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
Bloody Monkey
Artist notes: straight up side ya head + VERY valuable RED CIRCLE!! WOW.!!
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FIGHTOUT: JOIN THE FUTURE OF MOVE-TO-EARN Level up your health, earn rewards, and compete in the metaverse. FightOut will track your real life workouts and improve your avatar’s stats as you progress.
Who Is The Creator 2
The idea for this piece was borne out of a tweet of mine that caused a bit of a stir. I’d posted a link to a blog article I’d written a number of months previous titled ‘Who is the Creator’ discussing various types of creative collaborations and why I hire people to work on my animations. It generated a lot of debate around creation and attribution with the community split on whether it’s right or wrong for an artist to hire other professionals to help them realize their art projects. I decided to push the boundaries even further and see how the cryptoart community responded. What if I quite literally had nothing to do with the physical or digital elements of the work other than coming up with the concept and coordinating it? I decided there was one artist in the space who could add huge value to this idea on levels that none other could and so I gathered my courage and contacted the great José Delbo to ask him if he’d be interested in a very unique collaboration. I explained to him that to make this piece ‘work’ he couldn't have any say in what I produced and moreover, he wouldn’t even be allowed to see the animation until it was dropped on MakersPlace. To my surprise, Mr Delbo agreed to my proposal. The animation tells the story of the creative process, which includes my roles as writer, director, and producer working with a team and making edits and changes ‘in real time’. The dialogue between myself and my ‘hired guns’ plays out in front of the viewer. The music written for the piece adds to the nostalgia of the comic book superhero theme but other elements such as the snapping and kicking of the pencil and the signing of my signature at the bottom incorporates further layers and challenges the viewer to ask important questions, such as, is the ‘Art’ the final animation (the creation) or is the ‘Art’ the concept/credit for the creation itself?
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By OthersideDeployer