A destructive agent, still in demand.
XCOPY's (@XCOPYART) Breaker, a 2019 1/1 first minted on SuperRare (@SuperRare) with a single line of description, "Portrait of a destructive agent," joined a new collection on Friday in a private sale of $660,000. Eli Scheinman (@eli_schein), who facilitated the deal, called it "one of the truly great 2019 character pieces." The looping skull, boxed in cyan glitch and cut by bars of hot pink, sold for 200 ETH in 2021 and 100 ETH in 2024, as tracked by 24 Hours of Art (@24_Hours_Art). The new figure is the highest of the three in dollar terms, and the buyer has not been named.
The web's invisible readers get a body.
"Nowadays, much of the internet is explored not by humans, but by machines," opens the statement for Crawlers by Slava Rybin (@rybinfx), released on Ethereum by The Daily Program (@dailydotxyz) with OpenSea (@opensea). Its 1,111 creatures, built from points, squares and circles and moving like spiders and centipedes, each live on their own Wikipedia-style page, reading it, playing it as sound and writing new text beneath it with what Rybin calls "a boiled down LLM predictor." Saved as a bookmark, a crawler can be let loose on any website.
In Lisbon on Saturday, Eterno Gallery (@EternoGallery) held ETERNO OPEN LAB, a free day on how digital art and AI change the way art is made and collected, from production to ownership.
MAOTIK, the immersive and audiovisual artist Mathieu Le Sourd, spoke with Rudolfo Quintas and Camila Nogueira on installation and digital media, Mike Brauner gave a keynote on AI-led curation, and collectors talked first acquisitions, editions, display and preservation.
A cautionary note from the market.
Talis Protocol, an NFT marketplace built mainly on Injective, froze new listings and auctions after an attacker drained about 5,700 escrowed NFTs from its marketplace and auction contracts, reported Saturday. Dumped into standing collection offers, the haul came to roughly 445 INJ, about $3,100. Talis says it will return the stolen works, has begun returning more than 26,000 NFTs to their owners and plans to compensate bidders while a patched contract is reviewed.
And a history: in 1976 Martha Wilson opened Franklin Furnace (@FranklinFurnace) in her Tribeca loft at 112 Franklin Street to show artists' books, and its basement became a stage for a generation of New York performance.
Shut as an "illegal social club" in 1990 after a Karen Finley installation, it sold the loft in 1997 to "concentrate the program on broadcasting artists' ideas." In spring 1998, Franklin Furnace at Pseudo Programs, with Josh Harris's streaming network, gave 10 artists 50-minute netcasts, and the audience went from "75 people sitting on hard folding chairs" to viewers worldwide. Franklin Furnace turns 50 this year.