Talks
Anika Meier
On Curating NFTs. Value in the Age of Digital Scarcity
6 December 2024, 6pm
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NFTs have made collecting digital art as easy as collecting Pokémon cards. So, it’s no surprise that digital art resembles… Pokémon cards.
Is it just hype? Is it even art? What’s happening with digital art on NFT marketplaces? And how does one navigate this new space as a curator?
The media repeatedly reports that NFTs are either overpriced, worthless, or dead. Painting has been and continues to be constantly declared dead as well. So, it’s a good sign, that a new technology like NFTs can trigger such intense reactions and debates. But what exactly are NFTs? And what do NFTs have to do with the history of digital art?
Blockchain and NFTs have radically changed digital art. Suddenly, there’s a market for digital art that was difficult to sell until recently. Now JPEGs are achieving record sums in the millions. There’s talk of geese and dragons, of punks and apes, of squiggles and gazers. When the hype around NFTs began in 2021 following Beeple’s auction at Christie’s, there was talk of a revolution: the democratization of art. What has become of the revolution? Have NFTs actually contributed to the democratization of art?
In her lecture, Anika Meier provides an overview of the brief history of NFTs. This history begins with early blockchain art like Sarah Meyohas’ Bitchcoin and Jonas Lund’s Jonas Lund Token, and ends (currently) with pioneers of algorithmic art like Vera Molnár and Herbert W. Franke, and artists working with artificial intelligence like Mario Klingemann and Sougwen Chung. The pioneers of yesterday and the avant-garde of today show how new technologies can be used artistically and that NFTs can be more than Pokémon cards.
Anika Meier is a writer and curator specializing in digital art building EXPANDED.ART. She lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin, Germany, and teaches at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria, Class of UBERMORGEN, Department of Digital Art.
Among others, she wrote columns for Monopol and Kunstforum, built up KÖNIG DIGITAL for KÖNIG GALERIE, worked with CIRCA and Tezos on Marina Abramović‘s first NFT Drop, and with Herbert W. Franke on his NFT Drop MATH ART on Quantum. She was on the curation board of Art Blocks and is on the advisory board of Haus der Elektronischen Künste in Basel.
She is also a concept artist who creates text-based works that critically reflect value in the post-digital age, such as TWEETS FROM TWITTER, LOST FUTURES and TALE AS OLD AS TIME. She created UNSIGNED (2022) together with Operator, a collection of 100 signatures from women and non-binary artists to reverse the current negative value of the signatures through their transformation into artworks themselves.
Her most recent curated exhibitions include LeeMullican.PCX at FeralFile, Who Is Online? Game Art in the Age of Post-NFTism at HEK Basel (Virtual), Art NFT Linz at Francisco Carolinum in Linz, and Tribute to Herbert W. Franke (co-curated with Susanne Päch).
Her exhibitions have been written about, and her writing has been published in, among others, artnet, Hyperallergic, Monopol, Kunstforum, Spiegel, Tagesschau, and Right Click Save.