Arts • Space
How the Moon Became the Hottest Art Gallery in Town-
Republished Excerpts from Observer (Original Article by By Renée Reizman) • 08/07/24 7:49 pm
In 1965, six American artists delicately etched masterpieces on a tiny ceramic tile. Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, David Norvos, and Frosty Myers teamed up with the organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) and scientists at Bell Laboratories to engrave their drawings onto a canvas less than an inch wide. The images included Warhol’s doodle of a penis, Oldenburg’s bootleg take on Mickey Mouse and Rauschenberg’s finely drawn diagonal line.
“Moon Museum” was an unsanctioned project, and NASA has never confirmed whether the engraved tile successfully reached its destination. A good-faith reading, however, would have one believe that it reigned as the moon’s only artwork in situ for 70 years. That streak was set to end in January of this year when Dubai-based British artist Sacha Jafri would have become the first person with an official moon art commission.
Jafri, whom you may remember as the creator of the world’s largest painting on canvas, sent up an engraved gold alloy plate entitled We Rise Together — with the Light of the Moon on the Peregrine lander of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Rocket after being approached by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS). Look at the abstract piece long enough, and his cluster of overlapping squiggles reveals dozens of hearts and two figures embracing. It was a saccharine expression of hope in humanity; We Rise Together communicated that we’d rather make love than war.
Unfortunately, the lander, and with it Jafri’s work, failed to make its scheduled moon touchdown due to a propellant leak. But just one month later, the Odysseus lunar lander brought two more art projects to the moon: Moon Phases, a collection of 125 mini moon sculptures created by famed “balloon dog artist” Jeff Koons; and Space Blue’s Lunaprise Museum, a collection of 222 NFTs — digital twins of artworks on earth — compressed into a nickel disc.
[SPACE BLUE also curated into the Lunarpise Museum, the first bitcoin, first bitcoin white paper and first bitcoin Runes project on the moon, making surreal the actual meaning to to the famous exclamation by Bitcion lovers; “Bitcoin To TheMoon”[.
It looks like what used to be the most elusive gallery in the universe is now the hottest gallery in town.
Thanks to the whimsy of billionaires, the world has entered a new era of space exploration. Private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, and Kam Ghaffarian’s Intuitive Machine, which launched the Odysseus lander in partnership with NASA, have turned Earth’s lone orbiting satellite into something of a playground. For the first time in history, civilians — those of means, anyway — can launch themselves into the atmosphere and see the sun bending across the Earth’s curves.
With this comes new opportunities to turn the moon into a cultural entertainment venue. In addition to the artworks, Lady Gaga was once booked to play a concert aboard a Richard Branson Virgin Galactic spacecraft (canceled) and fashion mogul Yusaku Maezawa assembled a team of his favorite creatives, among them DJ Steve Aoki, to circumvent the moon (also canceled.) Though the celebrity voyages have yet to materialize, mostly due to the exorbitant expense and safety concerns, a lunar Madison Square Garden is most certainly looming in our future.
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We’ve made this gamble before. In 1977, NASA launched the Golden Record, which documented the sounds of the planet Earth into space. This experiment, led by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, was carefully curated to include a multitude of languages and music from both Eastern and Western cultures. If the record (now in the Kuiper belt) is ever discovered by someone from another civilization, the listener could hear rock and roll from Chuck Berry, concertos from Bach, a wedding song from Peru, and percussion from Senegal. In contrast, the Lunaprise Museum would have our hypothetical alien art appreciator thinking that NFTs were the most celebrated form of art on Earth rather than a confounding trend.
[Update: Lunaprise Takes “The Golden Album” Intentions to a whole new level At the time of the original publishing, the contents of the Lunaprise Museum were not known and were assumed to be digital NFTS. The curators published a complete list of artwork and the technology used and space collaborators, including SpaceX, NASA, the Odessyus Lander, and Galactic Legacy Labs information, all found at Github. The artwork stored spans over 30,000 years of human history including Renessiance masters, Sumerian artwork, sports collectibles, modern era master artists and photographers, The 9th Raider Post Apocalytic Movie and Stan Lee’s last characters and screenplay from the project Legion].
For the foreseeable future, Moon Art remains a performance rather than an exhibition. It’s a canon curated by the one percent, created by a roster of artists who befriended the right billionaires. In many ways, the contemporary artworks sent by Jafri and Koons, the Lunar Codex, and the Lunaprise Museum represent the same juvenile ambitions and connections that led to the did-they-didn’t-they Moon Museum, showing that humanity hasn’t made much progress when it comes to our desire to get art into space. Rather than sending our best to the moon, we are staking a claim. Like teen lovers carving their initials into trees, the mythos surrounding the lunar artworks will outlast the impact of the art itself.
Filed Under: Arts, Space, David Norvos, Frosty Myers, Sacha Jafri, space art, Ann Druyan, the moon, Carl Sagan, Steve Aoki, Yusaku Maezawa, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Branson, NFTs, Billionaires, Lady Gaga, NASA, Andy Warhol, Artists, Elon Musk, Blue Origin, SpaceX
