What a strange mix! How could urban art and digital art be linked in their spectacular and innovative approach in the 21st century?
HACKING PAINTING : A PHYGITAL CONTEMPORARY ART SALE TO URBAN AND DIGITAL PRACTICES
«HACKING PAINTING»
Urban Art + Digital Art NFT
First NFT Online auction sale
04/04/2024 - 14h30 PARIS
ARTISTS : SPACE INVADER / PHARELL WILLIAMS / ROBNESS / SYSTAIME / VHILS / FUTURA / YUE MINJUN / DRAN / REFIK ANADOL / JR / PURE EVIL / UTXOz / SOPHIE LAVAUD / LOUIS PAUL CARON / EKA / INSIGHT / LEE WELLS / PASCAL BOYART / QUIK / LAURENCE FULLER / PAUSER / GABI WALTHER / JONATHAN CHOMKO / FEWOCIOUS / AGORIA / MR.BRAINWASH / RICHARD NADLER / KEVIN ABOSCH / JAMES BLOOM / SEEN / JONONE...
NFT CURATION & COLLECTION:
Jean-Marc Scialom Zachary Dreyfus
CATALOGUE TO BID : https://drouot.com/fr/v/148918-hacking-painting
@ BLANCHET & associés, DROUOT.com, Paris.
As early as the 50s, artists were integrating the technology of their time into their work. In the 80s, Warhol himself had fun creating digital works on Macintosh and Commodore (works sold as NFTs at Christie’s in 2021). The 90s saw the emergence of net art, which struggled to find its place on the art market because digital works could be reproduced ad infinitum and had no associated property rights.
Contemporary art initiating urban practices was born in the spirit of the Russian Avant-garde in the early 20th century. Bourgeois or institutional museum art was opposed by art that was close to the people, art in the street. «From 1918 to 1926, the Institute of Decorative Arts played a very active role in decorating cities and processions during festivals... In 1920, for the second anniversary of the October Revolution, stage sets were installed on streetcars..., the decorative painting of the exhibition car of the Institute of Extracurricular Education...» (page 86 - La Russie à l’Avant-Garde, 1900-1935. Fonds Mercator, Europalia). The UNOVIS group (Chagall, Malevitch, Lissitzky) also painted tramway and trolleybus carriages and walls...
In 2018, everything changed with the democratization of web3, blockchain and NFTs, and in 2021, it was consecration following the successful sale of a work by the artist Beeple at Christie’s for $69.3 million. Thanks to blockchain, the digital work retains its aura of uniqueness, through its smart contract, which makes it non-reproducible and immutable. Each digital work, even if visually similar, becomes original because it is engraved in the blockchain, which validates it as a unique certificate. Urban artists are also playing with this technology.
On another continent and some 40 years later, young people from underprivileged neighborhoods in the United States, and more specifically in NYC, with a desire for social recognition, took the same approach, but this time in a non-conceptualized, purely instinctive way, spreading their art on subway train cars so that it could be seen by as many people as possible.
They unknowingly realize the vision of the Russian Avant-garde. Two spatial and temporal universes at opposite ends of the spectrum come together in a common approach that goes against the grain of the art market and its established codes, with a specific result: to open up the art world to the street, to life, and to inhabit the everyday.
New perspectives are opening up in the art world today as the barriers between the physical and digital worlds are erased, and that’s what I’m trying to convey in this sale, which is called «HACKING PAINTING» (Hacking for hacking the codes of art or computers, Painting for both physical and digital painting).
A direct relationship between the viewer and the artist and his work, without the formalism of the gallery, museum or institution. The immediacy of seeing a tag or a mural is juxtaposed with the immediacy of «clicking» on your cell phone or computer to access digital works. As digital artist Sytaime points out: «the Internet is a new world where networks are the equivalent of streets, and the post-digital of tag or graffiti». This idea was a precursor to the future and present of the Internet and its global network.
Continuous flows of spectators in the city are replaced by flows of network spectators behind their computer or telephone screens. Real and virtual worlds converge and interpenetrate. The lettering (the very essence of graffiti) and/or shapes on the walls that define the work are answered by the writing of the hidden code (work file) from which the digital image visible on the screen results. There’s a constant to-and-fro between the real and the digital. Technology moves into the real: augmented artworks, digitalized and pixelated murals, films... and establishes a dialogue with the virtual: QR codes, websites, NFTs, virtual worlds, games, avatars...