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His first art piece was a huge party - and his following creations were no less surprising! French artist Ben Elliot believes building an artistic career is the same as building a brand. He has created the Ben Elliot Shop, the Ben Elliot Water, and his own cryptocurrency, apart from the ambitious project Metaone. In this episode of Unlocked, Delfina Sena investigates his avant-garde working process.
Most artists want their work to speak for itself. Ben Elliot goes further: he wants his name to become the work. The French artist has built an artistic practice that is also, deliberately, a brand - complete with a shop, a water product, and his own cryptocurrency. This is not a critique of commercialism; it's an exploration of what the artist-as-institution looks like when taken to its logical conclusion.
Ben Elliot is a French artist whose practice treats brand-building as an artistic medium. His debut work was a large-scale party - a social event as creative act - and his subsequent projects have continued to blur the line between commercial logic and artistic intention. He has created the Ben Elliot Shop, Ben Elliot Water, and his own cryptocurrency, alongside the ambitious project Metaone. His work asks serious questions about value, identity, and the economics of contemporary art through the language of consumer culture.
The artist-as-brand is not new - Warhol built the Factory on that logic. What Ben Elliot is doing is testing how far that model can be pushed in a digital-native context, where NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and social platforms collapse the distance between artist, artwork, and commerce. This conversation explores what happens when an artist fully embraces that collapse rather than resisting it. Is Metaone a project or a company? Is Ben Elliot the artist, the brand, or the product? These are not rhetorical questions - they have real implications for how we think about authorship, value, and collecting in the digital age.
Brand as artistic medium
Elliot treats the construction of a brand identity - its visual language, its product line, its symbolic economy - as an artistic practice in its own right. The brand is the work, not the vehicle for the work.
Cryptocurrency as artistic statement
Launching a personal cryptocurrency is not a financial strategy - it's a conceptual move that forces questions about what gives any currency its value, and what the relationship is between an artist's reputation and economic exchange.
Metaone and the art-product continuum
The Metaone project extends the artist-brand logic into ambitious territory. It's a project about what an artist can build when they stop distinguishing between making art and making things.
The party as origin
Elliot's first work was an event - a gathering, not an object. This origin matters because it establishes community and collective experience as the foundation of his practice, before any products existed.
Collecting Ben Elliot means collecting a position on what art can be - not just an object but an ecosystem. Understanding his logic helps you evaluate what you're actually acquiring and why it matters. His work is also a sharp provocation for anyone thinking about the relationship between artistic value and economic value in a world where those categories are increasingly hard to separate.
Unlocked is the podcast by 100 collectors - the global network for digital art collectors. Each episode, we speak with artists, curators, collectors, and builders shaping the digital art world. No market speculation. No hype. Just honest, substantive conversations about art, practice, and what it means to collect today. New episodes release throughout the year. Find Unlocked on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 100 collectors is a membership network. [Explore membership →]
