Press Text
Art and the Blockchain, a new temporary exhibition in Amsterdam that is open between the 21st and 23rd of April, seeks to expose some of the myths surrounding the subject and show the complexity of the new cultural phenomenon of NFTs. Though the conversation around NFTs in popular media and on social media has mainly been about the astronomical sale sums and how the technology might upend the art world, the idea and practice behind it are much more complex than NFTs as simple facilitators and sale mechanisms.
Likewise, the aesthetics that we are commonly presented with are not representative of NFT space and the ecosystem, there is a lot more depth and width to the practice. Art and the Blockchain takes a step away from these preconceptions and aims to present a new way of seeing NFTs and blockchain art, as something with deep roots in the tradition of digital art.
Combining digital native NFTs with more commonly known physical art formats, all carefully selected by the curators, Art and the Blockchain looks at the wider practice of the artists, drawing direct correlations to the history and methods of digital art. Furthermore, the combination of the two, the physical and the digital, in the exhibition highlights the interdependence of both in the practices of all of the exhibited artists - how the physical informs the digital and vice versa.
By selecting a number of artworks from the plethora of NFT and blockchain art, the exhibition opens up for a discussion around NFTs and the medium’s broadness. The included artworks reflect upon the medium, bringing us generative, instructional, self-destroying and mutating works, showing AR virtual installations, GIFs, web and movies, from abstraction, through conceptualism to hyperrealism.
