A Beeple’s NFT enters the permanent collection of the Castello di Rivoli
The highly provocative work is the first NFT to officially enter a museum’s permanent collection
Mike Winkelmann, known in the NFT world as Beeple, is a digital crypto artist who we have now come to know very well, and who makes provocation the leitmotif of his artistic production.
Subjects such as Donald Trump and Elon Musk have already passed under his irreverent lens, and, this time, also Sam Bankman-Fried, former CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency platform now bankrupt.
The work FTX Board Meeting, Day #5676 11.13.2022
“Beeple’s work,” says museum director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “constitutes a major donation that updates our permanent collection with work in a 21st-century medium that combines the digital with the physical.”
The work portrays several versions of Sam Bankman-Fried engaged in sexual relations with each other, a solipsistic orgy that the Castello di Rivoli had to censor in order to publish it on the Youtube channel.
“Beeple’s seemingly pornographic image also points to the childish, immature and narcissistic nature of the digital world,” said Christov-Bakargiev. “It questions technology and the society that develops in relation to that technology, even if it uses its system and structures”.
Beeple had already exhibited in 2022 at Castello di Rivoli with the video sculpture Beeple’s Human One (2021), which was also presented at the M+ in Hong Kong.
