Conceptual art or provocation!
I am annoyed by this way of making art today, which is strongly influenced by factors that are anything but artistic.
Given that in order to "be", to exist in short, you must "be visible", with all the consequent obsessive compulsive ailments deriving from this need which would be equivalent to being present at all costs on the various social media etc. etc.
The question I ask myself and you is the usual one and it is the one that many people have always asked, at least since Marcel Duchamp changed the rules of the game and it is the following: What is art and what is not?
Considering that for some time now I seem to notice, that the prevailing idea consists in the fact that it is enough to emulate a fact, a brand, a logo, a popular work, and that this alone is enough... to become an artist. So taking advantage of the banal principles of elementary psychology of "similarity and authority", it seems natural that I assume lustre, importance, tracing precisely, the prestige, value from this or that "Vuitton or Prada or even Dollar or Banksy of the moment.
The resulting equivalence is therefore the following: an important logo or famous work is equal to “I am an important and prestigious artist.
We have therefore moved from the brilliant intuition of Andy Warhol that we all know as the famous 15 minutes of fame, highlighted and elevated to art as a banal moment in everyone's life can be in itself art, so a detergent like Brillo becomes art rather than the stereotype of the image of Marilyn Monroe or David Bowie being in themselves art. And this, thank God, is a concept established and present in the world of art for more than 70 years.
The distortion, in what happens today, would seem to be the exact opposite! That is, that the artist emulating the brand or the important work appropriates their visibility, importance and prestige with the intent of elevating himself and his work to art.
In this delirious context, I decided to take a stand, take sides and strongly provoke the collector with the new idea of: "being art myself", therefore, in convinced opposition to this clumsy attempt to appear, take advantage, avail oneself to please and be there at all costs, I decided instead to "value" and to impose myself as an artist, simply because I am, or I decided to be! And regardless of what I achieve and the feedback that all this has on the collector, I am worth as: "I as an artist" and so what? Going beyond the wonderful concept of Manzoni and his "artist's shit" which, even if symbolic and conceptual in the end is philosophically and materially supported by matter, therefore the can containing his presumed or real feces, I thought of evolving the concept making it purely theoretical and virtual. The provocation therefore becomes: today my essence is art, therefore, even just my name or everything I am or do is art"!
At this point the step is short, the value is no longer absolute measurable and conventional. There is no longer a hypothetical gold to measure the value of my doing but only the ability to calculate, to think it, becomes the true absolute value... Crypto currency, nft...?
Well... And so my purely academic and symbolic cryptocurrency was born: “The Wawakiki Art Coin, by Butera”
Every revolution has always had its tangible symbols, so by objectifying my concept, I have created a physical and purely symbolic coin consisting of a limited edition bas-relief with all the typical peculiarities of the current mintage coin except for the very important difference that here I attribute the value arbitrarily.
The work is made of biodegradable pla finished, colored and signed by hand. The dimensions are cm. 20X20 height cm. 3.5 resulting in a unique work.
