With A Slice of the Pie, you can exhibit your art at Kunsthalle Zürich inside of a big, digital pie. Buy one or more slices online for a few Tezos cryptocoins and fill them with your artwork. It will be displayed in the exhibition space on a 16 square-metre LED wall, which is also livestreamed online. This way, you can become a participating artist in the exhibition DYOR.
You might choose to fill the whole pie or buy only a few slices. Other artists can do the same. Will you cooperate with them or try to hide their content? If your artwork is covered up, you can bring it to the front ten times, so be sure to check the livestream often! A collaborative – or competitive – artwork results from the process.
Once a day, at a random time determined by an algorithm, the pie is frozen and then minted as an NFT. Do you like the pie you see and don’t want to wait? Then, you can pay to freeze the pie yourself.
The pie is then minted as an NFT on the Tezos blockchain and put up for sale on Objkt.com, while it is still visible on this website and in the space until the next day. The profits derived from its sale are shared among the artists who own visible slices.
Every 24 hours the whole process starts again, resulting in 100 pies created during the course of the exhibition.
A Slice of the Pie derives from the artists’ ongoing reflection on gatekeeping in the art world and the monetisation of access to it. Focussing on the crypto scene, the artwork updates these themes, which Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg first explored in Projected Capital (2018). A Slice of the Pie allows both cooperation and competition, both consensual decision-making and winner-takes-it-all resolutions. The artwork is inspired by the dry language of financial charts and dashboards as well as the cutthroat design of ’battle royale’ games. Launching in a time of backlash towards crypto, A Slice of the Pie puts its promises of participation to the test.
Commissioned by Kunsthalle Zürich for the exhibition DYOR, curated by Nina Roehrs.
Photo by Julien Gremaud. Promo video by Leïth Benkhedda.