- Alright, so we're on the way to go meet up with this guy,
Matty Moe, who goes by the moniker, The Most Famous Artist.
You know Matty's built a pretty massive following,
mostly using social media.
He has 90,000 Instagram followers and he made what he says
is the most Instagram mural ever.
So we're gonna spend a couple days with him,
watch him as he makes art out of flee market finds,
and tries to capitalize on Kanye West and Bernie Sanders
internet currency, but mostly, we're gonna try and figure
out if he's actually a social
media art savant or a swindler.
So one of the main ways The Most Famous Artist is making
money is selling altered paintings on Instagram.
So we followed him to a flee market where he
gets his supply of old paintings.
- We're gonna look for parking pretty close to the front
because we're gonna load up
a lot of paintings into the van today.
Hey guys, comin' or goin'?
Okay.
Can I make an offer?
- Sure!
- Forty dollars.
- No.
- Okay, what are you thinking?
- Well I think I had a hundred and a quarter on it.
- Would you do 25 for this?
- I would.
- I want to do a deal with you, 130.
(laughing)
60 each and then I take them off your hands.
- But you don't include the original work?
You don't leave any of the.
- No, I do, I do.
Like in that particular piece I might paint like a mega
yacht on the horizon and then it becomes this piece of
contemporary art that people really like.
- I probably put like a Celine or Hermes or Louis Vutton
or something like that.
25.
30.
25.
(laughing)
30?
Okay.
- [Voiceover] So after the flee market, Matty almost
immediately turns one of his finds into a painting and then
posts it on Instagram where he almost immediately sells it.
So I hit up this woman Hailey, who bought the painting.
She's an actual real art collector living in New York City,
and she usually spends like way more money on art.
- There's just something about those dipped pictures
that just are very sort of
funny and like a little bit of a wink.
I saw that one and I saw that it was for sale, so I emailed
them and I asked if I could buy it.
I'd rather find something like that on Instagram for 750
dollars than something ridiculous
at Basal for 750 thousand dollars, that's rubbish.
- Matty's actually only been an artist for a couple years.
Before becoming The Most Famous Artist, god it sounds so
dumb to say, he was a tech entrepreneur who started a
company when he was in college, sold it and started another
one and all in his mid-twenties.
And then things went south.
- I was running a company that
I had just started called Alpha Boost.
I had fundraised a million dollars from top tier venture
capitalists, had a really talented team, and made the
deliberate decision to sell the business.
I thought, because I had money and power, I was the man.
And that led to me getting totally blackout hammered
on a trip to India to go on a geek trip with a
bunch of other tech entrepreneurs.
- [Voiceover] What do you think about India?
- Dude, I think like we should all be friends.
And that incident was filmed and I became known as the
drunk, naked founder and that ended up killing my business.
(slow music)
So we're at Bergamon Station about to drop off these two
pieces for a group show that's happening tomorrow.
- [Voiceover] I wanted to get an outside opinion on Matty.
So I spoke with this guy, Stefan Simchowitz, who is a big
deal curator, collector, and thinker in the fine art world,
to see if artists like The Most Famous
Artist should be taken seriously at all.
When I look at The Most Famous Artist, I almost feel like
some of his work, like the main
critique I have of it is it's too easy.
- I wouldn't say it's too easy or too difficult.
There's a lot of Mark Rochan's work, who's the most
successful painter in America
since Jasper Jones, is easy work.
It's really easy work, it's great.
It's not that it's too easy, the work.
I don't want to make an opinion because I don't know
Matty Moe's work, so I don't want to go on record, on tape
saying anything, but it may just be not good.
Instead of me analyzing whether he's a good artist or
a bad artist, I think what's the most interesting is here's
a guy who has been able to build himself an audience
and that's an amazing thing.
And do that using the devices that are available to him in
today's sort of 21st century economy.
It's an extraordinary democratic process and I think
something that the fine art
world really can learn a lot from.
- [Voiceover] The Most Famous Artist promotes himself by
painting murals that are geared towards social media.
His selfie wall, he claims, was one of the most
Instagrammable walls ever.
And today he's working on something
else he thinks will spread.
- You see the new Kanye album?
Yeah, the new Kanye album cover?
- Yeah.
- I'm gonna show you what we're making right now.
- I was like looking at Kanye West's Twitter and I was like
dude, this guy is just gonna keep on getting attention,
so I might as well do something.
I've been meaning to do a Bernie Sanders wall, so it's
like why not take The Life of Pablo album, which is
meant to be kind of a memeified thing, and turn it into
a Bernie Sanders wall?
- How much of this do you want people to look at it and say,
" I'm gonna vote for Bernie Sanders now?"
- Look, people are gonna vote for whoever they wanna vote
for, I'm making this because I know it's gonna photograph
well and it's gonna spread online and it has a message.
And it's gonna be talked about.
Making art isn't hard, but most people think it is.
And I learned all the stuff that I'm
doing here online by watching videos.
Everyone from a poet to a mathematician can interpret an
image and the more images out there with positive,
interesting messages, the more
interesting the world becomes.
So hopefully people look at this and think to
themselves I could've done that.
And the message is good, go do it.
I guess that's the point is art is supposed to make you
feel something whether good or bad, it's supposed to make
you feel something and so long as people are reacting,
at least in a visceral sense,
to what I'm doing, I think it's art.
- [Voiceover] Matty's idea for the Bernie wall from just a
cursory search on Instagram, does seem to be spreading.
I think most people are just gonna be skeptical about
this guy possibly for his whole career.
It's partly because he has, you know, he has grandeur on
the mind, he calls himself The Most Famous Artist and he's
hoping it's gonna be a self-fulfilling prophecy,
but I guess time will tell whether that's true or not.
(slow music)
- At first glance, if you were to judge this book by its
cover, you think this guy is a lot like Kanye West.
He's an egotistical asshole.
That's what the brand represents to the untrained eye.
If you dig a little deeper, there's something there
hopefully, that's the intention at least.