Eliana Willis

Cash-strapped museums suffering from a drop in visitor numbers and income during the pandemic may have found a lifeline in the form of a new partnership with a tech company and a commercial gallery.
Four major Italian museums, including the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, have signed onto an ambitious project that will see them sell editioned digital replicas of priceless masterpieces from their collections as NFTs.
The project debuted at London’s Unit gallery, in an exhibition titled “Eternalizing Art History,” which displayed digital replicas of six famous Italian masterpieces by the likes of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. These authorized digital copies are shown on digital screens set within handmade replicas of the artworks’ original frames. Each of the digital works (dubbed DAWs by the tech company that made them, Cinello) has been certified on the Ethereum blockchain and can be traded as an NFT. They are available in editions of nine—a common edition size for sculptural works—that are priced at between €100,000 and €250,000 ($114,000–$284,000) apiece.
The participating museums—Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera and Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, and the Complesso Monumentale della Pilotta di Parma—have signed off on the reproductions in exchange for 50 percent of the net revenue from the sale of the works, which will fund their art conservation programs. (The remaining 50 percent is split evenly between the gallery and its tech partner).
Leonardo da Vinci, Ritratto di Musico (Portrait of a Musician), conceived in 1490, digitized in 2021 DAW® (Digital Artwork). Image by Eva Herzog.
The move is part of a broader effort to tour works that cannot be moved due to their fragile state of conservation, and to show them to audiences experiencing more limited travel options. But, as professor Guido Guerzoni of Bocconi University said at the unveiling of the exhibition, the commercial endeavor is about more than just reaching new audiences.
“Museums need revolution if they want to survive,” he said. “In one year of the pandemic, European museums lost 70 percent of their visitors, and between 70 and 80 percent of their revenues. These numbers are impressive but the Italian situation was even worse. If we consider only state-owned museums [… ] this was 85 percent of visitors and almost 90 percent of their revenue.”
The professor added that while the pandemic forced museums to reconnect with local audiences, this strategy is not sustainable in the long run for museums like the Uffizi, which rely on revenue from international tourism. In the absence of physical visitors, museums rushed to deploy digital strategies to reach audiences—which themselves require a huge investment—but few of these digital initiatives have actually been successful revenue generators. Initiatives like this, which may have been regarded as “unthinkable” a few short years ago, are now being lauded as entrepreneurial solutions to the real world problems institutions are facing.
Joe Kennedy, director of Unit London, told Artnet News that there has been “overwhelming interest” in the project so far, with five sales confirmed, and a further 12-15 expected to be confirmed by next week.
Raffaello Santi (Raffaello Sanzio), Madonna del Cardellino (Madonna of the Goldfinch). Conceived in 1506, digitized in 2021 DAW® (Digital Artwork). Courtesy of Le Gallerie degli Uffizi (Florence) and Cinello.
Audiences at the opening were divided on a philosophical question: whether experiencing the digital reproductions could ever be considered a like-for-like experience with standing in front of their originals. “The DAWs are not intended to compete with the original paintings. It’s important to recognize that they are reproductions,” Unit’s Joe Kennedy told Artnet News, adding that their mobility allows them to reach new audiences and reveal the fascinating history and context of the original paintings. “They act as a storytelling tool which ensures these iconic works live on through new generations of art enthusiasts and only enhances the magical experience of viewing the original painting in person.”
But in an age where the metaverse and NFTs are in fashion, this view of the sacredness of the original—while perhaps shared by this reporter—might not be the only answer to this question. Panelist Serena Tabacchi, Cinello’s partnership manager, considered the experiences indistinguishable, and artist Misan Harriman postulated that getting up close and personal with the high quality copies could offer an “even better” experience for audiences. 
“I don’t know if the aura of the original is the same thing in our time,” art historian and Unesco Florence director Carlo Francini said, referencing Walter Benjamin’s seminal text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which argued that the “aura”—or the unique aesthetic authority of a work of art—is absent from a mechanically produced copy. “Maybe now we are totally evolved digital spirits.” 
Installation view, “Eternalizing Art History,” Unit London, Image by Eva Herzog.
Indeed, if the “Immersive Van Gogh” phenomenon has taught us nothing else it is that people—some of whom may never have an interest in seeing the originals—will flock, and pay well, to experience digital reproductions. To some of these audiences, the copies of masterpieces by Leonardo, Caravaggio, Rafael, Modigliani, and Francesco Hayez could hold just as much sway as their originals. 
While the initiative seems like a no-brainer for museums, which have educational missions, and bank accounts to fill, the idea raises an interesting quandary. Considering the fragile state of conservation of many of these masterpieces—cited as one of the motives for the project—it is very well possible that these digital copies could outlast their original counterparts. Which in turn begs the question of institutional responsibility concerning ownership of these priceless objects, and whether they should be so cavalier about them disappearing into private hands.
