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Bitcoin is a monetary instrument originated from code and cryptography. However, when viewed through a broader lens, it is part of a cultural heritage that spans over a century. Since the 1910s, avant-garde movements have explored inquiries that later became fundamental to Bitcoin: Who determines value? Can regulations replace rulers? How do frameworks document time, disseminate trust or resist power? Far from emerging spontaneously in 2009, Bitcoin solidified concepts that had long circulated in creative endeavors.
You don’t have to appreciate art — or on-chain art — to engage with this discourse. This piece does not advocate for “Bitcoin art” but rather for comprehending Bitcoin’s conceptual prehistory. If you consider yourself a Bitcoin maximalist, interpret the following as the backdrop of your protocol’s perspective, rather than a diversion into the art world. And if you identify as an on-chain maximalist, keep in mind that maximalism of any sort overlooks reality: The essence of Bitcoin did not originate on-chain.
Artists typically emerge and rigorously test ideas prior to their wider societal acceptance. Concepts they examine in paintings, instructions, frameworks, or numerical systems usually migrate years later into economics, engineering, and governance. The aim of this article is not to equate art with Bitcoin, but to illustrate that Bitcoin represents the cultural outcome of ideas rehearsed for over a century — notions about decentralization, protocol, time, and value that were already prevalent long before they were encoded.
Avant-Garde Futurism: Speed, Systems and the Machine Aesthetic
If the avant-garde of the early 20th century had a launch point, it was Italian Futurism. Proclaimed in 1909 on the front page of Le Figaro by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the movement celebrated “the beauty of speed,” the vitality of the industrial city and the force of engines, aircraft, and modern weaponry. It demanded the demolition of museums and libraries in favor of an aesthetic overhaul — art in harmony with the machine era.
Futurist painters such as Giacomo Balla and sculptors like Umberto Boccioni pursued novel visual methods to capture movement: blurred edges, repeated forms, and “lines of force” that depicted figures as vectors within a dynamic system. Boccioni’s well-known “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” (1913) illustrates a walking figure whose body is fragmented into aerodynamic planes — resembling a fluid diagram more than biological anatomy. In sound, Luigi Russolo’s “Intonarumori” (noise intoners) incorporated the clatter of factories and the roar of engines into orchestral performances, transforming music into a mechanical phenomenon.
The legacy of Futurism is intricate — Marinetti’s later association with Italian fascism casts a shadow — yet the movement sowed the seeds of a mindset vital to subsequent art and Bitcoin alike: art as the design of systems, rather than mere objects. The Futurists embraced rhythm, repetition, serial techniques, and the intentional use of technology as a catalyst. Essentially, they envisioned culture functioning on protocols — machines with outputs determined by rules and cycles.
The Futurists welcomed the rhythm of machines, the beat of the production line, the accuracy of the stopwatch. Bitcoin transposes that rhythm into economics: Value arises not from declaration but from a timed, rule-governed process distributed across the network. Although Futurism never anticipated digital currency, it laid the foundation by making repetition and system-thinking seem intuitive.
Dada: Anti-Art as an Assault on Systems
In the turmoil of World War I, another avant-garde emerged in Zurich, New York, and Berlin: Dadaism (circa 1916-1920s). While Futurism embraced the promises of modernity, Dada sought to dismantle them. Dada artists revolted against the logic that had led to warfare; they produced “anti-art” — absurdist performances, nonsensical poetry, collages of waste — to jolt and undermine bourgeois sensibilities. In this endeavor, they directly challenged the authority of artistic institutions and the notion of intrinsic value in art.
The well-known instance is Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917), but an equally illuminating example is his Monte Carlo Bonds (1924): printed bearer “securities” issued in a planned series of thirty, each valued at 500 francs and intended to gather capital for a roulette “system” Duchamp claimed to have perfected. The bonds appeared and read like legitimate financial instruments — complete with detachable dividend coupons, corporate statutes on the reverse, and Man Ray’s photo of Duchamp with shaving-foam “horns” inside a roulette wheel — but were staged as artworks. The company’s chair was Duchamp’s female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy; the administrator was Duchamp himself. Buyers were, theoretically, investors; in practice, they regarded the sheets as art pieces, leaving all coupons intact. The work merges two regimes of value — finance and art — and unveils
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the identical fundamental mechanism: worth is not inherent; it is a societal agreement maintained by confidence, scarcity, and regulations. Duchamp even exhibited a nominal interest once prior to forsaking the gambling arrangement, a graceful reminder that the belief framework surrounding the object swiftly eclipsed any monetary return it could potentially generate.
