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Jul 29, 2023

Digital money and crypto art converge at the first

Daisy and Craig Rose are the owners of Nematic and Daisy Rose Galleries in Carmel. She is a dancer and a painter; her husband is an entrepreneur. They just relocated from Venice Beach to open the

Daisy and Craig Rose are the owners of Nematic and Daisy Rose Galleries in Carmel. She is a dancer and a painter; her husband is an entrepreneur. They just relocated from Venice Beach to open the first NFT gallery in Monterey County. Below: Artist Logan-Miles Allison, aka The Heart Hatter, next to one of “The Portals” by Blakeney Sanford.

It’s complicated, kind of like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrency and the blockchain itself, but it’s happening – right in the middle of Carmel. The former Gallery Amsterdam and Frame Shop is reopening as Nematic and Daisy Rose Galleries, a collaboration between the couple Craig and Daisy Rose and Claus Enevoldsen of MakersPlace, a marketplace for digital art that launched in 2018.

“We both curated,” co-owner Craig Rose, formerly of Venice Beach, says about the partnership with Enevoldsen. “We brought some artists, and he brought some artists. It’s a new experience for many of them.” Some of the artists represented are Californians, but the work is coming from all over the nation.

NFT art is digital art that one can create or own. (Cryptocurrency is digital currency that one might use to purchase NFTs or other items, and the blockchain is the distributed digital ledger technology that cryptocurrencies and NFTs rely upon.) The potential mediums of NFT art include digital drawings, paintings, music, film, poetry or books. The main attraction is a change in the way art is consumed (the most immediate benefit being that now you can take your Mona Lisa on vacation, or have a huge art collection in a small New York or Monterey apartment), but also – if not chiefly – how the art is owned. The allure of digitally confirmed, full, undeniable ownership gives status-seeking people a thrill similar to owning a star in the sky.

That said, there are concerns about a “bubble” around NFTs and crypto in general, as well as ethical concerns and environmental concerns – “mining” for cryptocurrency is an incredibly energy-intensive process.

“Like many of us, I just bridged to this world,” says California-based Blakeney Sanford, who is in the group of artists that will be presented in Nematic and will be featured at an Aug. 17 open house. She does sculptural installations as well as painting and photography.

Sanford learned about NFT art in 2020, and minted her first NFT on a blockchain in 2021. An artist since the early 2000s, she mainly thinks about the NFT art world as a way to broaden her audience.

The series Sanford is bringing to Nematic, called “The Portals,” is a relatively simple blue sculpture installation that she takes to various remote environments and documents the process (photos, video). One will be able to buy a collection of her video NFTs, each accompanied by a 3D portal sculpture and a 2D original Polaroid image.

They attempt to “bridge dimensions,” she says of “The Portals.” “They are an invitation to the unknown.”

The NFT marketplace MakersPlace uses blockchain technology to sell the artwork, ensuring rarity and ownership. It’s unique for an NFT marketplace to accept both cryptocurrency and non-cryptocurrency payments, as this one will.

“We’re absolutely thrilled to partner with Craig and Daisy to, for the first time ever, bring world-class digital art to Carmel,” Enevoldsen wrote. “As an innovator in the space, we want to show what is possible when artists get free reign across physical and digital mediums. The creativity on display in Carmel is going to blow your mind.”

Gallery visitors will be able to purchase artwork using either dollars or Ether, the currency of the Ethereum blockchain. Nematic pledges to contribute over 2 percent of its profits to various local causes.

“Phygital, a combination of digital and physical,” Craig Rose says of what to expect as a potential art buyer.

Both new galleries – Nematic and Daisy Rose Gallery – will feature the “Mushroom People Project” by Santa Barbara-based photographer Lindsey Ross, who is “shooting directly into glass,” she says, using the 19th-century wet plate collodion process.

Using various plates, Ross photomontages to create a world of mushroom people – where mushrooms are big and people are small. “I’m showing people different worlds that exist,” she says. “Mushrooms have this complex system of communication. We all have different ways of gathering information and that creates our worldview.”

Ross is interested in the world of digital art for the same reasons she is fascinated with mushrooms. “The digital realm is another version of the same connectivity,” that characterizes mycelium – a root-like structure of a fungus consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like elements – she says.

“My work has been very analog,” she adds, referring to her interest in historic processes. “NFT is a totally foreign world to me and I like that juxtaposition.”

Other artists include Josh Mayhem, who will paint five one-eighteenth scale model cars (each sculpture will be paired with a digital artwork) and Logan-Miles Allison (“Heart Hatter”), a globetrotting artist who brings three paintings, each paired with a digital artwork and a poem voiceover. Another artist, Benzi, is bringing one of his antique clocks from the “Time To Be Happy” project, featuring a digital screen with 90 minutes of video art content from his collaboration with 50 other artists. Bennett Williams will present his NFT video series, which features the big wave surfing destination Mavericks. There’s more.

Finally, the Aug. 17 open house event will include live performance art by Daisy Rose, and by the “crypto movement duo” NeoSutras that promises healing through art.

Carmel-by-the-Sea is the perfect flowerpot of affluence, obliviousness, and cultural insignificance for the last of a global tech-utopian Ponzi scheme can take root.

There's nothing like perusing the Weekly and finding it writing glowing articles about how great the grift and scam of NFTs are. Regardless, it's very funny that for profit art is still trying to sell this grift as viable when the market continues to show no sign of significant recovery and everyone who makes the big bucks off of this ugly digital "art" has shoved off to their next grift. It really just exposes the rotting core of the art world as less about making meaningful art and instead all about trying to get rich people to shovel over money for hollow, meaningless tripe because they are driven by appearances, vibes, and cool points with their other rich friends.

Even funnier is that Bloomberg wrote just today:

"NFT Rout Crushes $1.5 Billion Windfall for Artists as Markets Slash Royalties"

With a couple of salient bullet points;

- Payouts to NFT content creators sank 98% from a peak in 2022

- Exchanges for NFTs chopped royalty rates amid a bear market

But please, post more about these grifters. There's nothing I enjoy more than the thought of rich Carmelites virtually setting their money on fire for a grift meant to make the Roses money.[thumbdown]

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