Grifters by XCOPY

Grifters is a series of 666 portraits by XCOPY, each one a single battered head floating on black. The face comes in blue, green or yellow and is built from stacked layers: the shape of the head, the eyes, the mouth, what sits on the scalp and what drifts in the dark around it. Many of the layer names are crypto in-jokes, such as Ape Bait, DMs, Save As and G to the M. XCOPY introduced the series as a look at "how some people see us. Battered-looking souls but there's something human in there."

Grifters came out on December 13, 2021, as one of the three collections that launched Blueprints, Async Art's tool for building generative series from layers. Each Grifter was put together from XCOPY's layers at the moment it was minted, out of roughly 463,000 possible combinations. The drop ran on an allowlist for earlier XCOPY collectors and a raffle that drew around 18,000 entries. Unlike most of XCOPY's work, which loops as animated GIFs, every Grifter is a still image. Three Legendary Editions, Flooky, Rotten and Blazed, sit outside the trait system as one-off pieces. The images and metadata live on IPFS, so they outlasted Async Art, which began winding down in October 2023.

Grifters was XCOPY's first official profile picture series, and it poked fun at the avatar craze of 2021. Plenty of collectors took theirs up as an avatar anyway. In August 2022 XCOPY released his work into the public domain under CC0, so anyone can use or remix the images. A Sotheby's catalogue note ties the series to Bosch and Bruegel, and the house sold Grifter #372 in its GRAILS: Starry Night sale in January 2024.