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Perspectives within crypto communities use the political, social, and aesthetic to argue whether the present moment will inspire a techno utopian or techno dystopian future. The story I set out to tell in this exhibition is about this impending future, and the aesthetics through which these opinions are communicated. Abstraction has become a language to articulate this tension between a hyper-commercialized internet and a creator-centric “revolution” of ownership and exchange.
The abstraction we've seen emerge in the NFT space (Autoglyphs, Artblocks and beyond) spans the visual potential of generative art. While some artists view their aesthetics as a refutation of a hyper-politicized art market, others use abstraction as a language to communicate this conflict.
Thomas Piketty, an economist, finds that financial returns on capital invested outpace economic growth. Could this illustrate that labor, whether factory-based or studio-based, when attached to one’s livelihood, communicates a lack of agency? Web 3 has allowed artists to vertically integrate their creative labor, production, marketing and sales. Some artists have focused their creative labor on exchange itself.
This exhibition isn't meant as a tirade of personal projections on Web 3 and its effect on artists' future. My intent was to survey a group of artists who I observed engaging these futures through a codified, predominantly abstract language. At first, I reckoned that this exploration would soon lead me to darker ends akin to Francis Bacon, Wall-e and Beeple. What I found, though, was that reconstruction, and the discombobulation which occurs in the process, are lenses to elucidate the aesthetic and affective implications of the direction in which technology is headed.
We would like to thank FingerprintsDAO, Museum of Crypto Art, and Zora for opening up their collections to our exhibition. We would also like to thank the artists who trusted us to create an engaging, meaningful and exciting re-contextualization of their work.