Dada’s irreverent dismantling of logic and valuation schemas planted seeds that subsequent artistic (and even monetary) revolutionaries would gather. Subsequently, Cypherpunks and Bitcoin enthusiasts would question the equity of the financial system; the Dadaists had already ridiculed the so-called logic of civilized society. They unveiled that what individuals deem as valuable — whether it be a piece of art, a debt certificate, or government-issued currency — might merely be a communal illusion upheld by power. In Dada, we witness the prototype of Bitcoin’s philosophy of contesting institutional power: If Duchamp demonstrated that a urinal or a satirical bond could be “art” through collective consent, Bitcoin indicated that a line of code can be “currency” through mutual agreement.
Significantly, Dada was intrinsically global and decentralized. Its artists (Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Hannah Höch, etc.) were scattered across Europe and the U.S., yet interconnected via manifestos, periodicals, and correspondence. This early 20th-century artistic community functioned independently of governmental or museum domination — effectively a nascent peer-to-peer network of creative exchange. In the manner that Dadaists dispatched ideas and manifestos to one another across frontiers, we can perceive the later aspiration of a decentralized, censorship-resistant communication network.
ZERO: Constructing with Regulations
By the late 1950s, Europe’s postwar avant-garde sought a fresh beginning. In Düsseldorf, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene established ZERO (1957), soon joined by Günther Uecker. To them, “Zero” wasn’t nihilism; it represented a restart, an approach to dismiss the subjectivity of previous modernism and create artwork from the ground up, using solely light, rhythm, and repetition.
The creations of ZERO were meticulous and reproducible: Piene’s “Lichtballette” utilized mechanical projectors to choreograph moving light patterns; Mack fashioned mirrored reliefs and spinning discs to generate optical vibrations; Uecker covered surfaces with dense arrays of nails, transforming hammering into a systematic process. The artistry was in the methodology — the timed flicker, the rhythmic spin, the framework of repeated forms.
Equally significant, ZERO was never a confined entity but an international network, connecting to parallel movements in the Netherlands (Nul), France (GRAV), and Italy (Azimut). Exhibitions and collaborations traversed numerous countries, functioning more as a decentralized platform than a singular “school.”
For Bitcoin’s lineage, ZERO presents two resonant concepts. First, the reset: Initiating from “zero” to develop a system governed by explicit rules mirrors the symbolic reboot of Bitcoin’s Genesis Block. Second, the emphasis on time, repetition, and seriality foresees a culture attuned to protocols — structures where results emerge at set intervals and cumulative sequences carry significance.
Network Art: From Mail to Fluxus to the Net
While ZERO was delving into regulations and serial processes, other artists of the 1960s directed their attention toward communication itself as an artistic medium. Their creations transformed art into a distributed process, shared among individuals and locations, beyond the governance of galleries or states.
One such form was Mail Art, pioneered by Ray Johnson in the early 1960s. Small illustrations, collages, and notes circulated through the postal
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Hanne Darboven. Photo: © Angelika Platen
Avant-Garde Time: On Kawara and Hanne Darboven
If conceptual and algorithmic creators transformed rules into artistic expressions, others of the same period directed their focus towards time itself as their framework. Few collections of work make the comparison to blockchain as strikingly as those by On Kawara and Hanne Darboven.
Commencing in 1966, On Kawara crafted dates — simple white text on uniform canvases — in his continuous “Today Series.” Each artwork had to be finalized on the date it represented; otherwise, it was destroyed. Frequently, it was archived with a local newspaper, serving as a form of analog timestamp. In addition to this, Kawara recorded every individual he encountered (“I Met”), every path he traversed (“I Went”), the times he awoke each morning (“I Got Up” postcards), and telegrams that simply stated: I am still alive. What resulted was a rigorous, cumulative timeline of existence: day after day, block after block, a series of affirmations that life had taken place.
Hanne Darboven, based in Germany, went even further. Starting in the late 1960s, she developed numerical systems that converted calendar dates into endless handwritten sequences of sums, columns, and grids. Her installations extend across entire walls — hundreds of sheets filled with notations representing days, months, decades. Darboven transformed the passage of time into a literal account of numbers, an uninterrupted timeline devoid of a narrative beyond the sequence itself.
When viewed together, Kawara and Darboven illuminate how time, repetition, and documentation can embody both substance and significance. Their creations foreshadow precisely what Bitcoin later encodes. Each block on the chain operates like a Kawara date painting: a timestamp that verifies the system remains active. The arrangement of blocks mirrors Darboven’s unending grids, discrete periods of time aligned to create an unchangeable timeline. And in both instances, meaning arises not from any singular entry but from the totality of the entire chain. Kawara and Darboven made clear that even the simplest act of denoting time can attain depth when reiterated and preserved.
