Tetragrammaton New Moon Observer is best experienced in broadsheet format. Click here to read the full PDF.
The Economy Is the Medium: The Market
Seth Goldstein, July 2026
In the summer of 2022 the most alive room in digital art was a minting floor. Bright Moments, the gallery I founded, had built its whole model on a single inversion: the moment a generative artwork comes into existence (the transaction itself) could be an event you attend. Minting live onchain wasn’t new. Art Blocks had made the long-distance reveal a genre. Bright Moments’ invention was staging the mint in person: a room watching the transaction become the work. The CryptoVenetians in Venice Beach in 2021, a thousand tokens generated one at a time in front of the people who claimed them, were the proof. You stood in a room in Venice Beach or Manhattan; your city’s token was generated in front of you, and the market was the evening’s program. We were minting our way around the world, city by city. That July we were in London for Proof of People week at 18 Albemarle Street. The European chapter begins there: we brought the European artists over to mint their CryptoLondoners in person (Zancan, Ciphrd from fxhash, Andreas Gysin, Kim himself). That week is when I first met Ganbrood. They came to see what a live mint felt like. That is also where I met Kim Asendorf. The first thing that ever passed between us was, fittingly, a provenance problem...
Baby, I Love You
Derek Simpson, August 2026
Whenever we hear “Baby” invoked, imagine the seer is addressing this Spirit as it is revealed in the singular form of another human being. In the presence of a lover, a friend, or even a complete stranger, the seer catches a glimpse of Baby, flickering like a flame inside Her human conduit. Taking this momentary incarnation, Baby connects the seer back to something essential: a deep well of omnipresent love that lies within. This vision, and the epiphany it presents, arouse a sudden rush of passion within the seer, a moment of OH preceding either a hysterical fit or the direct channeling of a Rock ‘n’ Roll incantation.
Each of Baby’s adopted forms provides its own unique connection back to loving awareness, so Rock ‘n’ Roll has embraced a wide range of alternate titles for Baby. When Darling or Dearest are used, along with the title Baby itself, the seer is addressing one of Spirit’s many androgynous forms...
Art Which Can’t Be Art
Alan Kaprow, July 2026
When I speak of activities and contexts that don’t suggest art, I don’t mean that an event like brushing my teeth each morning is chosen and then set into a conventional art context, as Duchamp and many others since him have done. That strategy, by which an art-identifying frame (such as a gallery or theater) confers “art value” or “art discourse” on some nonart object, idea, or event, was, in Duchamp’s initial move, sharply ironic. It forced into confrontation a whole bundle of sacred assumptions about creativity, professional skill, individuality, spirituality, modernism, and the presumed value and function of high art itself. But later it became trivialized, as more and more nonart was put on exhibit by other artists. Regardless of the merits of each case, the same truism was headlined every time we saw a stack of industrial products in a gallery, every time daily life was enacted on a stage: that anything can be estheticized, given the right art packages to put it into. But why should we want to estheticize “anything”? All the irony was lost in those presentations, the provocative questions forgotten. To go on making this kind of move in art seemed to me unproductive...
Where Reality Renders
Molly Hankins, July 2026
If we imagine all of our individual perspectives as filaments of consciousness, or light as Kabbalah describes it, we can theorize a place where all of those filaments meet. It is at this convergence point where reality is assembled and ultimately perceived. As described by Peruvian-born anthropologist and author Carlos Castaneda, who wrote a series of books based on the teachings of a Yaqui shaman named Don Juan Matus, this “assemblage point” is where individual consciousness merges into collective awareness to create reality. As we become aware of and intentional in how we program our filaments, we learn to reshape reality, which is the Great Work of Yaqui shamans, as well as alchemists and Hermeticists.
In the early 1960s Castaneda became an apprentice to Don Juan, who he claimed could manipulate time and space, and began exploring psychedelic plant medicine under his supervision. These experiences brought Castaneda into what he called “non-ordinary reality,” and from there he was able to explore consciousness beyond the boundaries of ordinary perception. From this vantage point, Don Juan was able to show Castaneda how much power our perception has to influence both our lives and the whole of humanity...
Tetragrammaton on Grünewald
As the Renaissance entered its height across Europe, the mysterious German painter Matthias Grünewald looked backwards. Rejecting the classicism of the day, he committed himself to the style of medieval painting that had dominated Northern Europe before Italy’s influence. Gothic works laden with fantastic colours and strange perspectival choices, his paintings are as much about the spiritual as they are the religious The supernatural colours that emanate from Christ’s body, and from the jewel like on his hands and feet, emphasise the power of his divinity, creating in the viewer not a sense of understanding but one of awe...
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