“Eternalizing Art History: From Da Vinci to Modigliani” is on view at Unit London through March 19. 
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The late, great Toni Morrison, a giant of U.S. literature, died in 2019, at the age of 88. (Her 90th birthday would have been this Friday.) Her absence looms large in the American culture—which is why the author was a natural subject for New Yorker critic Hilton Als’s latest curatorial outing at David Zwirner Gallery.
The group exhibition, “Toni Morrison’s Black Book,” is named after her 1974 book, a visual scrapbook presenting a variety of historical sources about African Americans. (It follows Als’s Zwirner tribute to another Black writer, James Baldwin, as well solo shows he organized about Alice Neel and Frank Moore.)
There was no shortage of artists eager to participate in the tribute to Morrison. The final list includes Walter Price, Julie Mehretu, Amy Sillman, Joseph Cornell, Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, Helen Marcus, Chris Ofili, Irving Penn, and James Van Der Zee, among others.
We spoke to Price, Mehretu, and Sillman about their relationship to Morrison’s work, the importance of her legacy, and how the author inspired their contributions to the exhibition.

Walter Price
Walter Price, Thinly coded language (2019). © Walter Price. Courtesy Greene Naftali, New York.
I had not heard of the The Black Book before being approached by Hilton. From the beginning, I thought Hilton’s concept was profound. He made a show that we can see and feel, a show that brings together great artists to express the gratitude of Toni’s legacy. Within those cold white walls, Hilton has given us the warmth of emotions.
When I made the works for the show, I was specifically thinking about The Black Book. I thought about the magic of Henry Box Brown escaping [slavery] in a three-foot box. I thought about Jack Johnson’s strength and shamelessness to continue to box under unfair rules. I thought about Bessie Smith being a pioneer of the blues.
Toni Morrison is such an important author because she has expressed the complexities of Black life. She speaks to the Black audience, while diminishing the role of the white audience. I think that is very clever and important. Toni Morrison’s writing resonates with me for because I can feel it!

Julie Mehretu
Julie Mehretu, A Mercy (after T. Morrison) (2019-20). © Julie Mehretu. Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman.
I have known of The Black Book for a long time. There are archives of blackness that are essential pillars of the culture. The Black Book, along with The Image of the Black in Western Art, FESTAC ’77 by Chimurenga, the 1619 Project by Nicole Hannah Smith, and many more, are crucial books and collections of visual archives.
I made the painting for this show specifically in response to re-reading A Mercy during the late spring weeks of quarantine, just after Hilton approached me about the project. It is a book that goes back to the origin of the making of this country and the various struggles and violences in that endeavor. We were in the midst of a wildly out-of-control pandemic with a criminally absent and vacant leader at the helm of the most powerful nation of the world. The precarity and far-right nativist political vertiginousness of our time was extremely palpable and terrifying.
The underpainting of this piece was created from a Rorschach of the inverse of an image from the white supremacist United the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. It’s a blurred image that creates spectral forms that play with the subliminal and the visceral haunting and fear being regurgitated by white supremacy, and generated by the years of the Trump administration. The painting is a direct response to both to those sources and the book A Mercy.

Amy Sillman
Amy Sillman, Paradise, (An Alphabet for Miss Morrison) (2021). © Amy Sillman.
In response to Hilton’s invitation, I had the idea to invent an alphabet for Toni Morrison, or a set of letters somewhere between an alphabet and hieroglyphics. I made a big stack of drawings based on the bodies in her novels, how they appeared, moved, leaned, etc. Then Hilton and I collaborated by arranging nine of the letters into a word to be “read” from left to right.
When I saw the whole show, I realized that Hilton had created a whole in-between zone, somewhere between a written essay and a visual exhibition, where everything was transitive: figures became letters, sculptures became stories, photographs were narratives, a handwritten letter was a picture, artworks were artifacts, and vice versa, all crisscrossing back to the work of Toni Morrison, whose powerful imagination invokes a world in which all conditions and relations could be different.
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An ambitious immersive artwork designed “to be experienced with your eyes closed” will begin touring around the U.K. in May as part of the rebrand of a pricey initiative originally planned for the celebration of Brexit.
Inspired by an experimental 1959 creation by artist-inventor Brion Gysin, Dreamachine promises audiences—with their eyes closed—an opportunity to experience colorful, kaleidoscopic patterns and hallucinated visions created by flickering light. The experience will be accompanied by a tailor-made soundscape, as well as what organizers describe as one of the largest scientific research projects to take a deep dive into the collective human psyche.
Bryon Gysin, right, and his Dream Machine, with William Burroughs, ca. 1970, London.
