Long time, no see - we’ve had a hectic month and little time to work on the transcripts of our Café JPG Tuesday sessions, but we’re back now!
This is the transcript from the Valentine’s day edition of Café JPG, when we invited two very different and interesting powerhouses in the NFT world, Sofia Garcia and Micol Ap and by a stroke of magic (and Covid) Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan spontaneously joined the dialogue - perfectly on time, since some days before our session, both LACMA and Centre Pompidou had announced NFT acquisitions as “firsts”, forgetting maybe to mention that Buffalo AKG Museum’s Peer to Peer curated by Tina, had happened back in December 2022, and that there were multiple other institutions already on the same game.
The conversation went quite long and covered a wide range of topics, so for the edit, we decided to focus on the three experts talking about institutional acquisitions of NFTs.
Introductions
Micol: I’m the founder of VerticalCrypto Art, and a curator, I started VerticalCrypto almost three years ago now. We do a bunch of things, but mainly we have a curated platform. We host exhibitions both online and in real life. We've actually been quite active recently in doing exhibitions pretty much all over the world, from the U.S. to Europe. We have an ongoing exhibition right now actually in London focused on generative art. So, the latest, let's say most latest, news is that we announced the Art Blocks Engine integration last week. That means that now we are powering long-form generative art drops, which is very exciting and very fun.
Sofia: I am the founder of ARTXCODE, which actually started off as just my anon Instagram account, I think in 2015, 2016, where I just wanted to find out who else was into this weird creative coding, generative art thing. Since then, we started doing exhibitions and all that jazz, and nowadays it really has evolved into a full-time job and it's amazing. We really refocused our initiatives now into artist management and representation. It seems like it's really the best use of my team's skill set and my skill set, really helping artists navigate the space, understand all the crazy opportunities that are coming their way. And be behind the scenes and supporting them, having their back and making sure that the best projects come out. We also do exhibitions every now and then. We have one solid one that we will be planning this year for Paris+ in October, I'm really excited about that.
Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan joined the conversation later, so we’ve sourced her bio directly from her website: Tina Rivers Ryan is a curator, art historian, and critic specializing in art since the 1960s. She holds five degrees in art history, including a BA from Harvard and PhD from Columbia. Although broadly trained in Western art, her particular expertise is in the field of media art, including video, digital, and internet art. Throughout her career, Dr. Ryan has worked with some of the world's leading art institutions and organizations, including The Met, MoMA, and Artforum. She has received some of the most prestigious honors for curators and critics, including: Association of Art Museum Curators Award for Excellence (2022), Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (2022), Artnet Innovators List (2022)
On institutional acquisitions and firsts
Sofia: LACMA, I know, has been pretty thorough with regards to doing the work. I've met a few of the curators and they've worked with a few of the artists that I've been working with over the last few years. The PR is however, really, really absurd. Tina did an amazing curation and show last year during Art Basel, they are not the first ones to do something like that. But as a whole, it's amazing to see them take NFTs seriously, it's really enlightening to see just two major institutions this year come in, in two weeks' time, to show their support.
Micol: I agree. I was actually speaking to Robness, earlier this year and he did hint something to me, so I knew that this was coming. I think it was interesting for me to see what were the whole works that were acquired and what type of works were acquired. Which I think speaks a lot to what institutions are also looking for and what speaks to institutions, iconic works within not just the Web3 space, but actually how artists work with blockchain art. I spoke to some collectors about the acquisitions and they were like, "Oh, you know, I didn't even know about, you know, this project or this artist." Which, in a way, sometimes speaks to the vacuum that we're in, with NFT Twitter. It is a very close-knit community. And that sometimes doesn't speak to actually what is being created outside of this close-knit community and what are the experiments that are being made with blockchain art and what are institutions actually validating in that sense, as well.
MP (moderator, JPG): Those are excellent points, both Sofia and Micol. I'm no professional curator, but I'm actually quite disappointed that both of these institutions have not collected either Rhea Myers nor Mitchell Chan. Buffalo AKG has done them both, because of what they represent to NFTs and blockchain art. These are not only two big artists in the space, but also people that have been trailblazers that did it before anyone else. So are institutions really missing out on the historicity of NFTs.
