If you were on the internet in 2015, you likely followed the twisty tale of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. The Staten Island hip-hop titans conceived of the album as a conceptual artwork, a protest against the cheapening of music in the age of widespread piracy. Rather than release the music to the general public, the work was sold at auction for a reported $2 million to a then-anonymous American buyer, seemingly proving that music could sell at the level of Picasso and Warhol.
It proved a Pyrrhic victory when the buyer was revealed to be the hated “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli. The episode was a bitter lesson for the group, resulting in resentment and division. Even Clan member Method Man said, “Fuck that album. … When music can’t be music and y’all turning it into something else, fuck that. Give it to the people, if they want to hear the shit, let them have it. Give it away free.” (He somewhat softened his stance recently, on finally hearing the album.)
A new Netflix documentary, The Disciple: A Wu-Tang Fable (2026), presents a long and shaggy ride through the experience. Directed by producer Joanna Natasegara and featuring RZA as an executive producer, the film proves a frustrating watch: no one involved seems to, even now, have thought much about the lessons from their attempt to hijack the art market, a sometimes unpredictable world they blundered into, seeming to know little about it while somehow assuming that’s where the big money was. “Contemporary art is worth millions by virtue of its exclusivity,” said the band at the time. Of course, a vanishingly small percentage of artworks of any era are priced at that level, but maybe their misconception is understandable, since the members’ art world reference points, at least judging by the way they are quoted in the film, seem to be restricted to Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso, and Warhol.
Many of the art world’s denizens could have warned them away from the stunt. Funnily enough, in 2017, during the whole dustup, Richard Prince disavowed an artwork he had sold to Ivanka Trump before her father’s entry into politics. Of course, by then it was too late to warn RZA.
The album’s sale is mentioned in the opening sequence, with audio of an unidentified interviewer calling it “one of the coolest stories in art history.” RZA explains the thinking: “We’ll make one single copy of the album, treat it like it’s the Mona Lisa. It was a combination of ideas that led to it. Me and my student Cilvaringz—won’t take all the credit.”
“Would you ever do it again?” asks the interviewer.
Says the rapper, in a loaded two-letter word, “Um …”
The Shaggy Tale of an Unfolding Mess
The film then doesn’t mention the album again for a full 55 minutes, instead plunging the viewer at great length into the life story of Dutch-Moroccan rapper-producer Tarik Azzougarh, one of the masterminds of the project, including his traumatic childhood experiences of racism and abuse.
The director found him compelling, she explains in press materials: “Over a long lunch in beautiful Marrakech, where he lived, Tarik told me the twists and turns of the album’s 30-year story, and I was fascinated. It wasn’t only a great story; it resonated with me personally as someone who grew up in the ’90s with mixed heritage. The Wu-Tang Clan often talk about being teenagers inspired by East Asian culture through movies, while Tarik and his friends had, in turn, been inspired by the Clan.”
Unfortunately, for my money, Azzougarh doesn’t ultimately prove a compelling presence on screen. “I figured that a doc would show my side of the story,” Azzougarh tells the off-camera director early on, in a characteristically not-quite-electrifying observation.
The film slowly relates that the aspiring rapper and superfan ingratiated himself into the band’s circles, flying to New York multiple times as a teenager for the purpose. He earned the sobriquet Cilvaringz and membership in the Killa Beez, a network of musicians in the extended Wu-Tang family, releasing his own records on their imprint as well as producing some of the Clan’s albums.
Once Upon a Time was packaged in a custom handcrafted silver box and traveled with all the pomp and security of a seven-figure artwork, as the film shows. Only one copy will ever legally exist, in a protest against the loss of music’s aura in the age of its digital reproducibility, to paraphrase German philosopher Walter Benjamin. The band sold the record via online auctioneer Paddle8 in 2015, with the stipulation that the buyer could not release it commercially for 88 years, though they could play it at listening parties.
In keeping with the fine art theme, the band staged a listening event at MoMA PS1, after which Complex described the record as “rich, layered, and sonically bombastic,” with a “rugged, hard-hitting sound” reminiscent of early Wu-Tang Clan albums. Writing for ARTnews, a slightly more skeptical Dan Duray noted, “There were plenty of unexpected samples, melodramatic horns, cheesy bits of kung-fu dialogue.” Snippets are audible in the documentary.
Then Shkreli was arrested, and some of the film’s funnier moments come with the discussion of Wu-Tang’s attempts to find a way to reverse the sale and get the music to the people, including a rumored clause in the contract by which either Clan members or actor Bill Murray could legally steal the record back.
In 2018, Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud and conspiracy, and the Department of Justice sold the record to help pay his reparations. In 2021, it sold, for some $4 million, to digital art and crypto collective PleasrDAO, in whose hands it remains today. The group’s late founder, Jamis Johnson, said in 2021 that “there’s not a world in which we don’t own this album.” The group has organized several listening events, at venues from the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania to the Angel Orensanz Center, housed in a 175-year-old former synagogue in New York.
So now Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, with all its contradictions and challenges, is PleasrDAO’s problem. In a video interview with ARTnews, the collective’s “chief pleasing officer,” Jamis’s brother Adrian Johnson, outlined the tricky position in which the group finds itself.
“We don’t want the record to be streamed,” he said. “The moment it is, it becomes another album.”
He went on, “Everything about it is a paradox: it’s for the people, but it’s also highly guarded. It’s quite a difficult job as stewards of this art to say, ‘How can we bring it to the people but not devalue it?,’ and I don’t believe that keeping it locked away is right. I also don’t believe making it freely available is right. So we are constantly looking for creative ways to share this with the people.”
For future activations, keep an eye on a dedicated website, and tune in to Netflix for the documentary, but don’t hold out for too much excitement. I give it a passing grade.