The work is a collaborative effort spearheaded by Collective Art, which brings together Turner Prize-winning artists Assemble and Grammy- and Mercury-nominated composer Jon Hopkins together with a team of technologists, scientists, and philosophers. It is one of the 10 projects commissioned as part of “Unboxed: Creativity in the U.K.,” formerly known as the “Festival of Brexit,” the £120 million ($163 million) extravaganza initiated by Theresa May’s government to celebrate British culture after the country cut ties with the European Union. The festival is funded by the four governments of the U.K.—England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales—and commissioned in partnership with Belfast City Council, Creative Wales, and EventScotland.
The work will tour London, Cardiff, Belfast, and Edinburgh between May and October 2022, presented with Cardiff Council, Northern Ireland Science Festival, W5 Belfast, Edinburgh International Festival, and Edinburgh Science Festival. More than 100,000 visitors are expected to be able to experience this mysterious work for free.
Collective Art, Dreamachine (2022). Photo: Christa Holka.
Gysin’s original vision was to create a device that could replace television, allowing each individual to “create” their own cinematic experiences by immersing themselves into the images generated by the flickering light. Gysin hoped such unique viewing experiences could keep people away from passive consumption of mass-produced media.
More than six decades later, Collective Art pushes Gysin’s vision further, creating an immersive environment woven from layers of music, technology, neuroscience, philosophy, and architecture. Visitors are led to a room and seated in front of the machine with their eyes closed. A soundtrack by Hopkins, who has worked with Brian Eno and Coldplay, guides visitors to a transcendental state.
Audiences will be asked to participate in the science research project “Perception Census” to look into “the unseen diversity of the nation’s inner worlds,” organizers said. Details of the project, as well as dates, ticketing information, and venues, will be announced in late March.
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London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts has opened a groundbreaking group exhibition inspired by the sex worker rights movement.
Titled “Decriminalized Futures,” the show includes works by 13 international artists who create moving images, embroidered works, books, sculptures, and works in other media to address the multiplicity of contemporary sex-worker experiences.
The show, on view through May 22, advances through interpersonal narratives, histories, and artistic expressions, making a compelling case for sex workers to assert their human and labor rights.
While selling sex is legal under U.K. law, related activities such as soliciting, renting premises for the purpose of sex work, and working with other sex workers, remain criminalized. 
“Full decriminalization of sex work is the rallying cry that unites the sex worker rights movement across the world,” co-curators Yves Sanglante and Elio Sea said in a statement. “Under this banner, sex workers and their allies have fought tirelessly for strong workers’ rights, an end to exploitation, an end to criminalization, and real measures to address poverty.”
Chi Chi Castillo and May May Peltier, still from Stone Dove.
The works on view present various feminist and intersectional perspectives on sex work and interwoven issues faced by sex workers, people of color, trans people, migrants, and disabled people. In also explores sex work thought racial and social justice movements, migrant rights, labor rights, mental health issues, gender, joy, and pain.
Works include a series of life-size linocut self-portraits by artist Khaleb Brooks exploring the relationship between body, gender presentation, and sexuality; four vignette-style films by artist Chi Chi Castillo and May May Peltier focusing on sex work and queerness through the experiences of four sex workers of color; and an altar of plants, zines, medications, and a bedazzled dildo created by queer Pakistani-Egyptian artist and stripper Aisha Mirza. 
“What do I feel about being objectified from an art perspective, as opposed to from a sex worker’s perspective? I think it’s great,” London-based Spanish queer sex worker and poet Letizia Miro told Artnet News.
“I was just talking to a colleague about this and I feel celebrated in a way that goes beyond activism. The beauty and experience and depth of emotion is being celebrated, as opposed to being super politicized or victimized or glamorized.”
Installation view of Yarli Allison and Letizia Miro, This Is Not For Clients (2021). “Decriminalised Futures” ICA. Photo ©Anne Tetzlaff.
Miro collaborated with Canadian-born-Hong Kong artist Yarli Allison on a two-channel video installation titled This Is Not For Clients (2021). Installed among large sculptural objects, including doll-house-scaled sex dungeons, the semi-fictional documentary explores the story of an imagined “ideal” sex worker from the perspective of a fictional client.
Through digital modeling and animation, Allison has created a kind of hyperreal narrative that transcends Miro’s real-life experiences into a fantasy realm, making visible the complexities—some of them dark—that go into clients’ imagined ideals, and the precarious position of sex workers.
“I was thinking about gender expectations and stereotyping,” Allison told Artnet News. “How do you satisfy that kind of client’s needs, and how do these fantasies work as a coping mechanism?”
The exhibition is hosted in partnership with political arts organization Arika, and is part of an ongoing project led by organizers from the sex worker-led collective SWARM (Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement). There is also an associated events program including poetry readings, screenings of sex worker-made films, panel discussions, and artists’ workshops.
“Decriminalized Futures” is on view at the ICA London through May 22.
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