Metavanity

MetaVanity was a virtual museum launched by Vanity Fair Italia with the Swiss art-technology company Valuart during the opening days of the Venice Biennale. Built in Unreal Engine and modelled on the Pantheon in Rome, the space was entered through the free Hadem app or with a VR headset: twelve rooms arranged in a ring around a floating sphere, most of them devoted to a single artist, with a group show and a collection of Vanity Fair cover NFTs as special projects. The magazine's editor Simone Marchetti and Valuart's co-founder Etan Genini presented it as a digital counterpart to the Biennale, bringing together nineteen names from the international digital and crypto art scene, among them Max Papeschi, Quasimondo, Skygolpe, Coldie, Matt Kane and Vhils.

Federico Clapis had one of the solo rooms. The entrance panel, styled after a chemical element, reads "Gadolinium" and introduces his project Flooded Ruins, described as memories of a human species emerging from a flooded Earth. Inside, the virtual gallery shows a large image of a female figure standing in water with a visor over her eyes, while a white Babydrone, his drone carrying a newborn in a cloth sling, hovers in the foreground. The printed MetaVanity catalogue gives Clapis a spread with the same image, captioned Grieving Conception Flooded.

The project placed Clapis among the artists who brought crypto art into the orbit of a mainstream magazine and of the Biennale week, at a moment when museums and publishers were testing the metaverse as an exhibition space. For his work, which moves between physical sculpture and digital pieces, the room offered a setting where the two could meet without a physical venue.

Sources

• Vanity Fair alla conquista del metaverso con un museo di NFT — Artribune
• Vanity Fair Italy Presents New Metaverse Project — WWD (via Yahoo)