DIE WITH THE MOST LIKES
DECAY AND DEPRAVITY
“diewiththemostlikes is a f*ckable energy drink floating in a neglected retention pond outside a strip mall in a hometown you’ll never leave. Create nothing. Consume everything.”
That’s how Mark Wilson – a.k.a. diewiththemostlikes describes his art and creativity. He’s a chronicler of the life of Mid-America culture and society.
Whether you love or hate his art, die (as he prefers to be known) is grateful for that audience’s reaction. Be it disgusted, loathful, bored, excited, or love: he’ll take it. “My art is not striving to be a certain thing. It’s more of a journey of self-exploration. And this journey’s been crazy.”
He’s been creating art for as long as he can remember but only found the NFT space in 2021. His style of art is as much social commentary as it is self-therapeutic. He embodies the indifference towards Mid-America’s physical and mental decline, the apathy of today’s culture of consumption, and the transactional nature of society’s existence.
He recalls that he painted hundreds of artworks before he jumped into NFTs. They were hung on his walls, in his apartment’s passages, and he gave them away to strangers. “I was drowning in my own creations. The more I created, the more suffocated I felt.”
Eight years ago, his wife convinced him to get an iPad to start drawing, so he could draw and make art without worrying about taking up more physical space. Since then, he’s spent over 20,000 hours on the iPad creating art. A friend onboarded him to the NFT space and encouraged him to mint his first artwork.
When he did, he jumped headlong into it: dropping his artwork onto the blockchain was like “baptizing the larger Ethereum universe in the depravity and decay and regret.” It took a while for him to find his footing in the space before he found a community of people that related to his art. “I started pulverizing people with depravity. People find my art absurd and that absurdism funny, comical, and relatable. I never take for granted that someone can react at any given moment – a reaction that spans across kind of the entire breadth of human emotion.”
He is outspoken – and protective – about the NFT space. For other artists in the space, he says: “Don’t hammer people over the head with your new drop. It should be about connecting with people and creating things you want to create for the sake of creation. Create for self-exploration and creation. After all, we are the lips and bttholes of a sausage that will eventually be discarded into a landfill. So, embrace the ride and be ready to fcking decay and that.”