Ethereum, the crypto-currency on which most NFTs are minted, dropped below $1,800 Friday, its lowest value in over a year. It’s a far cry from its peak in the high $4,000s last November. 

With the drop, the mourning has begun, even among a crypto-community used to weathering the asset’s volatility. NFT platforms, however, are not wading through the five stages of grief before taking action.

In quick succession, major NFT platforms like Foundation, SuperRare, and OpenSea have announced major changes to the way they run their businesses. 

While none of these pivots has been explicitly labeled as a response to the market, the timing and nature of the new initiatives seem designed to make up for the lack of enthusiasm in the market currently.

Take Foundation, for example. 

Early on in Crimes of the Future, filmmaker David Cronenberg’s newly released big return to body horror, a man named Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) has his chest opened up for a rapt audience. A machine with fast-moving scalpels pulls apart his stomach and reveals his innards to the crowd. Meanwhile, his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) paces around the room, fingering a squishy gadget with blinking lights to control this surgery, which serves no medical purpose. All the while, Saul moans and writhes, perhaps in pleasure, perhaps in pain, perhaps in a mix of the two.

Could this makeshift surgery be considered art? At least within the film’s world, yes. Caprice labels herself as a performance artist, though Saul is not merely her subject — he is a collaborator unto himself, and he considers his organs his creations.

While this may all seem rather strange, Crimes of the Future is, in fact, couched in recent art history. It draws on a kind of performance art in which artists use their body as their material, subjecting themselves to particularly painful situations that have involved bloodletting and the modification of their skin.

“Twenty years ago when I wrote this script, there were lots of performance artists of various kinds,” Cronenberg told critic Amy Taubin in an Artforum interview this week. “Once you have it in your head that something exists, that artists were compelled to make those performance works and that there was an audience for them, that frees you to invent what you’re going to invent.”

A man broke into the Dallas Museum of Art on Wednesday night, significantly damaging several artworks, including three Greek artifacts and a contemporary Native American piece.

According to the Dallas Morning News, Brian Hernandez, 21, shattered the museum’s glass entrance with a metal chair. Once inside, he began targeting the collection. Among the casualties of his vandalism was a 6th-century BCE Greek amphora, a ceramic vessel used to store liquids, and a Greek box dated from 450 BCE.

Police said Hernandez also destroyed a delicate bowl from ancient Greece decorated with vignettes of Heracles fighting the Nemean lion. A ceramic Caddo bottle depicting an alligator worth $10,000 was pulled from its displayed case and shattered on the museum floor. A dozen smaller objects also suffered minor damage.

“While we are devastated by this incident, we are grateful that no one was harmed. The safety of our staff and visitors, along with the care and protection of the art in our stewardship, are our utmost priorities,” the museum said in a statement.

Hernandez reportedly called 911 on himself while inside the museum before being apprehended by DMA security. He confessed to police and is currently detained at the Dallas County Jail on a charge of criminal mischief. In addition to the collection pieces, he is also accused of causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage to museum property including display cases and furniture.

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Most New York gallerists who’ve opened spaces in the Hamptons got their start in the city and built up a network of artists and collectors before venturing out east. Dealer Harper Levine did the reverse. He started his gallery in East Hampton in 1997, tapping a rich community that would launch him from a rare bookseller to an established gallerist. Now, he has five spaces under his auspices, with three of them located in Manhattan.

This past weekend, Levine celebrated a major milestone, opening “25 Years,” a show in East Hampton that toasted the gallery’s 25th anniversary.

Dealer Jack Hanley and artist Cindy Sherman were among those who came this past Saturday to see the show, which includes work by Mark Grotjahn, Richard Prince, and Eddie Martinez. Artists Rashid Johnson and Joel Mesler, who both have nearby studios and also have work in the show, were also on hand, mingling among artist Mary Heilmann and collectors Stafford and Laura Broumand.

“I want to celebrate the fact that I survived this for 25 years,” Levine said in an interview last week in the gallery space he opened in New York’s Chelsea art district in 2020. The anniversary show, he said, is “a celebration of my life and business and is a way for me to sort of commingle artists. [It’s] about believing in my own story and seeing what we’ve been able to do.”

In 2001, Levine, who was born and raised in Manhattan, was living in Minnesota when he decided to come back to New York and make a new start. As he puts it, “I had a hundred bucks.” But his trip back home ended up coinciding with the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and, with a new baby in tow, he and his wife decided to instead settle in the Hamptons, where Levine opened a rare book store that eventually also became a gallery.

