Wrong Theory at Permanente Museum
Curated by Dart
Milan, Italy
2121, the crypto art exhibition staged by DART | Dynamic Art Museum at the Museo della Permanente in Via Filippo Turati, Milan, was presented by the press as the first Italian exhibition on NFTs in a museum. DART, a project conceived by Piergiulio Lanza and developed with the architect Riccardo Manfrin, curated it together with Wrong Theory, a group founded by Alessandro Brunello, Alan Tonetti and Serena Tabacchi. Works by around seventy digital artists, from established names such as Beeple, XCOPY and Trevor Jones to a strong Italian contingent, were shown on screens in two large ground-floor rooms, alongside talks on crypto art, artificial intelligence and the crypto economy, and a parallel display of old masters from private collections.
Federico Clapis was among the Italian artists in the show, with Babydrone in Space. The announcement card pairs his portrait with the work: a drone lifting a heavy marble-like bundle, the old image of the stork bringing a baby, above the curve of the Earth, surrounded by a fire hydrant, a refrigerator, a jerrycan and a folding chair adrift in orbit. In the galleries the animation ran on tall vertical screens mounted on black stands, next to a related scene in which a white female torso, opened to reveal a fetus, floats among bricks and a hard hat.
The exhibition gave Milan an early overview of the NFT scene inside a historic institution, and placed Clapis' reflection on birth, technology and care within the international crypto art canon of the moment.
Sources
- Al Museo della Permanente di Milano "2121", la più grande mostra sulla Crypto Art — Artribune
- The first Italian exhibition on NFTs arrives in Milan — nss magazine
- Wrong Theory at Permanente Museum — Federico Clapis