What Madonna’s collaboration with Beeple tells us about the status of human-centred reality
The development of NFTs as a platform for a kind of feral, chaotic experiment in visual culture has produced some strange works of late. The recent NFT collaboration between pop queen Madonna and NFT king Mike Winkelmann – the artist known as Beeple – being one of them. The three videos that comprise Mother of Creation (2022) aren’t exactly subtle. In three different, vaguely dystopian science-fictional settings, a reclining, naked Madonna CGI avatar gives birth to things other than human babies: a great, verdant tree, quickly covered in lichen and blossoms; a cloud of fluttering amber butterflies; and perhaps strangest of all, a cohort of metallic centipede robots. All to be auctioned as fundraisers for women’s charities, on NFT site SuperRare.
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