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The Headlines

ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT, a 21-year-old man was arrested for allegedly breaking into the Dallas Museum of Art and seriously damaging at least four pieces on display, including a Greek amphora from the 6th century B.C.E., the Dallas Morning News reports. Initial reports had placed the value of the damaged works at $5 million, but the museum’s director, Agustín Arteaga , said that the actual figure may be “a fraction” of that. The man was charged with criminal mischief of $300,000 or more, which carries a possible sentence of five years to life in prison, according to the Guardian. Dallas police said that the suspect told the guard who apprehended him that “he got mad at his girl so he broke in and started destroying property.”

CHINA DISPATCH. The exact date has not been announced, but Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam said that the Hong Kong Palace Museum will be inaugurated this summer amid celebrations tied to the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China, the South China Morning Post reports. Over in Shanghai, an intense Covid lockdown has ended, but cultural venues institutions remain shuttered, and there has been no word about when they will be allowed to reopen, the Art Newspaper reports. A rep for UCCA Edge, branch of the Beijing-based museum in the city, said that it will soon be able to install shows, which will ease reopening when that is allowed.

The Digest

Paul Gunther, a revered expert in arts administration who held posts at the Municipal Art Society, the New-York Historical Society, and the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, has died at the age of 65. [The New York Times]

The Dulwich Picture Gallery in London has quietly stopped billing its director as the “Sackler Director.” The move comes as many museums have removed the Sackler name from projects supported by the family, some of whose members have been accused of fueling the opioid crisis through the sale of OxyContin via their company Purdue Pharma. [The Art Newspaper]

Marcus, Andy and Pete are here for queen and country to welcome England’s return to action on today’s Preview Show, sponsored by Betway!

They also chat about last night’s internationals, where Cristiano Ronaldo’s absence from the starting XI against Spain caused a stir and Norway’s national team took a break from defeating trolls and goblins to somehow keep out Aleksandar Mitrović. 

Plus, Marcus and Andy enter the lion’s den that is Pete’s Game and do battle once more. 

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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If your memory about last week is hazy, no one can blame you. But it was less than two weeks ago since a massive misinformation-generation campaign caused people on both the left and the right to declare they were canceling their insurance through State Farm.

The story began on Monday via the National Review, a right-wing media machine. According to an email leaked to Consumers’ Research — a group that purposefully sounds like Consumer Reports but is instead a machine meant to generate outrage against “woke” companies — a leader in State Farm’s company reached out to Florida agents in January asking if they’d like to take part in a project to “help diversify classroom, community center and library bookshelves with a collection of books to help bring clarity and understanding to the national conversation about Being Transgender, Inclusive and Non-Binary.” Jose Soto, who wrote the email that was leaked, said that “The project’s goal is to increase representation of LGBTQ+ books and support out communities in having challenging, important and empowering conversations with children Age 5+.”

This story trickled down through the Moms For Liberty groups on Monday afternoon, generating the precise rage it was meant to elicit. Indeed, as of Monday afternoon, only the National Review and affiliates had begun to spread this news of the partnership; no reputable source – not State Farm, not GenderCool, not a single information outlet — had covered the story. The image below is of a Google search for “GenderCool” and “State Farm” on Monday, May 25, at 4:30 pm Eastern time. All of these sources are right-wing outlets.

Tuesday morning, State Farm trended on Twitter. The Washington Examiner — another right-wing outlet — shared the story that State Farm pulled out of the program because of backlash.

That morning, prior to the murder of 21 people in a Uvalde, Texas, classroom, the left began its outrage. They, too, would be canceling their insurance through State Farm.

I went to day camp from about 2nd grade through 8th grade. It was a religious summer camp, despite the fact then — and now —I’m areligious, but it was a way for me to socialize with other kids, get outside, and free my grandparents from a few hours of watching me. I loved it wholeheartedly, and though the option to stay overnight was one, I never took it. Instead, I stuck to singing Jesus songs, enjoying afternoon swims in the pool (including going off the diving board and conquering a fear as soon as I passed the advanced swimming test in 4th grade), and playing camp-wide games of capture the flag and red rover before heading home, sun-battered and chlorine-covered. I read my fair share of tween and teen summer camp stories during that time, and while summer camp in YA has definitely changed since the ’90s, one thing remains the same: camp is a killer setting and remains a popular spot for teens to fall in love, to experience heartbreak, and maybe to help solve a murder or two.

What is camp, anyway? It might involve camping or the wilderness, or it might not. Camp is less about hiking and biking and getting into the lake (like camping) and more about an organized summer program that’s supervised by older teens and adults. Camp has often served as a bridge for childcare during the months when young people are out of school but parents are still working. While it once was fairly focused on being set outdoors in some capacity, whether it was a day camp or a sleep away camp, it’s common now to see a million different types of camp. Some may never include being outside at all and instead focus entirely on a specific skill or craft for a designated period of time.