Your Weekly MOCA Round-Up

What's Up In Our World c. September 25th

Performance art exhibitions, podcasts, and a visit to some classic MOCA writing.

1. AND: AN EXHIBITION ON BLOCKCHAIN
AND PERFORMANCE ART (CURATED BY OONA AND PRESENTED IN COLLABORATION WITH THE MUSEUM OF CRYPTO ART AND ZORA) IS NOW LIVE

As of this past Thursday, MOCA’S newest exhibition is open for business. Featuring works by SamJ, Violet Bond, Edgar Fabián Frías, David Henry Nobody Jr., DADAGAN, and the exhibition’s curator, OONA, “AND” is what you could call a Theoretical Exhibition, a performance in and of itself.

Okay so, when OONA was on the podcast this past week (more on that in a bit), we talked about the way performance art documentation on the blockchain inherently allows audiences to approach these performances in their own time, providing in accessibility what the performance may lack —because it’s stuck behind a screen instead of experienced viscerally in person— in immediacy. So then, how do you even exhibit performance artworks together if not in a single space? Without six stages erected all around a physical audience, featuring performance artworks on each, how can multiple performances be transferred across the digital sphere and still be “exhibited?”

Answer: In “AND!” a single NFT is currently for sale for .015ETH on Zora, and which will remain on sale until Monday, September 25th. All proceeds from the “AND!” NFT sales will be split evenly between the six representative artists. A day later, on the 26th, the six artists previously mentioned will each release their dedicated performance artworks on a free claim-page for everyone who purchased the “AND!” NFT. The catch is that each artist has also already released these performances for individual sale at a higher price, with the proceeds going to them (and them alone). Take a look at all the performance pieces:

Echo Chamber by David Henry Nobody Jr.

Dust and Hair by Violet Bond

L1M1N@L W1TCH by Edgar Fabían Frías

Web of Fortune by OONA

Narcissus by SamJ

🚀 4 Tips To Become The Ultimate Artist Machine 🤖 by Dadagan

by clicking their cute, pink names. Since performance art on blockchain is inherently extricated from chronology, experiencing them together is a matter of seeing them together, owning them together, stumbling back upon them together weeks/months/years from now.

This Theoretical Performance deals with issues of value, individuality, notoriety, chronology, and immediacy, among other things that end in “y”. The full explanation and treatise on “AND!” is available for your perusal (and as a free mint)

→→→→→here ←←←←←←. But you’ll find a lil sneak peak below:

2. MOCA LIVE Episode 32: All of Crypto Art’s a Stage (At Long Last)

We’ve got OONA on the Live podcast this week talking not just “AND!” but all about blockchain-based performance art in 2023:

“Our first-ever guest, the anonymous performance artist OONA, returns to the podcast to talk about the incredible eruption of blockchain performance art over the course of 2023. OONA's unique insights from years spent creating blockchain-based performance art encompass perspective, provocativeness, creative sales mechanics, and much much more. Visit @museumofcrypto or @madebyoona on Twitter to learn more about "AND" the collaborative performance art exhibition mentioned often in this podcast”

3. Throwback To Cohen’s First-Ever Feature Essay: “The End of Art (as we know it) (again)

(or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bored Apes)

Newly-arrived (all things considered) into crypto art, I wrote this essay with input from SamJ, Hackatao, and LuluXXX about whether PFP projects had any artistic value, and, you know what, I believed they did. I still think I do (if you squint). I’ll leave you today with that essay’s deliberately melodramatic intro:

Prologue: An Admission of Guilt

This is not the piece I wanted to write. This is not the piece I wanted you to see.

I wanted to write about how the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), and the many Profile Picture projects (PFP’s) it spawned, were the collective Trojan Horse that would wheedle Contemporary Art World tastemakers –-their hierarchies and impossible criticism and exclusivity– into the world of Crypto Art, hitherto a hotbed of free creativity and community, pure, self-sustaining, and egalitarian. Bored Ape Yacht Club, I was sure, would destroy it. And I wanted that on the record.

I wanted this piece to be suitably vicious. I wanted to let loose unassailable points and contentious questions, all part of a larger assault on prototypical BAYC holders, their smug grins and smelly maleness and unquestioning adherence to an outdated status quo of wealth. These mostly male millionaires who could only imagine using their profits in the most pompous possible way: with exclusive yacht parties, $800 hoodies, public boasting about their membership in a prestigious club, one everyone wants to be in, one you want to be in too, but you can’t, ah-hah-ha, because you aren’t them.

Only I couldn’t write that piece, even though I wanted to. Because it wouldn’t be accurate in the least. Because the premise is utter bullshit, an unfair overreaction at best.

And so, this piece is nothing like what I wanted it to be. I didn’t ever want to venture into the personal. I didn’t ever want to be so goddamn understanding, even flattering. I didn’t want to start with soap, either. But alas, the best laid plans of mice and men and monkeys…

Read the full essay now, for a little glimpse into how crypto art and the entire NFT landscape has changed in the last 21 months.

Oh, and starting this week, we’ll have double the podcasts for you. Vibes. Subscribe to the MOCA LIVE podcast on Spotify and Apple to hear the first episode of “Current Events with Max and Colborn” a show where the two of us talk about what’s what in the crypto art world sans preparation. Should be loony.

That’s all for this week. See ya’ll real soon.

xoxo,

MOCA