Dystopian Visions: celebrating the Italian crypto Renaissance

Dystopian Visions is a curated NFT digital art collection bridging the cap between traditional art institutions and digitally native pioneers.

The recent months have seen an emergence of hybrid structures that attempt at capturing the crypto zeitgeist in the habitually conservative contemporary art landscape. The art institutions of all sorts, be it auction houses, museums, blue-chip galleries, have tried to set foot in previously unexplored terrain. 

We have seen the wave of institutional recognition & adoption for crypto art, with even the most conservative gatekeepers of the contemporary art community, such as art critics and curators, starting to experiment with NFTs of their own – an example of which being the meta-artwork by Kenny Schachter and Jerry Salz.

At the core of any art movement that is later on recognized by the art world’s “vetting” figures, has always been an integral community of artists sharing a unique creative vision, along with collectors disposing of discretionary income willing to support that vision andcurators or other enlightened intermediaries taking on the role of putting the artists’ vision into a cohesive and solid statement.  

Indeed, the emergence of community-based movements is at the core of art history as we know it – take Paris in the early 1900s or Italy in the 1400s – and the Italian crypto art landscape today is no different: with ever increasing interconnectivity and ethereal communications, these artists have witnessed a newfound “renaissance” happen in the digital art realm over the past months. In Italy, one of the first countries to adopt the severe lockdown measures as of early 2020, the artists have found themselves in a position to investigate their practice and make artwork using digital media while in continuous mutual confrontation with their peer creators online. 

A crucial part of any type of artwork on its way to recognition is exhibition and establishing the curatorial fondamenta. Exhibitions are where the public and the gatekeepers alike get to access and evaluate the work for what it is. Following this pattern, the crypto art world has adopted digitally native tools, such as virtual world galleries, as well as showing crypto artwork in the physical settings – we have seen examples emerge as early as 2019, following up with a recent blockbuster show ‘Breadcrumbs’ by Kenny Schachter at Nagel Draxler Gallery in Germany. 

“Dystopian visions”, was conceived as an attempt to further bridge the gap between the traditional institutions and the digital art pioneers, by adopting the hybrid exhibition model, hosting a physical show at CAMBI headquarters from June 24th to June 26th,  while also having the works on show in the Arium metaverse.

Emergence of the new digitally native art institutions and gate-keepers like MoCDA (Museum of Contemporary Digital Art) and auction houses like Cambi opening up digital art departments  – are all a clear sign of a larger movement taking place that can no longer be ignored.

In ”Dystopian visions”, the Italian crypto artists are capturing the zeitgeist of the human condition with its backbone ever more reliant on digitized communications and technological advancements. Imagining utopian landscapes like their predecessors envisioned the perfectly aligned “città ideali” (eng. ‘ideal cities’) in the 1400s, artists are contributing to the evolution of the classical concepts from a futuristic perspective. “Dystopian visions” is building bridges not only between the physical and the digital, traditional and innovative but also underlining the continuity of human-centric creative concepts in the ever-evolving perception of the anthropocene.