The retrospective “Satanic Panic” invites the visitor to explore a handpicked selection from the 428 NFT video artworks of the Luther Blissett Legacy collection created by ARTOLDO crypto in memory of the super folk hero Luther Blissett (1994-1999). The exhibition reflects on the different selves of the Luther Blissett pseudonym which was used by hundreds of left-wing artists in Europe to produce art, perform pranks, and publish books. Their most famous novel “Q” may have been abused by right-wing renegades as inspiration for their conspiracy theory of QAnon.
Besides this historical political homage, the Luther Blissett Legacy goes one step further by employing a philosophical aspect of the crypto culture and establishing the suppositional protocols of Proof of Workerism vs. Proof of Prank. The artwork in the name of the credo of NFT may be seen as a liberation of slavery of work but at the same time as an orgy of capitalistic speculation, pure “cognitive labour” greatly subsumed by the capital once more in an eternal mocking. A concept prophesied about the destiny of industrial labour by some of the protagonists of a critical Italian radical current of political thought called Operaismo, i.e. Workerism, yet in a forward, joking and fresh interpretation. PoW and PoP (culture) combined form a bright communist anti-capitalist stance which the duo explains academically by hijacking the identities of recognised leftist professors and intellectuals using the same techniques as Luther Blissett but in an updated fashion for the Web 2 and Web 3. Their white paper offers a deeper look into the world of the Luther Blissett pseudonym in the form of collected texts and interviews and an own understanding of the power to stay anonymous by transferring the actual (hi)story of Luther Blissett to the technical evolution of the Blockchain and the world of crypto itself – concluding their essay that Satoshi Nakamoto has much in common with the pseudonym of Luther Blissett which may be seen as some sort of reincarnation of the ideals of anonymity, as a reformation of the doctrine (FIAT dogma vs. the crypto millennialism, akin Luthers’ rebellion), and as miseducation of “received” canon.
Project website: https://lutherblissettlegacy.github.io/collection/
NFT collection on OpenSea: https://opensea.io/collection/lutherblissett
Curators: Carl Fravel, Pondweed