If you take the scale of a mega pharma expo, infuse it with burning man optimism and a sprinkle of celebrity magic, you come up with something approaching Psychedelic Science, the world’s largest psychedelic conference held in downtown Denver for a week in June.
Quarterback Aaron Rogers speaks, the Inflamed lips give a show, and at the same time Christie’s offers an exhibition of the hallucinogenic reflections of more than 30 artists. This is an IRL presentation of “soul mapping”, a sale running until June 27 on Christie’s 3.0, the auction house’s platform for chain art.
There’s a blurry line to draw between 1960s psychedelia and decentralization maxim of today’s blockchain revolution. Both ends share a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo and it is, to some extent, the countercultural spirit of the California hippie movement that has fueled the Silicon Valley boom. Today, the digital world created by these dreamers-turned-tech moguls is one that Web3 both builds and rejects.
mad dog Jones, A gust of wind (2023). Photo courtesy of Christie’s.
Some of the works organized by Christie’s and 10F1A NFT collectors’ club, a nod to this story. by Sasha Stiles Analog binary code: (non)fungible features zeros and ones in differently colored mushroom capsules (maitake and turkey tail, to be precise) that make up a poem. The Fantastic of Harry Pack biomorphic blues seems to evoke the back-to-nature spirit of the 60s with something curly and colorful due to Heinz Edelmann’s illustrations of yellow submarine fame. And The fall by Klara Vollstaedt is a personal video exploration of the push and pull of creation in today’s digital reality.
More Powerful, according to 1OF1’s Lukas Amacher, thinks about the show holistically rather than its composite parts.
“True to the decentralized structure of mycelia, rather than choosing artists’ works, this exhibition asked them to contribute to a network of ideas,” he said. “Mycelia and plant networks have the same governance properties as Web3. The whole is about the network of nodes rather than the individual nodes. »
Dee Kay, self discovery (2023). Photo courtesy of Christie’s.
For the second consecutive year, the sale will benefit the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. This time, Christie’s hopes to raise north of $600,000 for psychedelic therapy research and judging by the list of artists who have donated their work, it could well top that number.
Auction most confident about DeeKay’s prospects self discovery (fixed bid $77,000), which adopts the flat aesthetic of platform video games and plays out the somersaults, jumps, and slides of hapless animated characters in a dizzying loop.
Other names include tech duo Holly Herndon and Mathew Drygate who offer Ditch, an organized heap of indecipherable metal objects that combine monstrously; And Mad Dog Joneswhose future fuchsia-tinted cityscapes have sold for millions, offers A gust of wind which depicts an office worker meditating in a dilapidated alley. Nadya Tolokonnikova from Pussy Riot given This art rejects fear in which she copes with her treatment in the Russian justice system through physical labor (attached to an NFT) reminiscent of forced needlework in a penal colony.
“This sale offers buyers a unique opportunity,” said Nicole Sales Giles of Christie’s Digital Art Department, “to collect digital artwork at a range of price points and aesthetics while supporting a wonderful organization.” .
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