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.

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
Alex in Wonderland
A figure, Alex, stands mostly naked in the midst of a physical and psychological maelstrom. He is clad only in nostalgic 80’s era socks, on a tenuous island between active waters and a variety of shark denizens. Sharks on the right side of the image are all beached, including a shark with a quartz crystal snout, an orange shark wrapped in a life buoy, and a shark further in the distance wearing an 80’s style shirt with the number “88”. On the left side is the largest shark, wearing bright glossy red lipstick and brandishing prominent teeth with braces. She is cordoned off from the figure by a roped float divider, and within her thought bubble is a warning symbol. Behind the figure, hovering in the air, are Grey aliens emerging from the distance, out of a series of elliptical UFO shaped interdimensional membranes. The Greys take on the visual form of spermazoa ostensibly impregnating the interdimensional thresholds. As is typical, these Greys inhabit a zone just behind the unconscious topology of Alex’s dissociative mind. Though Alex’s bottom half is representative, his top half mutates into a psychological cornucopia. In a manner akin to “Auto-Erotic Sphinx”, a predecessor work, the figure has self suctioned—an act of sensual infatuation, enjoyment, and exploration. Upward exists the figure’s primary conscious eye, adorned with a revolutionary beret emblazoned with a Bitcoin badge. The figure’s summit features the nose of a fighter jet facing off against video game Bullet Bills, one of whom is marked by a communist North Korean star. A cropped section of a UFO observes the contest. Alex’s mind branches both left and right. To the left is more singular embodied consciousness, manifesting two eyes and a Ganesh trunk grasping crayons. The right branch dissociates upward diagonally, emerging into an array of eyes, faces, teeth, tail, a unicorn horn, and much more—all of which participate in expressing his unconscious being; a democracy of psychic factions representing thought impressions and associations. All illumination and darkness– fernal, infernal, high consciousness and corporeal underbelly–reside in this realm. In the distance are relatively languid, light clouds, and against the firmament hovers a colossal distant eye peering over the scene and far beyond. This painting possesses underlying genetic traits with previous works such as “Auto-Erotic Sphinx with Toys”, “Dionysus”, and “Fuku-Shiva”. The work serves also as a nod to an earlier period of art inspiration during late teens and early twenties— born out of the nakedness, vulnerability, curiosity, and wonder inherent to coming of age and all subsequent psychedelic revelation.
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By OthersideDeployer
The Pixel
The Pixel is a single pixel statement. It is created to validate. The Pixel is a digitally native artwork visually represented by a single pixel (1x1). It is a token that signs the most basic unit of a digital image in a traditional global auction house. It is a tiny mark to carry digitally native art to a potential future history.
Dream Gate
From "Dream Gate" series, created in 2018.
Rare Kratos
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