"CryptoBlues, Offline"

121205, Moscow, Skolkovo Innovation Center
Nobel Street, Building 7, Floor 4, Space V

October 4, 10 am – October 29, 7 pm
Monday – Friday, 10 am – 7 pm, free admission

Please write to racc.ny@mail.ru or call (347) 662 1456
The artist is available for interviews

Twenty-one pieces of cryptoart by Dmitry Borshch will be shown next month in two physical locations at Skolkovo. This innovation center hosts PimPay and Elfin, startups that provided high-resolution displays, big enough to display the work at scales intended by the artist, for his show. That's one reason to show cryptoart offline – displaying it at "true" scale (Elfin has a projector, so few artworks that are too big for the displays will be projected onto the space's wall). Another reason is meeting artists; both startups believe their employees and others invited to the show's opening where Dmitry will explain these blue-and-white pieces, styled by him CryptoBlues, profit from such meetings. In late November of this year he will show all twenty-one of them, displayed together with eleven pink collages, at Azrieli Center in Israel, his first show there, under the title "Cryptofied". Later these thirty-two works, some like "Unchained from Lust", "A Mining Archer", "Will it contain you, this house I have built?", "fashy", "The Undertaker’s Pale Children", and "Better One Bird" transformed into audiovisual ones, are coming to Melville, New York for a show entitled "Crypto Optimism", jointly produced by an investment advisory firm in that hamlet and Russian American Cultural Center.

"I am hopefully a sober optimist about cryptoart, but an explanation first. Images produced on paper, canvas, other support, if artistic enough, become digital artworks when they're digitized artistically (reproductions cannot be art) – these, if minted as NFTs, become cryptoart, whether sold for cryptocurrency or not. It's this tokenization that unites different works in my shows instead of common themes. They are 'lazy-minted' on the Ethereum blockchain. I decided to mint there to benefit from Ethereum's network effect, but will not sell NFTs on the blockchain until it fully transitions to proof-of-stake. Environment isn't the only reason selling now is premature: 'smart contract' vulnerabilities, their publication on different blockchains, thereby undermining scarcity of the artworks described in these contracts (even when they describe an open edition, its sale is often time-limited and happens on one blockchain, not many) are two other reasons," explains Borshch.

He continues, "That a digitized image, still or moving, has become a tradable, rentable digital asset isn't new; its 'distributed financialization' is. Trades of NFTs categorized as art and excluding all other kinds, when measured by the total number of daily sales, have peaked in August after falling, rising for months since their last peak in January. The exchange value, and with it use value, of these NFTs are on the rise now (it's early September) – I am using both terms in contemporary, post-Marxian senses. The latter is pleasure that one derives from ownership of his NFT, being viewed by others as a collector of scarce, non-fungible assets and the elevated status that brings, peacocking it allows... But those assets are divorced from taste. I thought Beeple's collage "Everydays" was produced with the encouragement of Christie's auctioneers because they were reluctant to display his crappy pictures – he named them and himself Beeple Crap – individually, yet even the finest auctions today sell cartoonlike items, so many think buyers who participate in them are less concerned with displays of tastefulness, more with buying (and often quickly reselling or flipping) the most profitable way."

For 12 years Dmitry Borshch has collaborated with Russian American Cultural Center. It was founded in 1998 by Dr. Regina Khidekel and earned its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in 1999. RACC aims to provide permanent cultural representation to more than 700,000 Russian-speaking residents of New York. The center has adopted and broadened the strategy of organizations like No Longer Empty, http://www.nolongerempty.org/ which invigorate neighborhoods by mounting exhibitions in their unutilized or temporarily underutilized spaces. Visitors coalesce around a space where art may have never been exhibited before.

The artist was born in Dnipropetrovsk, studied in Moscow, today lives in New York, Dnipro, and Ramat Gan. His works have been exhibited at Russian American Cultural Center (New York), HIAS (New York), Consulate General of the Russian Federation (New York), Lydia Schukina Institute of Psychology (Moscow), Contemporary Art Centers (Voronezh, Almaty), Museums of Contemporary Art (Poltava, Lviv). More exhibitions can be found in the Brooklyn Arts Council registry: http://archive.is/ClMDa

http://www.russianamericanculture.com/galleries/emerging-artists/dmitry-borshch/

About the image:

"fashy" non-fungible token, edition of 6 + 1 artist’s proof
PNG file created 2014, minted 2021, 8640 x 14158 pixels, 2.07 MB

The exhibition schedule:

"CryptoBlues, Offline" October 4 – October 29, 2021
Monday – Friday, 10 am – 7 pm, free admission
121205, Moscow, Skolkovo Innovation Center
Nobel Street, Building 7, Floor 4, Space V

"CryptoBlues, Offline" October 11 – November 5, 2021
Monday – Friday, 9 am – 6 pm, free admission
121205, Moscow, Skolkovo Innovation Center
Bolshoi Boulevard 42, Building 1, Floor 3, Space 1098

"Cryptofied" November 28 – December 23, 2021
Sunday – Thursday, 9 am – 6 pm, free admission
Art Office, One Azrieli Center, Round Tower, Floor 31
Derech Menachem Begin 132, Tel Aviv-Yafo, 6701101, Israel

"Crypto Optimism" January 4 – January 29, 2022
Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm, free admission
RACC satellite space, 105 NY-110, Melville, NY 11747

"Dmitry Borshch, a Crypto Skeptic?" February 27 – March 31, 2022
Sunday – Thursday, 9 am – 6 pm, free admission
Culture and Business Center "Menorah"
49000 Ukraine, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Dnipro
Sholem Aleichem Street, 4/26, 8th Floor Gallery