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NFT vs. traditional art collecting

Hype & Hyper
2021

Text: Lilla Gollob

 

Is it really the end of physical artworks? NFT vs. traditional art collecting

 

At the beginning of last year, most of us had never heard of the NFT (non-fungible token) acronym; however, in one year, the editors of the Scottish Collins Dictionary had already chosen it as the word of 2021. The new medium is fundamentally shaking up the art market: it redefines the relationship between art and money, the psychological aspects of art collection, and the artifacts’ conceptuality. Many have taken the plunge into crypto art, but there are plenty of skeptics too.

 

NFT SUX – group show | TOBE Gallery

 

TOBE, a contemporary photography gallery, has organized an NFT critical exhibition in the summer of 2021. “We came up with our NFT SUX group exhibition in the wake of the COVID shutdowns and the NFT craze, with the primary aim of saving community life. We felt that we had to do something for the physical presence. We think it’s not necessary (yet), and most of all, we don’t have to get too involved in the ‘ethereal marketplace’ straight away to make art enjoyable or purchasable. We added the word SUX (referring to sucks—the Ed.) in the title because we felt that the air around NFT is not clean yet, and this has since been proven, with several cases of plagiarism. It’s quite clear that it will be a new gateway, but we don’t know what kind and who will “fit” through it. Or I mean, we suspect that somebody who does this diligently, full-time, in front of the monitor. We have invited many renowned foreign artists to the exhibition, and the displayed works contain many elements that point to this changing world. We could keep on writing and talking about this, or ‘looking at the screen,’ but we still want to stay and continue to be active in the physical space,” Bea Puskás and Tomas Opitz, the gallery’s directors, shared with us.

 

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