Mint me! I’m an artist is a VR environment and installation that critically reflects on the ambiguity of the crypto art movement, commenting on its potential for artist emancipation.
Historically, the artist’s identity can be legitimized by exhibitions, prices, and institutions. The crypto art market is rooted in dematerializing art and refusing the traditional dynamics and rules of the art market. Artists finally benefit from the high degree of transparency achieved by a technology that irreversibly assigns the author to an artwork. Yet at the same time, the NFT market embodies how modern technological advances permeate creative production, sometimes corrupting it. The absurdity of crypto art markets becomes a field of observation and speculation, to think on how production methods and art pieces will change, and what artists will be able to sell in a realm so permeated by neo-liberal values.
For Mint me! I’m an artist the artist duo Xsenofemme in collaboration with interdisciplinary artist and social designer Nika de la Loncha are envisioning a speculative interactive crypto market, in which artists can sell bits of their skin and bodies, as the ultimate art piece, answering to the thirst and lust of a market that is based on bourgeois consumerism. Drawing on Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit, the installation aims to take a radical stance towards the dynamics regulating the world of NFTs. Manzoni said referring to his work: “If the collectors want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there’s the artist's own shit, that is really his”. With this project, the duo Xsenofemme and Nika de la Loncha are trying to envision the desperate quest of performance artists to squeeze creativity out of their own bodies, by showcasing what would happen if they actually started selling their bodies as real artworks.