The background story of the world’s first modern art meme token: International Klein Blue (IKB)
Nearly 3 months ago, at the end of June 2024, we, a small decentralized group of techno-artists (not the musical kind), banded together across time zones to create IKB on the Solana blockchain via DEX Screener’s recently created Moonshot program meant for meme tokens. At the start of September 2024, the token completed its bonding curve and has henceforth been available to all via most SOL-based decentralized exchanges (DEX).
Inspired by the body of work of Yves Klein, the modern and conceptual artist born in Nice, France, we believe that his creation of International Klein Blue in 1960 is the original meme, a meme before its time. We have taken this and turned it into a blockchain-based token to be able to fulfil the artist’s vision of a “Blue Revolution” where everyone would benefit from the birth of International Klein Blue.
When it comes to crypto tokens and crypto coins, especially those without apparent “utility”, most of the world derides the purely financial and speculative interest that they garner. However, that’s actually the artistic point of IKB, the token. The financial aspect of art, considered by some as dirty and uncouth, is exactly one of the areas that Yves Klein’s works explored. The adage “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” is accepted truth, but Klein illuminated the world on the uncomfortable truth that art is valued only when a price tag is attached to it.
The parallels don’t just end there: Just as different monochromatic paintings all look the same to the naked eye, we have created a set of fungible tokens, rather than the non-fungible (NFT) variety. There is method to our madness!
We have big plans for the IKB token project, including decentralized art experiments and funding grants for modern artists following in Yves Klein’s tradition. But for now, we’re starting by building the community which starts by increasing the diversity of IKB token holders (if you’re interested, you can get some here) and building on the foundation of the International Klein Blue DAO that we inaugurated a few days ago, to add more community input into future endeavours.
Keep watching this space or our X/Twitter feed for more news and updates. We also invite you to read our original project manifesto on the project website.
