EventsThe New Social Environment#255

Art on the Blockchain: Debates on NFTs & Crypto Art

Tuesday, March 16, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

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Please join us for a discussion with Ry David Bradley, Claudia Hart, Steven Sacks, and Anne Bracegirdle, led by professor Charlotte Kent. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from Sam Riviere.

In this Talk

Christie’s recent auction of a work on the blockchain increased speculation on the blockchain realm. Variously called crypto art, NFTs, and blockchain art, artists and galleries are embracing its potential. How does it work? Why does it work? Is it an art work or just a form of currency? What are the environmental concerns? Is it a way to help artists retain some fiscal control over their work? Is it just a tech bro scam? Join long-standing participants in the digital art realm for a discussion on why they have now decided to make this a part of their studio practice or to sell it through their galleries.

Ry David Bradley

A photo of Ry David Bradley on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Courtesy of Unite London
(b.1979, Melbourne) lives and works in London, New York City and Melbourne. Bradley has exhibited internationally including LA, London, New York, Berlin, Brussels, Milan, Cologne, Sydney and Melbourne. His work often shifts media but always looks closely at painting in the 21st century, the new opportunities and the shortcomings in our digital moment. Recent solo exhibitions include “Post Truth II” at Galerie Derouillon, Paris; “Unvalley Valley” at Evelyn Yard, London; “Not To Be Digitized” at Tristian Koenig, Sydney and “Where Do You Want to Go Today” at Brand New Gallery, Milan. His work debuted in the USA with Bill Brady Gallery in Kansas City in 2015 with “Access All Areas.” His work has recently been added to the permanent collection of the Victoria Museum in Melbourne.

    Anne Bracegirdle

    A photo of Anne Bracegirdle on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    An art + blockchain thought leader, currently Head of Sales US for Convelio and Co-Founder of the Art & Antiquities Blockchain Consortium. She previously led digital strategy at Superblue, and while at Christie’s New York, she spearheaded the Art + Tech Initiative which included the 2018 conference ‘Exploring Blockchain: Is the Art World Ready for Consensys?’ During her ten years at Christie’s she was a specialist of Russian Art, 19th Century European Art, and Photographs. Anne speaks widely on the topic of art and blockchain and has been cited in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Forbes, The Art Newspaper, among others.

      Claudia Hart

      A photo of Claudia Hart on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
      Claudia Hart emerged as part of 90s intermedia artists in the “identity art” niche. Her work is about issues of the body, perception, nature collapsing into technology. She considers it Cyborg-ish, creating liminal spaces, and is in love with the interface between real and unreal because it is space of contemplation and transformation. Hart’s work is symbolist and poetic. Hart calls her work “post photography,” and has created a body of theoretic writings and exhibitions based on this concept. At SAIC, she developed a pedagogic program called Experimental 3D, and is the first art-school curriculum teaching simulations technologies in the art world. She lives in New York and Chicago, shows with Transfer and bitforms galleries and is married to Austrian media artist Kurt Hentschlager.

        Steven Sacks

        A photo of Steven Sacks on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
        Founder and director of bitforms gallery, a leader in digital, internet and new media art. Since 2001, the New York bitforms gallery has been advocating and supporting media art, showing artists who push into the boundaries of this territory, including Casey Reas, Quayola, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, R. Luke DuBois, Marina Zurkow, Manfred Mohr, among others. Steven is an expert in the new media landscape and its evolving nature, as well as an authority on collecting and preserving digital art.

          Charlotte Kent

          A photo of Charlotte Kent on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment

          Associate professor of visual culture at Montclair State University Charlotte Kent, PhD, is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Railand a contributor to assorted books on art and technology, including as co-editor of Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art (Intellect Books, 2024), co-author of Midnight Moment: A Decade of Artists in Times Square (Monacelli Press, 2024), and editor of Generation to Generation (Vetro, 2026). She is the recipient of grants from NEH and Google Art + Machine Intelligence, with a forthcoming book on contemporary art and technoabsurdity. She is a member of the College Art Association’s Committee on Intellectual Property.

          The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

          Dao Strom

          A photo of Dao Strom on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
          Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

          We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨

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