Who Are the Art Police?

My Vampire Bat began the old fashioned way. Pen scratching across paper. Ink staining fingers. I used three reference photographs, fed them into AI to generate a symmetrical guide because bats, like leaves and lungs, carry that mirror language of nature. Then I drew it by hand in pencil before inking it. Photographed the drawing. Painted it digitally in Procreate. Then I copied and pasted that finished bat across a grid until it became wallpaper. Pattern as habitat. Repetition as rhythm. A colony instead of a specimen.

Have you ever unintentionally broken the law?

If we are talking about art laws, I am probably doing life.

Did I use tracing paper once upon a time. Yes. Did I use Photoshop. Of course. Have I projected something onto a wall to speed up a mural. Yes. Have I painted from someone else reference photo. Yes. Have I borrowed the mood of another artist style while finding my own voice. Absolutely. Have I made something in minutes instead of days. Many times. Have I written a prompt to generate an image. You are reading the blog of someone who runs toward the machine while others are running away from it.

The art police would say guilty on all counts.

But who are they.

I believe there are four levels of law when you are an artist.

The first is self policing. You decide the lines. You decide whether tracing feels like growth or like a shortcut that leaves you hollow. You decide whether using AI feels like collaboration or cowardice. No one else lives inside your chest. If it sits right with you, that is your court of law. If it does not, that quiet discomfort is the only warning you need.

The second level is artists policing artists. This one is loud. This one loves outrage. Many creatives cling to the belief that greatness must be carved from decades of suffering and technical torment. That if you did not bleed over it for ten thousand hours it is not legitimate. That is romantic nonsense. Art is not a medieval guild. There is no single gate. If a piece moves people, if it sells, if it shifts something in culture, it exists. You can call it bad art. You cannot call it not art.

The third level is the public. The collector jail. You can use every cheat code in existence but if your work feels disingenuous people smell it. Humans have ancient pattern recognition. We know when something has soul and when it has been factory farmed. If you are transparent and the story is solid, people lean in. If you are pretending, they walk away. No trial required.

The fourth level is the only one that actually matters. The real police. Forgery. Fraud. Claiming you are someone you are not in order to siphon money. That is not artistic experimentation. That is crime. Artists have always stolen ideas, borrowed styles, absorbed influence. From cave walls to Renaissance studios to hip hop sampling to digital remix culture. Tools change. The instinct does not. The line is simple. Do not lie about authorship. Do not fake legacy. Build your own.

My vampire bat breaks many imaginary rules. AI assisted symmetry. Digital painting. Copy and paste pattern building. NFT minting. To some that reads like heresy. To me it reads like using the tools available in 2026 while still honouring ink on paper and hand made mark making.

The key is transparency. I am telling you exactly how it was made. There is no smoke machine. No fake mythology about divine inspiration descending from the heavens. It was built through curiosity, technology, repetition and a stubborn love of bats. That feels clean to me.

Listen to your own compass. Make the work. Tell the truth about how you made it. And if anyone wants to send you to art jail, make sure you decorate the cell walls properly.

My Vampire Bat Wallpaper NFT is a 1 out of 1 original on ZeroOne for 1 AVAX. One piece. One collector. A single digital artefact sitting on chain like a strange nocturnal animal that only comes out when someone brave enough decides to adopt it.