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ART IS NOT SYNONYMOUS OF PROFIT!

Museum Link:  https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/permanent-collection?collection=0xe6dc6f2577bc0cb55c0dca518bd8121b206d557d&token=43&page=2

Source Link: https://opensea.io/assets/0xe6dc6f2577bc0cb55c0dca518bd8121b206d557d/43

Date Minted: April 28, 2020

Artist Description: Cryptoart “ART IS NOT SYNONYMOUS OF PROFIT!” is a digital collectible in GIF format and will have only 1 piece issued. Please do not see art only as a merchandise for profit. Art has an immensity of dimensions. Art is the infinite!

CohentheWriter’s Commentary:

Look at that title, all caps, punctuated with an exclamation mark. Look at the piece itself, how it seems to shake with rage, barely contained. Is ART IS NOT SYNONYMOUS OF PROFIT! a cry to the heavens? Is it a man in rags on the side of the road shouting at passing cars? Is it a defiance personified? Is it ultimately futile? ART IS NOT SYNONYMOUS OF PROFIT! has all the emotion, the kneejerk suddenness, even the color and technical construction, to construe itself as any of the above. Without much in the way of visual information to parse out, we’re left to wonder, or, perhaps, to fill in the blanks ourselves. Which of the above voices to do we ourselves hear shouting “ART IS NOT SYNONYMOUS OF PROFIT!” Whichever it is, it might as well be the one the piece centers around. Artist Nino Arteiro is all of us when gripped by this phrase, this feeling. Arteiro is the entire space. Arteiro, channeling a fury so powerful and so instantaneous, creates these words to be spoken in the ur-voice, beyond just yours and mine, beyond ownership, a cry not just to the heavens but from it. And maybe that’s why the phrase is physically depicted floating in space.

ART IS NOT SYNONYMOUS OF PROFIT! is tremendously simple in design. The piece centers around two words and a symbol. ART, in all caps; the unequal sign, below it, and PROFIT!, similarly styled, along the bottom edge of the image. The text is lit up in bright scarlet, the most prominent color, one splashed atop a black background dotted over in glitter-like squares, flashing on/off, popping up frenetically like angry zits, grey and olive green and brown and neon green and silver. Bars of color sometimes appear from the side of the screen, the entire effect apparently seeking to recreate a computer in some stage of malware infection, or as if the words in the image are so powerful they’re physically breaking the graphics around them into pixels. The words, as mentioned, shake in place. Or, perhaps, the angle with which we’re viewing them is the shaking thing, with the words being static. Either way, there is a tension, if not an outright fury, baked into the piece itself, as if we’re biting down hard, too stressed, becoming red-faced. 

The words themselves, ART and and PROFIT!, have all been rendered here rather childishly, bearing the hallmarks of a birth in Microsoft Paint. The letters do not sit on a line, but rather approximate one. They’re bent, twisted, and without uniformity. Lines criss-cross and pass through each other, like in the letter A, which here is depicted with its horizontal center line extended through its other diagonal lines, and those two criss-crossing where they meet and continuing outward, until the letter seems less like what it is and more like an arcane symbol. It all lends itself to some kind of infantile expression, infantile not meaning poor quality but literally as if representing something nascent or not yet fully-formed. We are given the impression that these words have erupted from the primordial ether, that they are beyond specific characterization or font. It’s almost as if Arteiro has less created these words and more captured them in a moment of apotheosis, once they have momentarily garnered form and legibility.

Otherwise, ART IS NOT SYNONYMOUS OF PROFIT! demonstrates Crypto Art’s general distaste for classically contemporary art world practices of profiteering and investment-centralization. One can see this piece as an extension of the Basquiat aesthetic, one where the lack of specific technical artistry isn’t a knock against the artist, it’s the point of the piece. Few have lately purchased a Basquiat because of its fine technique. But in his work was something beyond the art-school definition of value, which Picasso himself first railed against but would, later and through no fault of his own, come to define. Similarly, Arteiro has shirked off any desire or need for traditional “beauty,” and what is presented to us instead is something that has traded that paradigm of beauty for one of effect and tension. There’s no mistaking the feeling this piece causes in us, especially when, through contrast, it calls to mind its foils: pieces of so-called “high art,” made through techniques gatekeeper behind the walls of expensive institutions, which have traditionally been used to justify inordinate prices in art. The works of “old masters,” for example. Basquiat came along and challenged that paradigm. Arteiro is continuing that work. 

ART IS NOT SYNONYMOUS OF PROFIT! is not pretty. It’s not overtly aesthetic. It doesn’t aim to be. It’s momentary and capricious, capturing the sudden mindset of a perspective overcome with emotion. And in that way, it’s extremely effective. We are asked, by the apparent infantilism of the various techniques, to think about the nature of art itself, if it need be “beautiful,” or if it need be “effective,” or if communication of an individual’s unique perspective is enough to justify it. That’s a central question M○C△ seeks to explore: What is art? Arteiro is interested in exploring the same thing, and here, details their findings. What is art? It sure as hell ain’t profit. Process of elimination, that’s a good way to get the core of something. There are plenty of layers left, but ART IS NOT SYNONYMOUS OF PROFIT! has done the necessary, ignoble job of peeling one away. Would that all artists could be so audacious.  

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