![]() Naysayers have attacked NFTs as “scams” and “Ponzi schemes” of the “cult of crypto,” and AI-generative and digital art as “screensavers” and “ugly.” The reaction is almost as hostile as the initial reception to cubism. And scores of digital artists around the world are selling their works on online marketplaces, such as Art Blocks, and in Christie’s and Sotheby’s auctions. The style was invented by Pablo Picasso and George Braque who created abstract works using fragmented, geometric planes. ![]() Drawing upon Paul Cezanne’s emphasis on the underlying architecture of form, these artists used multiple vantage points to fracture images into geometric forms. The artist Refik Anadol’s exhibition of “Unsupervised” at MoMA has captivated people’s imaginations so much that MoMA extended the showing. Cubism developed in the aftermath of Pablo Picassos shocking 1907 Les Demoiselles dAvignon in a period of rapid experimentation between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. This March marked the two-year anniversary of the third highest auction sale by a living artist: a $69.3 million digital artwork NFT called “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” by Beeple, whose sale bested the single sales of Salvador Dalí and Frida Kahlo. Now the leading art institutions from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and from the British Museum to the Centre Pompidou are exploring digital artworks through NFTs, including for permanent acquisitions. A now infamous pamphlet attacked the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first major exhibition of modern art, lambasting it as the product of a “modernistic degenerate cult.” Tragically, this view later prevailed in Germany, resulting in the Nazi confiscation of tens of thousands of “degenerate” artworks. to disrupt and degrade, if not to destroy, not only art, but literature and society, too.” The Washington Times even suggested that the modern artists might have to be quarantined, and the Constitution amended, to limit free speech. Their artworks were “ugly,” “bizarre” and “degenerate.” A New York Times editorial said that cubism is a “false art” and “a part of the general movement. The artists were disparaged as “freaks” and scam artists. newspapers fomented people’s fears about cubism. Les Demoiselles dAvignon, 1907 by Pablo Picasso Courtesy of This painting, Les Demoiselles dAvignon, was painted in 1907 and is the most famous example of cubism painting. Though Matisse wasn’t a cubist, the term was associated then with everything evil about modern art. The students “convicted” Henri Matisse for “artistic murder” and imposed the death penalty in a mock trial. In 1913, students of the School of the Art Institute even organized a mass protest. ![]() In the early 1900s, a new movement in art - derisively called “cubism” for the bizarre cubes the art supposedly depicted - sparked backlash. Soon afterwards, an artistic partnership developed between the two artists that was to define the nature of painting for years to come. Societal transformations often spark controversy.
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