Systems and Power: Institutional Critique and Currency Hacks
While several artists focused inward to guidelines and time, others during the late 1960s and ’70s looked outward to reveal the concealed systems of power — financial, political, institutional. Their work illustrates most distinctly how art presaged Bitcoin’s urge to circumvent authority.
In New York, Hans Haacke aimed to illustrate how wealth and power influence culture. For his 1971 endeavor “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System,” he employed public records, maps, and photographs to document the dilapidated properties of a significant real estate network in the city. The piece was slated for a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, but six weeks prior to the opening, the museum canceled the showcase and dismissed the curator. No direct connection between the landlords and the museum was ever established, but the cancellation itself underscored Haacke’s argument: Institutions are never impartial, and pursuits for transparency can be too disconcerting to reveal.
In Brazil, under dictatorship, Cildo Meireles adopted a subtler but equally radical approach. His “Insertions into Ideological Circuits” (1970) inserted dissenting messages into everyday exchange systems. On Coca-Cola bottles, he silkscreened political slogans that became visible only upon refilling; the bottles then re-entered circulation. In his “Banknote Project,” he stamped inquiries like “Who killed Herzog?” (after a murdered journalist) onto currency, then circulated the notes back into the economy. The system — Coca-Cola’s distribution, the state’s monetary supply — turned into the medium for critique. Meireles illustrated that even currency could be hacked into a vessel of counter-authority.
For Bitcoin, the parallel is unmistakable. Meireles’s stamped notes foreshadow the notion of embedding messages within a financial system itself — Satoshi Nakamoto’s Genesis Block inscription (“Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”) continues that action directly. Both artists grasped that structures are never unbiased: They embody ideology. By infusing new content or revealing concealed systems, they showcased how authority could be contested not merely with slogans but by repurposing the very system.
Bitcoin advances that artistic lesson to its zenith. Haacke uncovered concealed structures, and Meireles embedded messages into the currency circuits; Bitcoin does not simply critique the system but establishes a new one. It inherits Haacke’s call for transparency by making every transaction publicly accessible on the blockchain while carrying forward Meireles’s spirit of subversion by generating a parallel currency beyond the reach of governmental control. What once were artistic interventions now scale into a global protocol. It transcends being a metaphor about money, instead offering a functional redesign of how money itself can operate.
Bitcoin as the Cultural Consequence
When examined together, these movements narrate a tale that is more coherent than it initially seems. Futurism celebrated the cadence of machines; Dada dismantled institutional authority and unveiled how value…
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hinges on consensus; ZERO commenced anew from illumination, guidelines and recurrence; Mail Art, Fluxus and Net Art transformed networks into the artwork itself; conceptual and algorithmic creators redirected focus from items to protocols and code; On Kawara and Hanne Darboven regarded time as something to be acknowledged and amassed, day after day; and Haacke and Meireles demonstrated how power structures could be unveiled or subtly penetrated from within.
Each of these trials practiced notions that Bitcoin subsequently embedded in its code: decentralization, regulations over rulers, value as agreement, transparency as a form of reality, time as framework and the application of systems themselves as tools of critique. None of this emerged from thin air in 2009. For many years, artists had been exploring the same terrain — whether in artworks, instructions, mail systems, arrays of numbers or modified banknotes — long before those insights were encoded.
None of this diminishes Bitcoin’s technological innovation. Proof-of-work remains the cornerstone that renders the system unforgeable, yet it does not clarify why individuals opt to safeguard and engage with it. This is why it is misguided to view Bitcoin solely as a financial instrument or to dismiss its cultural aspect as a minor tale. Bitcoin is also a cultural relic, molded by a lengthy history of challenges to authority and experiments with regulations and systems. You don’t need to appreciate art to recognize that. What Bitcoin signifies is not a solitary breakthrough but the progression of ideas rehearsed for over a century. Acknowledging that history does not undermine Bitcoin’s innovation; it anchors it in a wider cultural heritage. Bitcoin is not a happenstance of code but the most recent chapter in a century-long endeavor to envision systems beyond authority, to intertwine time with structure and to demonstrate that value is ultimately what we elect to share and protect.
BM Big Reads are weekly, comprehensive articles on some contemporary topic pertinent to Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. Views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine. If you possess a submission that you think aligns with the model, feel free to contact us at editor[at]bitcoinmagazine.com.
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