Digital Duel: Crypto vs Canvas by Kenny Schachter

The pushback against crypto and NFTs from the traditional art world has been fast & furious (and relentless)! Digital Duel: Crypto vs Canvas is a prototype for a fantasy conceptual video game in the works pitting the leading lights of NFTism against the stalwarts of the old art world in a life or death battle for superiority. The winner takes all—of art history.

Kenny Schachter has been curating contemporary art exhibits in museums and galleries and teaching (art history and economics) for more than thirty years; presently in the graduate department of the University of Zurich (appointed to advisory board January 2021) professorships at the School of Visual Arts (NY) and New York University. He has lectured internationally, been the recipient of a Rockefeller supported grant in Mexico, and contributed to books on Paul Thek, Zaha Hadid, Vito Acconci and Sigmar Polke/Gerhard Richter.

Schachter has a regular column on Artnet.com in addition to writing widely for various international publications including most recently New York Magazine and The Times Magazine (UK). He had a retrospective of his art at Joel Mesler’s Rental Gallery in New York in the summer of 2018, curated an exhibit at Simon Lee Gallery in London, fall 2018 and a one person show at Kantor Gallery, LA, February 2019. He recently participated in a two-person show with Eva Beresin at Galerie Charim in Vienna (both in May 2021) Schachter participated in Art Basel 2021 in Switzerland and Miami with Nagel Draxler Gallery. Schachter is presently the subject of a documentary being produced and directed by Chris Smith (Tiger King/Fyre Festival), and a Hulu/ABC NFT film, and has been profiled in The New York Times Magazine (cover story, September, 1996), and London's Observer, Independent and Telegraph. After having made digital art for decades, Schachter has spearheaded the traditional art world’s adaptation of Non Fungible Tokens in 2020-1 by lecturing from Yale to the Hirschhorn Museum and written 12 feature articles for Artnet on the subject. In 2021, he curated wide-ranging NFTism exhibitions (a term he trademarked) at Nagel Draxler in Cologne, Institut in London. Kenny is currently based in New York.