31/07/2021 The LA Art Show Returns: NFTs, Tradition, & the Impacts of COVID

Organizers took into account the fact that the NFT art trade represents an uncomfortably high number of white male practitioners producing works that are usually purchased by white male buyers. Perhaps in response, curators Damiani and Velicescu kept their choices on the diverse side. Twelve new media artists are featured, including Nicole Ruggiero, whose digital sculpture Elegant is a talismanic morphing head. Claudia Hart’s The Green Window is a meditative view of a red patterned tablecloth with matching wallpaper, and an abstract Japanese floral painting.

Blake Kathryn, Auriea Harvey, Luna Ikuta, Itzel Yard (Ix Shells), Sam Clover (PLANTTDADDII), Sabrina Ratté, Anne Vieux, Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst all have works on display. But the standouts include Marjan Moghaddam, whose #GlitchGoddess of Art Basel Miami in Red Number Twofeatures her ever-morphing, ever-strutting Chronometric Sculpture revived from her viral 2018 work. In it, she explodes the notion of the ideal female form.

Krista Kim’s Supercube 400XR, gets right to a core esthetic of NFT art—a ruminative lava-lamp effect that lulls viewers into a spell. Kim is the founder of a movement she calls Techism, promoting digital humanism through art and technology.

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Continuing the tech theme is a section called DIVERSEartLA, curated by Marisa Caichiolo, focusing on sight and sound installations by women artists from Spain and Latin America. _DATA | ergo sum RELOADED is artist Ana Marcos’ installation on viewing machines using AI to extract data by observing visitors.

LA-based artists Carmen Argote and Zeynep Abes’ Immersive Distancingfeatures art produced by Argote as she took long walks during the pandemic. Abes similarly cogitates on her hometown of Istanbul. 

Filling out the rest of the convention hall are not galleries representing the usual four corners of the globe but, due to COVID restrictions, a handful of countries are represented, with L.A. galleries like Track-16 and Coagula Curatorial filling out the rest. Pan American Art Group Inc. from Miami has works by Jim Morphesis, Robert Rauschenbeg, and Lita Albuquerque for sale. The Pinto Gallery is selling pieces from Takashi Murakami’s Superflat and Bubblewrapseries. And at his first fair ever, 14-year-old wunderkind Tex Hammond exhibits his Basquiat-derived goods at Acosta Arts.

With the NFT invasion disrupting market norms and esthetics, it is hard to say whether the 2021 iteration of the L.A. Art Show is a “sea change” or harbinger of a tech takeover, or just a clever effort by organizers to work around COVID’s impact on gallerists’ and buyers’ desire to travel and ship art. For some, the show will be a breath of fresh air, finally giving a broad platform to a powerful new trend. For others, it will be the logical result of a market driven by dollars and not esthetics.

Arts

https://www.artandobject.com/news/la-art-show-returns-nfts-tradition-impacts-covid

Interesting NFTs
manx + elk virgin!
Shalom! My name's manx + elk virgin!. I once peed on Cleopatra's cat. They had it coming. When no one's home, I invite my pals over and we listen to Frank Sinatra. We're so fur-tunate to have found each other!
Hairy
hairy by Steve Aoki x Antoni Tudisco. Comes with Infinite Objects screen!
Goat
Hey, who's in charge here? This collaboration between Beeple and Peter France was created using Cinema 4D, Bellus3D for the heads, Octane Render, and Adobe Photoshop.
#53324
By OthersideDeployer
The Scion
A young figure caught in a moment of distraction, aware only ephemerally of his unconscious being, as it engages in psychological and psychedelic layer spaces. His right arm casually cradles a moray eel; the figure is comfortable but not truly aware of the potentials for danger in such negligence. His shirt reads “Bello” in Pokemon style font, harkening back to a childhood straddling the millennial threshold. To his right side, out of the unconscious deep, shrouded alien heads propagate as a fractal totem, each new iteration a more sophisticated rendering of emotional masking over the cold mystery of the greys. As the scion of the Budgie-Sattva, the young man, in his distraction, is also simultaneously aware of higher levels of self discovery. To his left a psychological topology sets beneath the oracle side of an 8 ball ,hovering; its message a purest concept of acceptance. The “Scion” lettering is in 80’s HeMan style bold declaration. The lower right side of the painting is like a hybrid of melon, feathers, and seeds. The crystals in the background bring light; conducted, refracted, reflected, and dispersed, to balance the dark shadow of the figure’s physical body. The aura of the scion succeeds in layers to point, with a finger, and the crown chakra, toward a center of a mandala existing as nigh pure application of strokes, in essence painterly abstraction, but also revealing hints of the Aura of migraine, and the bi-hemispherical nature of the brain–noting concerns of the possibility of inherited mental disease. Yet the flourish of chakra as it sets against that center is robust, active, coherent, and reveling against all fear. Fundamentally, the piece speaks to the activation of one’s potential to begin to “Know Thyself”, and find greater awareness out of the enigmas of the mind–as an inculcated seed given to the rich soil of one’s own birthright.