Robness

Biography

Robness is a Los Angeles-based digital artist who has been active in the crypto art space since 2014, when he began exploring blockchain technology while living out of his car and doing odd jobs to get by. He emerged as an early creator on Bitcoin's Counterparty network and contributed to the foundational Rare Pepe digital card collection, placing him among the pioneering generation of blockchain-native artists who predate the modern NFT boom. Robness rose to wider prominence in 2020 with '64 Gallon Toter,' a glitched, psychedelic rendering of a plastic trash bin that he described as a piece of rage art. The work was removed from the SuperRare marketplace amid disputes over its source imagery and questions about what qualifies as legitimate art, a controversy that ignited what became known as the #trashart movement among crypto-native artists challenging institutional gatekeeping. Years later, as attitudes toward NFTs and appropriation art evolved, the piece was reinstated and eventually sold to a major collector for a quarter of a million dollars, cementing its place in digital art history. Robness has also drawn attention for burning a CryptoPunk as a work of performance art, further underscoring his provocative, anti-establishment approach to value and ownership in digital culture. His work invites comparison to Marcel Duchamp's readymades for its interrogation of authorship, taste, and institutional legitimacy, and he has championed open-source artistry and digital appropriation as core artistic values. Robness has been featured in galleries and institutions internationally, including Paris's Galerie Charlot, L'Avant Galerie Vossen, and recognition from the Centre Pompidou, and he continues to operate under a range of aliases across platforms including RobnessV2, RobnessVirtual, and Robness Cyberpop.