Of Monkeys & Marts

Back in 2021, I was in a modern art museum in Spain. I had been staring at a particular piece by Banksy: the one with the monkeys on top of a big pile of money—their hands over their eyes, their mouths, and their ears—See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. And, after taking a couple photos, I left that room and entered a long dark tunnel I couldn't see the end of, and I thought for a second that I might have been lost. That was, before the neon lights turned on, and I was met with an altogether different type of monkey: the Bored Ape NFT. It was an exhibition made entirely of NFT art, which the museum had proclaimed was "a new anchor for artists," and I was left a little disconcerted. For context, an NFT is a non-fungible token, a picture that is stored on the blockchain—a ledger that ensures that you and you alone are the sole owner of this photo. Could it really be that this small picture of a monkey could be the next Banksy? 

(seen above) "Bored Ape #2967" & "Mutant Ape #1933" created by Mutant Ape Yacht Club, displayed at a Hong Kong cryptocurrency exchange.

As we came out of COVID, many things have changed, and in the art scene, it was the realization that seeing a painting on Instagram could be just as influential as seeing it in a gallery. Paintings and museums, which created digital copies of their exhibits, became even more accessible, and some artists took advantage of the digital medium to their stories under the guise of innocuous websites. These stories are called hyperliterature—and they have grown in immense popularity during the pandemic. 

But the physical hadn't been completely abandoned: with the shift to digital media came a counter-culture movement that rejected the idea of bound, safeguarded pictures—immersive art installations that merge both the expansiveness of the digital and the tactility of the physical. Omega Mart was, and still is, a particularly popular example of this new phenomenon. Seemingly an ordinary grocery store, after hours of discovery weaving between aisles with strange lemons with eyes and meat covered in tattoos, finding secret hidden portals to new strange psychedelic worlds, the audience finds themselves locked in a struggle between a massive capitalist corporation and artists trying to protect their creativity. The set is rife with physical props hand-made by sculptors, employees played by actors, and even video games and hackable computers—all interactive, all telling the same story, all created without the use of AI. 

As AI art becomes more and more advanced, the art scene has been left in the wake of this new transformation similar to as it had when the camera was first invented: stunned, outraged, and forced to change, and out of that panic came the new modern movements: abstract art, performance art, and expressionism. 

The question is, of course, how will we change now?