Beeple Donates NSFW NFT to Castello di Rivoli, a Rarity in the Museum World

The Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin, Italy, is now one of the few institutions to own an NFT by Beeple, the artist who helped put the digital-art format on the map with a 2021 auction at Christie’s.

On Friday, the museum announced that Beeple had donated FTX BOARD MEETING, DAY #5676 11.13.2022 (2023), an image that features computer-generated versions of the embattled entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried graphically copulating with each other. Alongside the NFT, the museum has acquired a physical oil painting version of the image.

Bankman-Fried, who was arrested last year for wire fraud and money laundering, ran FTX, a crypto hedge fund that has since declared bankruptcy. CoinDesk has reported that Bankman-Fried and his ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison were part of a “cabal of roommates” that engaged in relationships with one another; the Beeple NFT is in part a reference to rumors that Bankman-Fried hosted orgies at the office of his currency company, Alameda Research.

Other Beeple NFTs have regularly spoofed the tech industry, with apocalyptic images of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and the like, sometimes in lewd ways.

To underscore the NSFW quality of this NFT, the Castello di Rivoli announced the donation with a censored version of the image that blurred out most of the bacchanalia. Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev said this was a reference to censorship that takes place on social media, claiming that YouTube would not allow the image to be shown, due to rules about nudity on the website.

“Many great artists use the new medium and techniques of their time and also critique them and show the risks of their ‘brave new world.’ Here Beeple’s seemingly pornographic image is also pointing to the childish, immature and narcissistic nature of the digital world,” she said in a statement. “It’s important that such art not be censored by social media companies and their algorithms.”

In typical form for Christov-Bakargiev, who has in recent years established a deep friendship with Beeple, she issued a lengthy statement that touched on a spread of issues, from art history to the crypto crash.

“For me, the collapse of the crypto world following the FTX scandal and the speculative bubble that exploded last year is one of the key moments of that world – it was like an atomic bomb going off in the crypto world,” her statement read, in part.

She continued, “Beeple’s work is particularly controversial in that community because he is an artist who critiques the digital world. He questions the technology and the society that develops in relation to that technology, even as he uses its system and structures. For me, Beeple is interesting as an artist in a similar way to Andy Warhol: both critique the societies in which they are embedded. Warhol was critiquing the consumer society around him – that’s why he made the electric chair pictures, the tragic image of Marilyn Monroe and his endless repetitions and magnifications of consumer culture.”

Not many other museums have NFTs by Beeple, whose work sold for $69 million at Christie’s two years ago, becoming one of the most expensive pieces by a living artist ever auctioned and setting off a crypto craze in the art world that can still be felt today. The Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China, does own one of his sculptures, however. LGDR gallery has said that that work was purchased for $9 million at Art Basel Hong Kong.

The Beeple donation is one of the last initiatives overseen at the Castello di Rivoli by Christov-Bakargiev, who is set to depart as director on January 1 upon her retirement. She said the Beeple work is “an important donation that updates our permanent collection with a work in a 21st-century medium that combines the digital with the physical.”

View the uncensored image of FTX BOARD MEETING, DAY #5676 11.13.2022 below: