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
Shanghai Street Life
original Fine Art watercolour on Fabriano Artistico 81 x 60cm Giclee Print with this purchase created 2020
#84603
By OthersideDeployer
The Harvest
An anthropomorphic figure stands, wide eyed, staring at the viewer; its body masculine, muscular, and humanoid. Its “mind” dissociates into a conglomerate of structures resembling feathers, grain, teeth–as well as a radial flower “node”, casting linear rays throughout the composition. To his left, a vat of bodies gesture and writhe in a kind of amniotic soup, attended by a video game robot. The bot's red display reads “uWu”. Behind the robot and filling the left side of the composition is an archaic figure composed of a variety of vintage objects and symbols. Among them are a hardbound book with ancient cuneiform scripts, indicating barley, beer, bread, ox, house, and sky, behind which is a grimacing, salivating jagged toothed maw; and an old Commodore floppy drive. The figure’s head tilts toward an illuminated crescent moon, suggesting the Egyptian Sacred Bull. The archaic figure is composed of a variety of mutating cells, which shift in color, and pattern; eventually breaking free into an ephemeral broadcast of bubbles which move across the background. The work came into being against a psychological introspection, which included associations to pop culture such as alien abduction and pod people, as well as quite a bit of reflection on grains as a symbol of civilization, agriculture, sustenance, life, and imbibing (mainly whiskies).
The Investor's Dream
The second "Visual Toy" about cryptocurrency and its universe that continues the exclusive collection on this theme. After the first Visual Toy, dedicated to the cryptocurrency itself, this visual toy is the other side of the coin. It represents, as its title tells us, the investor's dream, the current person and his financial hopes. A surreal fantasy of the dreams and longings of every investor, in this case the crypto investor. In this magical, happy and colorful dream, aspirations of all kinds intermingle, both the desire for great benefits, represented in a long animation that shows us a production cycle or series production that ranges from the gastronomic recipe of a two-ingredient cake. Bitcoin slice and Ethereum smoothie, passing through magic, represented in a fairy that transforms the cake into real money, which is sucked into a giant capsule to accumulate it and multiply it. The rest is full of investor aspirations, which appear in their dreams in the form of profits or screens that announce that values are rising steadily, as well as physical possessions, such as the sailboat, the helicopter, homes and other objects or possibilities. A dream full of happiness, fun and hope.
Hope
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