With a slew of digital art exhibitions, Italian institutions are going all-in

It was only a matter of time before NFTs, which revolutionised the art world in 2021, seized control of some of Italy’s most prominent art institutions.

When the literati of the art world came on Venice for the 59th edition of the city’s Art Biennale in April, an NFT show named “Decentral Art Pavilion” sprung up in a Venetian palazzo.

The event, which featured pieces by more than two dozen artists including Beeple, Robness, Ryan Koopmans, Alice Wexell, XCOPY, and others, was a watershed moment for NFTs in the generally closed world of contemporary art.

“Let’s Get Digital!” is a new exhibition in Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi that promises to take viewers on a voyage across the broad expanses of digital art, featuring pieces by Refik Anadol, Anyma, Daniel Arsham, Beeple, Krista Kim, and Andrés Reisinger.

The show was conceived in collaboration with the Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati in Florence and curated by Arturo Galansino, director of the Strozzi, and Serena Tabacchi, director of the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art (MoCDA).

The show aims to “bring together the avant-garde and tradition, research and popularisation,” according to Galansino, by looking at how art and technology are enabling new forms of experimentation, study, and collaboration.

“‘Let’s Get Digital!’ aims to provide a broad overview of the most current developments in digital art, which are now generally acknowledged by the modern system,” Tabacchi explained. “Decentralization, blockchains, and NFTs have certified and spread the work of innumerable artists who were not previously recognised in that capacity.”

Anadol’s site-specific piece for the Palazzo’s courtyard, in which a sequence of artificial intelligence algorithms are projected onto visitors as they enter the museum’s verdant gardens, is one of the show’s highlights. And digital artist Beeple, whose career took off after his book EVERYDAYS: The First 5,000 Days sold for $69.3 million last year, will be exhibiting a collection of his most well-known post-apocalyptic digital photographs.