Why is Frida Kahlo’s niece dismantling her house for an NFT? Has ‘succession’ broken up the shed? + Other questions I have about the week’s art news

Curiosities is a column where I comment on the week’s art news, sometimes about stories too small or weird to make the cut, sometimes just my thoughts on the ups and downs.

Here are a few questions about the events of the past week …

1) Do we have to sell Frida Kahlo’s house to make NFTs?

Miami Art Week is just around the corner, and it promises to get especially insane this year with the frothed-mouth NFT fever breakout. I could spend all day telling myself the barrage of insane NFT events that hit me and couldn’t even make a dent in the pile. Let us concentrate on just one thing: The “Digital Asset Company” Ezel.life sells a real piece of Frida Kahlo’s family house, the Casa Roja (or Red House), as NFT.

You can attest to this, starting tonight in the heart of the Miami Beach action at the Sagamore Hotel. The Ezel event is being advertised as the “soft start” of an “exclusive partnership” with Frida’s family which, according to a product roadmap, will culminate in the creation of the “Frida Kahlo and Family Metaverse” in the second quarter of next year.

Mara Romeo, Frida’s great-great-niece, is involved in the project – although Romeo has been involved in some very complex legal disputes in the past over who has the rights to market Frida’s name and image. Romeo objected that having a Frida Kahlo Barbie offended the artist’s mind. Then the Panama-based company that controls Kahlo licensing sued Romeo, saying it did not have the right to sell its own Kahlo merch. The lawsuit was dismissed in Florida in September, according to ARTnews.

“We’re getting a brick from the Red House,” enthuses Romeo in a video that Ezel.life has published. “This building block will be the basis of the metaverse that the house is to recreate and replicate in order to give you all access to the secrets of the family, the secrets of Frida Kahlo, through this new digital world.”

It then shows footage of a worker literally pulling the actual brick out of the structure and prying it out from under a beam that is apparently about to be on display in Miami.

A press release states: “The physical building block and its NFT connect the foundation of the red house in the physical world with the metaverse in the digital world.” I don’t know exactly what that actually means – but as a metaphor it’s a bit on the nose, don’t you think? Do you know how to undermine the very foundation of Frida Kahlo’s legacy and everything else?

2) How about that shed cameo in a row?

If you like art and watch HBO’s upper mid-brow media dynasty soap series, “Succession,” you were probably as amused as I was when I saw Shed appear on the episode on Sunday. It served as the venue for the 40th birthday celebrations of Kendall Roy, the rebellious offspring of the Roys, the show’s fake Murdoch clan. (Kendall’s real analog, James Murdoch, by the way, bought a majority stake in Art Basel’s parent group last year, so it’s timely!)

In explaining the decision to host the set-piece party at the Shed, production designer Stephen Carter told Thrillist that he originally envisioned it at the Clark Art Institute, but thought better. Considering Kendall’s characterization as a rich kid, whose desperation to be loved, and megalomania keep getting in the way of his better impulses, Carter has made a rather devious addition to the shed that it feels like more of an authentic venue: “It is a guy from Hudson Yards. “

Some Other Art Tidbits: If you thought the entrance to the party, where guests entered through a pink tunnel that represented Roy’s mother’s vagina, reminded you of the famous Hon (She) statue by Niki de Saint Phalle (whose Work was seen on PS1) while filming season 3) you’re probably right. The tunnel was supposed to be flanked by two 25 foot long inflatable woman’s legs – you just can’t see them in the last cut.

she at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, Sweden. Photo by Arne Scweiz / Scanpix Sweden, AFP via Getty Images. “Width =” 1024 “height =” 631 “srcset =” https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2021/11/Niki-de -Saint-Phalle-1024×631.jpg 1024w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2021/11/Niki-de-Saint-Phalle-300×185.jpg 300w, https: //news.artnet .com / app / news-upload / 2021/11 / Niki-de-Saint-Phalle-50×31.jpg 50w “size =” (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px “/>

People enter Niki de Saint-Phalles giant sculpture She in the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, Sweden. Photo by Arne Scweiz / Scanpix Sweden, AFP via Getty Images.

The set-piece tree house was inspired by the Santa Fe Experience art collective Meow Wolf: “The idea was to make it feel a bit like approaching the tree house, like one of their constructions is pointing to some kind of theme park version of the Treehouse, but when you go in, it’s actually a lot clubbier, ”Carter explained.

Meow Wolf, home of eternal return. Photo by Kate Russell, courtesy Meow Wolf.

Parts of the party were actually filmed in the shed; others, such as the “compliment tunnel” through which guests went to receive compliments from the companions hidden in the walls, were performed on a sound stage. The lighting was inspired by Kanye West’s Life of Pablo tour. The theme ideas actually come from the mind of Jeremy Strong, the actor who plays Kendall – although one of his favorites, a room with “Fucked Up Enya”, didn’t make it to the cinema.

Since satire is dead, there is of course an article on “How to do Manhattan Like a Roy from HBO’s ‘Succession'” which is broken down into the categories of “Stay”, “Eat” and “Do”. (Would you like to “do” NYC like Kendall? The article suggests you see “DRIFT: Fragile Future” in the shed.) So I wouldn’t be surprised if the satirical party announces what’s in store for the shed. What better use for the iconic “Bloomberg Building” than the birthday rent for rich guys?

3) What is the price for the $ PEOPLE?

I’ve written enough about the ConstitutionDAO’s failed offer to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution at Sotheby’s, where over 17,000 people pooled their cryptocurrency to address the giants of the collectible document market.

One thing that may not have been emphasized enough is how quickly the DAO’s generous rhetoric turned into talk of financial speculation. Originally, the public pitch was about claiming the document “for the people” and finding an effective public institution for it so that it would not be hidden by a billionaire.

But on the post-sale Twitter livestream, when the DAO leadership group still thought they had successfully bought the document, the chatter had already turned into potential “high profits for the governance tokens” and DAO participants with the potential Advantage annoyed the “$. to flip over People ”tokens they bought that they could use to vote on where the constitution ended.

In any case, the DAO lost the bid. The following week turned into a cluster fuck as the core group tried to grapple with the many unknown problems of this crypto-powered form of crowd funding. It turns out that the “gas fees” associated with a refund in the Ethereum economy are gobbling up more value than many people are investing.

Yet for some there were still options.

Dylan Goldberg and Katie Rothstein. Photo courtesy of Crypto Girls.

Specifically to Katie Rothstein, former Artnet News writer and social media manager, who wasn’t sure how to reclaim the $ 250 she’d given to participate in the viral ConstitutionDAO. But the weekend arose when the DAO released the tokens for trading on secondary exchanges, where they instantly rose to 25 times the original price.

“My friend noticed and texted me, so I sprinted home and drove out. I hadn’t touched it or asked for my refund so I could claim my $ People, convert it to $ 5,500 Ethereum, which I then sold and transferred to my bank minus the gas fees for $ 5,300, ”wrote Rothstein. “I’m freaking out!” (Rothstein just started a podcast with Dylan Goldberg called “Crypto Girls” about crypto investing, and you can hear her talk more about the saga in her new episode.)

The price of $ People has already gone down again. After the speculative surge, the ConstitutionDAO group itself was forced to issue a statement reminding everyone that $ People tokens are essentially useless:

After losing the auction and following the decision of the core team to close it, we would like to remind you that the tokens have no other rights, governance or use than they have against Ethereum from the smart contract held in Juicebox at a ratio of 1,000,000 to redeem: 1 – the same ratio in which contributions were made to the original crowdfund to purchase the constitution.

As Rothstein said, “This crypto shit is so crazy.”

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