Tina Rivers Ryan on NFTs
Two frames from Chris Torres’s
Nyan Cat, 2011, GIF.
ON THE AFTERNOON of February 19 immediately after the classic internet meme known as Nyan Cat was auctioned for almost $600,000 digital art abruptly entered the most recent, and perhaps most heated, of its many hype cycles. In the weeks that followed, media outlets from
PBS NewsHour to
Saturday Night Live reiterated the story of record-breaking prices fueled by an enigmatic technology called the blockchain, which is a system used by techno-libertarians and anarcho-capitalists for encrypting immutable digital records in blocks of data across a decentralized chain of computers. Blockchains can be used to make fungible cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, and also nonfungible “tokens” that can act as surrogates of specific assets, whether tangible or digital including files that are freely available online. These tokens, or NFTs, are traded as if they were de
Aria Dean on Designing an Anti-Monument
The artist on her proposed
New Monument for Franksa Tomten and how minimalist aesthetics speak to the complex history of Sweden’s colonial past
Travis Diehl Your proposed
New Monument for Franksa Tomten (2020) would replace a pair of granite and bronze sculptures commemorating Swedish settlers in Delaware – a 1938 monument designed by Carl Milles that sits in Fort Christina Park in Wilmington and a replica installed 20 years later at Stenpiren in Gothenburg – with seven-metre-high monoliths of solid iron. To these would be added a third on the Caribbean island of St. Barts.
Aria Dean I identified three key dates in Swedish colonial history: the departure of the Swedes for America, the transfer of the then-colony of St. Barts from France to Sweden, and the establishment of the Swedish West India Company. People talk about Scandinavia with this sense of exceptionalism regarding colonialism and the slave trade, b
Featured in In the Chilling Shadows of a Biennial Yet to Be Seen
‘Made in L.A. 2020: a version’, slated to open in 2021, exposes the horrors of American life pre-pandemic
Before entering the long-delayed (and now revised) ‘Made in L.A. 2020: a version’, I pitied its poor curators, whose exhibition has been kyboshed by a succession of lockdowns. Originally scheduled to open in June, the biennial – split this year between the Hammer Museum and the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino – has lain partly dormant, partly unfinished. With (almost) all works installed, museum leaders allowed in a few members of the press, who, they hoped, might grant ‘Made in L.A. 2020’ a little exposure to daylight. (The biennial is currently expected to open to the public next year.)