NFT
London’s House of Fine Art (HOFA) gallery is one of the pioneers of the crypto art scene and was one of the first venues to NFT works of art in a physical space in 2021.
At the time, it had a somewhat conservative approach, focusing on CryptoPunks prints alongside physical sculptures and NFT-adjacent work.
This time, the “Beyond the Screen” exhibit turns up the digital element, with vibrant screens showcasing dazzling animated work from the likes of XCOPY, OSF, and DeeKay. But the word “NFT” is nowhere to be seen.
NFTs are “just a medium,” said NFT artist and collector Ovie Faruq, aka OSF, who showed Decrypt around space. “It’s like, do I have my painting on an oil canvas or do I have a photograph? Or do I have a screen with some digital art? It’s just a canvas; it’s just a mechanism to transact,” he added.
Ultimately, he argued, “people will start buying NFTs without knowing they are NFTs. And that’s the kind of thing that will get us over this, like the stigma attached to it.
1. Officially announcing my next 1/1, “superfan”.
How many $PEPE frogs can you count? 🐸
Link + info below 👇 pic.twitter.com/TTXDaYGSs8
— OSF (@osf_rekt) May 5, 2023
“We didn’t use the word NFT at all for this event,” OSF added. “The focus should be, this is digital art; we want to represent it in a way that people can resonate with it. That means shifting the focus from pricing and speculation to “artist champions,” he added.
It is therefore somewhat ironic that OSF’s own contribution to the exhibition, “Super Fan”, inadvertently predicted the current PEPE-led memecoin market frenzy. The digital artwork, which OSF drew “two or three months ago,” shows a “sort of loner” obsessed with Pepe the Frog, surrounded by market charts with green and red candles.
“It probably looks like a lot of people within cryptoculture,” OSF said. “Maybe also the COVID era. It’s a bit satirical.”
“Beyond the Screen” at HOFA. Image: HOFA
Also featured in the exhibit is XCOPY’s “MESCO TETRO” — “which none of the Americans have the reference of, but all of us, of course,” OSF said, admitting, “I still don’t really know if it might be based on Tesco plastic bags.” The work was one of the last XCOPY to be slapped on the shared SuperRare contract, he added. “They used to have one shared contract, so all the artists would hit on this contract. After SuperRare allowed artists to sign on their own sovereign contracts XCOPY announced that he would hit four final pieces on the shared SuperRare contract.” He sold one, he gave one away – so somebody made like £300,000 from the giveaway – and this is one of the unsold,” OSF said.
Other artists whose work is featured in the exhibition include animator DeeKay and photographer Cath Simard. “She does crazy expeditions and hikes, super dangerous stuff, and she captures his moments and uses composites to create a definitive image,” OSF said.
What the exhibition aims to show, OSF said, is that within the NFT art space “there are people with sincere intentions trying to achieve noble things. It gets swept up in this association with the crypto bro culture; none of these artists here is about that.”
“Beyond the Screen” runs at House of Fine Art until May 26.