London Digital Art Week, Art Basel, Martin Shkreli gossip, and more #hearsay

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Dear Hearsay readers,

It had been a busy week, most of it spent in London sad and depressed, it’s a special kind of hell when the weather is terrible and you’re feeling blah and not in the mood. Anyway, I have a lot of personal news to report as I’m heading back to Warsaw next week, so crypto Polskis please hit us up!

But unfortunately when it comes to rumors…

Is Martin Shkreli launching another token?

“Together with my 10 colleagues, we are working tirelessly to establish a startup. Shkreli recently wrote about the project: We’re starting to do good work, we have significant investors, “We’re doing some work on AI, and we’re working heavily with GPUs.”

Warning? Shkreli was complaining that a fellow inmate he met in prison had taken five million tokens of the project that Shkreli had donated to him before the launch, pumping the project into private Discord channels while also throwing away his own tokens. Getting an erection from someone you met in prison. Sheesh, ‘pharmabro’ can’t seem to catch a break.

Scam alert: @_d3f4ult.

Background story. I met this kid in prison. He seemed nice so he kept her as a friend. We chatted here and there. He wanted to rearrange his life in crypto trading. Cool.

Together with my 10 colleagues, we are working tirelessly to establish a startup.

— Martin Shkreli (e/acc) (@MartinShkreli) April 25, 2024

Speaking of toxic men, Andrew Tate recently used X to sing the praises of Bitcoin. Yes, that’s right: The world’s most hated how-to-be-a-man expert tweeted his support for Bitcoin while under house arrest in Romania. His logic? He is against oppression! Or possibly tax evasion in his case.

Digital Art Week London kicked off with a bang last week, proving that NFTs are far from dead. They’re in displays like the Ventana LED, incredibly thin digital bullets that I encountered at the Ideaworks Experience in Mayfair, where a champagne reception was held to celebrate the work of digital artists Yuma Yanagisawa and Ryan Koopmans. Koopmans is an OG in digital art photography, known for his depictions of post-Soviet ruins in places like Georgia and Armenia; His landscapes often draw on tensions between death and rebirth, between life and its tenuous and omnipresent end.

Ex-communist detritus aside, Yuga Labs has announced another round of layoffs due to a waning appetite for PFPs (profile picture NFTs). Yuga Labs CEO wrote of X: “Simply put: Yuga has lost its way.” “Keeping ourselves centered and on track means being a smaller, more agile, crypto-enabled team.” Ah, it seems PFPs are a bit stale?

Things we are looking forward to: Digital Art Mile at Art Basel fair, June 10-16. The event will be the first digitally focused subsection of the massive Art Basel fair in Switzerland, which will take place in Basel’s Rebgasse district, just a stone’s throw from the main fair. The new Digital Art Trail is led by web3 native collectors and curators George Bak and Roger Haas, and will include work by Basel veterans Tezos as well as other web3-focused galleries and crypto art initiatives.

At the last opening of the Venice Biennale in April, there seems to have been little room for digital presentations, apart from the melancholy presentation of Sam Spratt’s Monument Play organized and curated by 1OF1 (on view until 23 June 2024). Spratt’s newest organic hallucination of Venice comes with original artwork and a game; It’s a sign that digital art (and discontents with video games and world-building) can be seen as a real shift in the largely binary (i.e., hand-coded morality system). digital art history. There are interesting developments everywhere.

I am very excited to announce that my first solo exhibition and the first stop of The Monument Game and Luci’s story so far will be in Venice, Italy. @1OF1_art

The Monument Game was created as a digital experience born from a life behind the computer and… pic.twitter.com/u4vqhOX7bK

— Sam Spratt (@SamSpratt) March 12, 2024

Speaking of the Venice Biennale, which I unfortunately missed due to token2049 in Dubai, Autism Capital nailed my classical perspective on most, if not all, art/crypto events.

All kidding aside, NFTs appear to be far from dead. These are just layers of dust and speculative settlements of time and effort. A rare pepe and artwork, a symbol of digital care; a sign that this is important, a rubber stamp for a generation of netizens.

That’s all for this week folks; Stay thirsty and don’t forget to touch the grass 🙂

Your humble writer, on a rare sunny day in London, England. April 30, 2024. Read more: London Digital Art Week, Art Basel, Martin Shkreli rumors and more #hearsay | Idea