Tezos

67. "Untitled #1 (April 16, 1987)" by Keith Haring [aka, a Forgery]

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tz1U8x9dUtdv4mtLUvaukpMNVi1wvNxr1gy2

Description

67. "Untitled #1 (April 16, 1987)" by Keith Haring [aka, a Forgery] "Drawing Exercises" 1400 x 924 px., gif 2023 ** It was inevitable. There would come a time where a Drawing Exercise would require me to produce a forgery. That time is now ---Christie's is about to auction 5 NFTs of 5 recently discovered pixel art drawings by Keith Haring. It's said he made them on an Amiga gifted by Timothy Leary back in 1987. "Untitled #1" stuck out because of the noisy gradient fill, a strange detail that also didn't escape the attention of Xer0x, whose concurrent PDF work "No Way These Keith Harings Are Real" looks into the history of Haring's pixel drawings, their provenance and conservation. Ofc this exercise poses the question: What does forgery mean for digital art? Is it even possible to forge a digital work of art the same way one would forge a painting? In NFTLand, we don't see forgeries as much as we see copyminters, people who right-click-saved a minted artwork and then listed it under a different wallet or on another blockchain. But this forgery is a hand-drawn reproduction, carefully crafted with mouse-strokes on a rainy Friday afternoon. This work wasn't even traced, I eyeballed the proportions and tried to embody Haring's mouse gestures. Maybe for a second I became a vessel. You might point out, that this isn't a good forgery, because the original Amiga drawing was created with Graphicraft and not Deluxe Paint IV. It also had a 320 x 200 pixel dimension and not whatever emulated AVI monstrosity this is. To this charge, I respond that you are right, here I failed as a forger because the stubborn incessant grumbling voice of artist spoke louder. I just think the drawing looks cool with the color cycles. NGL. So is it possible to forge a digital artwork? The material economy of digital art is different than that of paintings. Forgeries cash in on perceived notions of rarity. This is a much more serious preposition when it comes to rare physical objects, from Da Vinci's to N64 Cartridges. But with digital art, it's different. This forgery won't affect the 1/1ness of the work going up for auction. If anything, it adds value to the work because this will generate discourse and citations and clicks and maybe even some ad revenue. To successfully forge a pixel artwork from 1987 you would need to simulate the simulation, so to speak. Recreate the conditions of 1987, even bring back Reagan. It's a vast and thankless undertaking. So, is the act of forgery a mere conceptual performance in the age of memes, fandoms, and AI? The value system of images have been turned upside down during the last half-century. Today, the rarest and most precious images are the ones that are copied. These are the few images we want to remember, the ones we butcher and resurrect with the rusty tools we find in our sheds. So, in many ways, the forgery becomes necessary. It's one small way to carry art across time and history. To forge a digital artwork is to participate in the very act of its creation. ** > Created in Deluxe Paint IV on an emulated Amiga A1200 computer. // Artwork by Sabato Visconti // www.sabatobox.com // @sabatobox on Twitter //