First Global Cryptoart Exhibition in Shanghai and Simulacra

The first Global NFT Cryptoart Exhibition by CryptoArt.AI in Shanghai and Diving into the Third Order in Simulacra from Jean Baudrillard.

Cryptoart and its legacy

The event was organised by CryptoArt.Ai and was the first global-scale NFT cryptoart exhibit held in Shanghai and opened on May 29th. It caused a great reaction as NFT broke into the mainstream at the beginning of the year with controversies and discussions, due to the pandemic there has not been a holistic and art history-based digital art exhibition globally.

It also made several ‘first’ and records in history with 27 artists and groups and their almost 100 pieces of work. The auction record holder of digital art Beeple also presented his artwork The First 500 Days on a massive 16-metre screen.

Other renowned artists like Pak, mbsjq, Ouchhh, and multiple emerging Chinese artists have brought their excellent and rewarded works. Curator Du Xiyun and Qin Jianxin studied the history of digital art and dated back the origin of digital art to 1948.

This was when Norber Wiener published his Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, where he discussed the cybernetic is a cross-disciplinary study on how humans, animals, and machines communicate and control with each other. Extending to the art world, it showed how humans make an influence on apparatus, or vice versa, including the interaction between humans and machines.

With this theory of application of contemporary technology, they could trace back the earliest experiment on digital art, like Laposky’s oscillogram to CGI, as the internet emerged, we saw the internet art/post-internet art, and cryptoart based on blockchain technologies. The exhibition was intended to have depth, besides the ‘flashy’ experience are in-depth brief history of digital art to introduce the context for the audience.

More than seven decades have been condensed into one show. As the authors say, when people are experiencing something shocking and happening, our existence and position as ‘insiders’ usually blinded us, so that we can’t realise the shocking effect.

Especially for the ‘gatekeeper’ in the art world, as the authors state, maintaining the old order and monopoly system is the ‘best choice’. Curator Du Xiyun compared the shock with Robert Hugh’s book/documentary The Shock of the New.

As the authors state, impressionism and modern/contemporary art have always been challenging old perceptions of art. Cryptoart has an equivalent shock value as well, shocking the art medium and the way of art dealing and understanding ‘authenticity’.

When art can be duplicated, how does one measure authenticity? Blockchain coincides with the idea of an artwork’s uniqueness which also protects the artist’s rights. Cryptoart is not only about making shocking records in auctions and the art world, the shock will reform aesthetics and styles.

In other words, cryptoart even though mostly innovative in the crypto world, but the influence will impact more of the art aspect with time.For the indigenous residents on the internet, they are the generation that uses digital tools to create art, but with the new driven factor and momentum, digital artists will naturally push the boundaries of creativity.

The exhibition was largely inspired by ‘A Realistic Shocking of the Virtual Authenticity’, the curators Du Xiyun and Qin Jianxin noted the growing landscape of digital art. With that, the authors felt you must pay mind to Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation (1994).

It is paid tribute by the Matrix, and introduced the concept of simulacra, in the third order of simulacra, the simulated is more real than the real. As a result, the real is at the mercy of the simulated,  elaborating on this Baudrillard also introduced On Exactitude in Science (1946) by Jorges Luis Borges.

To quote the authors, “This is how we are eventually living in the third-order of simulacra when the value of simulated sign/symbol is greater than the value of itself. And living in it means that we don’t consume the real products anymore, but rather to consume the symbol of it.

On this level, it also coincides with René Girard’s theory on the ‘mimetic desire’, in which he stated that our desires are coming from mimicking the others’. Our admiration, desire to possess are based on other people’s desires. Hence, an object is sublimed (or downgraded) to a simplified symbol.”

To learn more about this event, the curators, and the art works, check out the link here.