Lydian Stater is excited to present TLPS, an exhibition featuring first-ever NFT works from eleven artists: Jeffrey Michael Austin, Marcos Castro, Matthew Cronin, Yi Hsuan Lai, Marta Rodriguez Maleck & Zac Manuel, Cedric Tai, Anika Todd, Catalina Tuca, Victor Yañez-Lazcano, and Alisa Yang. 

In 1637, somewhere in the dimly lit backrooms of wine bars in the Netherlands, merchants took part in a risky game. One in which bets were placed on the future price of a recently introduced flower, the tulip. Contracts changed hands so frequently that prices were completely divorced from the tulip’s inherent value. Inevitably, traders began to refuse to pay the exorbitant prices, causing a cascade of defaulted agreements as the price of tulip contracts crashed in what became the first recorded financial bubble. 

The recent rise in the speculative trading of NFT artworks mirrors many qualities of the tulip bubble from the Dutch Golden Age. Excess wealth, status, greed, and—some experts argue—a fatalistic risk-taking culture in the wake of the bubonic plague, were all factors in a wild rise in tulip speculation. Financial speculation permeates the art world, but what was once limited to auction houses, art fairs, and blue chip galleries, now extends into the NFT marketplace. 

The artists participating in TLPS are speculating in a different way. Together, their work theorizes that there is room for thoughtful and self-reflexive work in the NFT marketplace, work that relies on nuance, narrative, complexities, and critique rather than social media statistics and prior sales figures. The artist-led speculation takes on the form of video, painting, photography, performance, and sculpture. The work collectively explores themes related to identity: cultural, technological, and emotional, and how identity is intertwined with ownership, labor, and representation. 

There is an obvious worry that a blockchain-driven digital world will continue to perpetuate the inequalities already dominating the current art world and economic system. Because of this, artists need early opportunities to engage with this space, to experiment, and to take control of it, as it is possible that much of our economic and social activity will take place here in the future.

While the NFT space could easily be written off as just a new digital playground for the crypto-wealthy, the novelty of NFTs and the unregulated nature of blockchain ecosystems creates a radical prospect for artists: financial and artistic autonomy. TLPS hopes to offer an example of what that autonomous vision might look like. 

TLPS will be viewable online at www.lydianstater.co from June 3 to July 9, 2021 (extended to July 16, 2021!). 

*This exhibition acknowledges the ecological impact on the environment and the economic barriers inherent in many popular blockchain technologies. Because of this concern, all artworks minted for this exhibition have been created on the Tezos blockchain, which consumes 99% less electricity than the most popular blockchain for NFTs, and offers one of the lowest costs of entry into the NFT marketplace. 

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Installation Images

Works