We thought it was love and instead it was a gig. The great exhibition Let’s Get Digital! , dedicated to new forms of crypto art, which opens on Tuesday in Florence until July 31, could not have come at a more interesting time to understand what is happening there. On this history of Nft in fact, a brutal repositioning is underway. Perhaps the most effective way to tell it is through two moments. The first, last Friday, May 13, when the charity auction for tking crypto art videos made by Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, with Madonna. Three rather disturbing videos in which Madonna is represented naked, among plants, flowers and technological artifacts. At auction, the NFTs of those videos were sold for 620,000 and 820 dollars. Much? We see.
Digital
What is happening to the NFT market?
by Arcangelo Rociola
04 Maggio 2022
A little over a year ago, the NFT version of Beeple’s great work Everydays was sold by Christie’s for $ 69.2 million. In just over a year, three zeros have disappeared and no one has understood where they have gone. The difference is all here. What happened?
Digital
The Giro d’Italia at the NFT finish line
06 Maggio 2022
That Christie’s auction – it was March 11 – marked the beginning of the first short, overwhelming and somewhat clumsy season of the NFT. A technological tool that transforms any digital artifact (a video, a photo, a song, even a tweet) into a single object guaranteeing its authenticity forever, and therefore allowing to attribute a value to it; it ended up in the hands of speculators and marketers. The former artificially raised their prices, often buying the works they were selling through nominees, in order to attract crowds of naive people into the market who believed that this was the way to get rich quickly (even Melania Trump has resorted to this deception with a watercolor NFT portraying her blue eyes).
The latter slipped the word Nft into everything they had to sell: from cooking recipes to cars, to make them more attractive but emptying the expression of any meaning. Finally, the freeze has arrived in the cryptocurrency sector, or the currencies with which NFTs are bought and sold: due to the war, the resumption of inflation and interest rates, their value has pulverized within a few weeks, and the market has shrunk a lot.
Blockchain
Not just football: Sorare expands to other fantasy sports with NFTs
by Emanuele Capone
12 Maggio 2022
In this context, the Palazzo Strozzi exhibition that should have been a party makes its debut, when it was designed by Serena Tabacchi and the director of the Arturo Galansino Foundation, but it will certainly not be a funeral. Serena Tabacchi says: “I am happy with this crisis, this world was populated by people with a strong speculative drive, well they have moved away; those who have remained instead have a value. And the fact that the super inflated prices have reduced, creates greater accessibility “. Arturo Galansino adds: “A work of Refik Anadol, Casa Batllòhas just been sold by Christie’s as NFT for 1.38 million dollars, and this confirms the solidity of the art market compared to those of altricollectables “.
Digital art
Madonna’s latest provocation: 3 NFTs together with Beeple
by Bruno Ruffilli
10 Maggio 2022
Anadol and Beeple are among the protagonists of the Florentine exhibition together with Anyma, Krista Kim, Andres Reisinger and Daniel Arsham. The curators propose a reasoned selection of works of art united by a basic idea. Tabacchi says: “The exhibition is a sort of invitation to try to digitize oneself, not to see technology in a negative way, but as something that can amplify our possibilities”. Chiosa Galansino: “We aim to bring the general public closer to works and themes that are radically transforming our relationship with art, and with the digital world as a whole”. For example of Beeple it will be possible to admire some parts of Everydays up close (the original work is in fact a collage of five thousand works, one for each day, and the artist has created several NFTs, even single portions); in addition to Bull Run, perfect for framing the difficult moment of cryptocurrencies, since it represents a huge bull carrying a golden bitcoin on its back.
While Refik Anadol has created an installation for the courtyard of the palace, Machine Hallucination – Renaissance Dreams, in which algorithms compose and break down images on the theme of the Renaissance. And Krista Kim’s Mars House invites us to think about the metaverse and the sensibility of real estate investments in virtual reality.
In short, according to Tabacchi, NFTs are not a bubble, but will remain: «They are a useful tool, which helps to certify the value of digital and physical art.
It is a technology that allows you to trace the life of a work and therefore it is essential to generate royalties for artists in the secondary market, every time a work changes hands ». The novelty of crypto art, however, according to the curators is not just this: to say that NFTs are a tool for the certification of digital art is an understatement. There is, in the works on display at Palazzo Strozzi, a new aesthetic. Tabacchi says: “There is an almost subversive aspect, which celebrates the phenomenon of decentralization. And the mixture of nature and technology in a dystopian future is very strong”. As in the celebrated Eroding and Reforming Bust of Rome (One Year) by Daniel Arsham, in which the artist created a sculpture with a life of its own, which changes over the seasons and which will destroy itself in a thousand years. The NFT then, the curators are convinced, will cisaranno.
The Let’s Get Digital!
At Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, from 18 May to 31 July curated by Arturo Galansino and Serena Tabacchi Sopra, Daniel Arsham