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FineArtPink Bear

Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/the-permanent-collection?collection=0x2374425c7e7ddf1d46f771f068d205aed551faf8&token=14&page=3

Source Link: https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x2374425c7e7ddf1d46f771f068d205aed551faf8/14

Date Minted: August 6, 2020

Artist Description: FineArtPink Bear is the original hand-painted animated 1:1 artwork. This artwork is a part of the 'Cruel Summer’ series, a follow up to ‘The UnBearables’ artwork and collectibles released on Nifty Gateway.
 The series explores a gap between expectations and reality with summer being merely a background. Each bear is having an underwhelming summer, yet chooses not to give up on its dreams. The series is also a metaphor for social media deception. It only portrays what is intended to be seen, which commonly defaults to aesthetically pleasing instead of banal realistic depictions. There are 5 animated artworks total in the ‘Cruel Summer’ series.

CohentheWriter’s Commentary:

Historically, there’s been quite a bit of socially-conscious meaning mined from the interplay between real-world horrors and the saccharine sweetness of child-minded animation. Think the horror videogame Five Nights at Freddy’s: This bastardization of Chuck-E-Cheese-style animatronics belies a strong commentary on commercialism. Or the Watership Down film using rabbits to elucidate the inherent cruelty of nature. Happy Tree Friends would gruesomely kill off its wide-eyed characters and play it off for laughs, never overtly referencing what this said about a 21st-century American psyche addicted to omnipresent depictions of violence. And into this storied context, artist Olive Allen places her two-part 2020 series “The Cruel Summer,” and its cornerstone 1/1 piece which is our interest today: FineArtPink Bear. Although someone scrolling past might mistake FineArtPink Bear for something vapid or cloyingly sweet, to actually see the piece in its entirety is to realize the full brunt of Allen’s social commentary. FineArtPink Bear is a brutal piece. It’s a deeply sorrowful piece. It’s a piece that has emerged out of a shared trauma, but not one that is bogged down in it. Instead, FineArtPink Bear identifies a mind under the effects of savage circumstance, what it sees, what it aches for, and what it ultimately does to deal. 

“This artwork is a part of the 'Cruel Summer’ series,” Allen tells us in her Artist Description, “a follow up to ‘The UnBearables’ artwork and collectibles released on Nifty Gateway. The series explores a gap between expectations and reality with summer being merely a background. Each bear is having an underwhelming summer, yet chooses not to give up on its dreams. The series is also a metaphor for social media deception. It only portrays what is intended to be seen, which commonly defaults to aesthetically pleasing instead of banal realistic depictions.”

Allen perhaps buries the lede here, which is that, minted on August 6, 2020, this piece is inflected centrally by the Coronavirus pandemic. You’d have to dig a bit further into Allen’s website to find that referenced directly. In the description of the original “The UnBearables” collection, which shares an aesthetic sensibility with its spiritual successor FineArtPink Bear, Allen says, “The UnBearables are essentially horrifically cute collectible bears, as well as an odd manifestation of hopes and anxieties of the present moment.  Coronavirus threats and potential consequences are unbearable. Oil prices and their impact on the global economy, especially my homeland, are unbearable. The toxicity of the media and disinformation are unbearable. Isolation and loneliness are unbearable. Economic recession and its inevitability are unbearable. Dysfunctional government is unbearable. The deficit of hand sanitizers and respiratory masks is unbearable. The prevailing feeling of uncertainty is unbearable. Tomorrow is postponed indefinitely. And it’s unbearable.”

In FineArtPink Bear, we are initially presented with an innocuous, exaggeratedly-sweet image. It’s a pool party! On a fine summer’s day, and here we are, outside a fine rectangular pool occupied by a small gang of multicolored bears. The blue one wades upon a blow-up duck floatie and rocks heart-shaped sunglasses. A cool dude indeed. The purple one has her back to us, but brandishes her koala’s ears. Way in the back, Lavender Bear closes their eyes and takes a short snooze against the back wall. There’s a water slide, sunblock, a mixed drink presented in a coconut, and the Pink Bear looking directly at us with great, glowing green eyes. Pink Bear is very close. Pink Bear might as well be inviting us into the pool with them. And how we wish we could go. But the image changes. The six-second video continues. We are pulled back away from the pool party scene. We see now that it is, indeed, a scene. Graffitied with spray paint onto a boarded-up shop window. The artist turns to us; Pink Bear in the flesh, as opposed to the previous Pink Bear, a mere depiction. On Pink Bear’s face is no longer a smile, but a mask bearing the words “Stay Away.” Paint cans roll, leaking, across the sidewalk underfoot. Pink Bear still stares at us with those enormous green eyes.

And now, having seen this piece, we know under what circumstances the Care Bears might be considered haunting. FineArtPink Bear is a jarring piece in its composition, for there are only six short seconds between the idyllic scene painted upon the wall, and the grim reality. And in that reality, storefronts don’t seem to have recovered from whatever unrest gripped them earlier in the summer during the height of the George Floyd protests. And the coronavirus pandemic continues, clearly. And we find our resident artist, perhaps a representation of all artists, drawing into existence a better world (albeit a lost one), one free from the impossibilities of connection and togetherness. Even the cutest of cartoon creatures aren’t spared the harsh whip of a pandemic-inflected reality. And even these most physically two-dimensional of cartoon creatures contain enough humanity to long for a now-gone world, a world which may forevermore, only exist as a nostalgic painting on the wooden board where recently a window was broken. 

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