Curatorial text by Charlie Five – Chr5 for 52 Weeks Artists Drop
The artist is present. The blockchain is present. If there was a common thread or a motto in this project it would be “The crypto-artist is present”. The presence of digital art. The here and now.
Collecting has become a key element of the digital art discourse in blockchain. Without collecting there is no cryptoart. There is certification but no diffusion, no projection of its artists in the digital space.
The open edition is an innovative way of presenting a work on the digital stage. An open edition, unlike a limited edition, is an edition subject to time. The work is subject to the desire to be collected for the time determined by the artist. It is an invocation to the present, a claim to instant love. It demands determination. It is a proposal of risk, a launch into the void. I am here for you, here and now. You can collect me or not, tomorrow you won’t have this chance to kiss me. It is now or never. It’s now.
In the 52 Weeks of Releases3 project, every week, a work is launched into the abyss of collecting. It may happen that nobody collects your piece and it ends up in a kind of abortion. Something that does not thrive in the digital world. Or it can happen that the piece is collected so much that it becomes an icon of the digital iconosphere. In either case, it demands to be present.
The year has 52 weeks, and this project requires its artists and collectors to be present every week. To be present by collecting. That they pay attention to each artist. Because creation is important, it requires people who are aware and interested in promoting artists.
From this perspective, the 52 Weeks Artists Drop is a challenge to the present of art: to be an artist, from this new digital perspective, means to produce, to share what has been created and to collect. To collect one’s own and others’. To support other artists. To promote one’s own career and that of others simultaneously. It means exploring the collective project of the blockchain. And that is what we are doing. Experiencing personal and collective growth around a common idea that is nothing more than an idea, an excuse to create.
In this first edition of the 52 Weeks Artists Drop, we have a cast of top artists from the European and Latin American blockchain digital art scene such as Scrawlzy, Mikita, Arregium, Aarón Sosa, Dani Hache, César Álvarez, Alfonso Crujera, Mercedes Cas, Alfonso Crujera, Mercedes Cas, Layla Pizarro, Nacho Ramírez, Francisco Ruíz, NftGarden, Ultravioleth, Maitreya, Ernesto Asch, Coriot, Nikomano, Aída Piñango, NurArt, SonarKlang, Fernando Jerez, Néstor Cano, Marló López, Martyan, Jose Alguer, and Charlie Five (Chr5).
In this first edition we also have the unconditional support of the crypto-artist Javier Arrés as promoter of the event, who will participate at the end of the 52 releases by contributing the 53rd piece, which will be offered exclusively to those who collect the previous 52 pieces. It will be the icing on this cake that we will be slowly tasting throughout 2024. We also count on the financing of Publiservic, a company from the Canary Islands that will support our project with the edition of a catalog. Bingo.
Our collection has been created to be slowly tasted weekly on the objkt.com platform, listening to the artists in their weekly presentations, following their parallel production, following the collection of each piece as if it were a soccer match. It is a project that has been created so that anyone can be part of it as a collector, rather than as an observer. Cryptoart has changed the rules of the game. If you don’t participate, it’s simply because you haven’t yet understood the power of blockchain, the new rules of the game.
But why do 26 artists do this exercise of digital presentism for a whole year? Simple. The 52 Weeks is the result of a collective reflection that the crypto-art community has been doing since its origins. Is it possible to make a living from art in the digital era? This hypothesis made from a contemporary perspective of art raises problems of economic scale complicated to answer at this time.
To think that we can sustain our artistic careers by selling editions of our works in an incipient market is still a utopia worth exploring.
In this sense, this project seeks to link people who collect our pieces at low prices, it proposes the construction of a network of collectors who finance the careers of the artists who in this case congregate around the project. A far from simple objective.
In this way, the 52 Weeks also becomes a platform for teaching, collective learning around art collecting on blockchain. During the time of the exhibition, we will give support and help to those people outside this field who want to learn how to collect digital art. We are building a community of collectors who understand the importance of what we do, and in the near future may be part of this social project as patrons aware of the importance of funding artists and safeguarding an intangible heritage of valuable art pieces.
