when I can go off and do things that maybe no one really appreciates initially and which don’t even seem to make sense. Sometimes they pan out to be predictive or relevant later. I think I’m most useful to the world when I can do that.

‍Alex Estorick: Tony, can you share anything more of your vision for RCS?‍

Tony Lyu: One thing I’ve come to appreciate through RCS’s work in the NFT and digital art communities is the importance of artistic discourse to society. When art speaks, artistic discourse allows the world to answer back. The challenge is how to nurture that dialogue while keeping our focus on what endures. How do we ensure that these conversations are preserved for future generations and not lost in the next wave of hype? And how do we measure the cultural impact of these conversations — on the emotions people feel, the ideas people have, and the actions people take?‍

Alex Estorick: I agree. And if it sometimes feels as though modern art was insulated within a white cube separate from society, I would argue that contemporary artists with a literacy for code are no longer operating strictly on aesthetic systems but are capable of recoding reality. 

For me, the act of documenting digital art is in some sense about highlighting a resistance movement to digital systems of monopolistic domination that a lot of people feel threatened by. 

Of course, one of the principal benefits of the NFT was that it unlocked careers for artists from all over the world by allowing them to sell directly to collectors. Going forward, I hope that RCS will remain a listening exercise for artists at both grassroots and institutional levels, as well as a safe space for difficult conversations in a turbulent political climate. ‍

Jason Bailey: Thanks for setting up this conversation Alex. I’m glad we had an opportunity to talk more with you, Tony. Now I am just excited to be able to be a reader of RCS, and to watch it grow and flourish under new leadership.‍

Tony Lyu: I really appreciate the chance to continue what you created. My goal is to build on that foundation and ensure that RCS remains a vital space for artistic discourse for years to come.