Sofia: We saw this with MoMA with their acquisition of Refik Anadol's work, it feels safe, if that makes sense. I think that they can see the traction that these works already have in the community. And being able to get people through their doors, I guess, is one way of thinking about it, and getting that support from this community that I think that they do want. It takes a little bit more to understand what Rhea and Mitchell are trying to do. And I think what Tina did so well in her curation was really push the boundaries, and push what people really consider to be these important works in this ecosystem at the moment.
Micol: I also think that there's something to think about, like who is having these conversations with the institutions and who are the artists that they are presenting and pushing. I think it is definitely playing it very safe. Most artists are already well known in the contemporary art space. Right? So, yes, they have done NFTs. Yes, they have done incredible work. But still, they are, one foot here and one foot there, kind of. So, in a way, institutions are saying, you know, "We're interested, we're coming in, but we're still, you know, playing it safe."
Tina: I think there's a temptation to think about museum collections, in part because of how museums and institutions talk about themselves, as being objective, as reflecting some type of universal truth about quality. But as we all know, thanks to 50 years of post-structuralism and deconstruction, and postcolonialism, these institutions actually reflect really subjective and partial ideas about quality and history. And so this question of “who is helping shape these collections?” will do a lot to answer the questions of why these collections are taking shape the way that they are.
Every museum has its own history, its own geographic context, its own, you know, curatorial staff, its own board, and, you know, its own community. And all of these things should come together to produce a relatively unique collection. That reflects all of the people who are part of, you know, making it a particular moment in time. It’s okay that these collections look different and that the collection that we've built at the Buffalo AKG, which includes artists like Mitchell Chan and Rhea Myers, is different from what other museums are building. Right?
I just sort of wanted to preface what I'm about to say by saying that. So, did anybody catch the ARTnews article that Shanti wrote that came out about the LACMA acquisition yesterday? There was one paragraph that really kind of took me by surprise. In this article, she writes, "Generative art—works of abstracted art made with code that has been minted on a blockchain," which, by the way, is a very particular definition of generative art, let's put it that way, "—has come to represent the most artistic contribution that the NFT scene has had to offer, especially in the heady days of 2021's NFT boom.". Granted that this shouldn't have been surprising because the title of this article is "LACMA Has Acquired a Who's Who of Blockchain Art by an Important Generative Artist." Which speaks to the large role that Art Blocks artists played in this particular acquisition, but also alienates a lot of the other artists who came into this acquisition that are not generative artists. And also the fact that, together with the donation from Cozomo, which is one thing, they simultaneously have acquired a bunch of other works that are not part of that. There's actually a couple different things happening simultaneously here and I don't think they're all generative art. There's a weird conservatism about what it means to make blockchain art. And it's like the entire history of conceptual engagement with the blockchain has been completely erased. All those artists like Simon Denny for example, who have engaged with the economic and material history of blockchain technology.** **
MP: In the light of, who dictates what and who is in touch with, which collector and who's talking to whom, I think that the idea and the small initiative of JPG crowdsourcing the knowledge from people on what we believe is actually canonical or not, or what we believe should be considered by the wider audience, it's even more important than, you know, we originally thought. As we build our own infrastructure, we're also building our own sort of parallel, and very friendly art history that can totally coexist with the art history that we know. So, it's really important to continue the efforts of curation, the efforts of archiving, the efforts of hosting residencies, like the guys at VerticalCrypto do. Or, you know the work that Sofia has been doing in pushing forward all of these incredible artists that have become the heavyweights of this space. ** **
(This interview has been condensed and edited)** **
For more Café JPG, we meet every Tuesday at 1PM ET, on Twitter Spaces.
If you want to continue the conversation, we’re always on Discord ready to debate!
Cover image is Mitchell F. Chan’s Winslow Homer’s Croquet Challenge (2022) for Peer to Peer - Buffalo AKG