Non-replaceable objects / III. National Salon of Fine Arts 2025
The exhibition is the third in a series of annual National Salons organised by the Kunsthalle and presents the most important endeavours and works of Hungarian art in Hungary and beyond the borders of Hungary over the past five years.
The title of the exhibition is a term borrowed from the crypto world, meaning a virtual object with a unique digital ID, but the term in its modernly ingenious way captures something of the essence of fine art.
Is it too much to say that the material world thrust into virtuality, with the ingenuity of the human mind behind it, functions as a living substance in its intangible totality? As a glowing, sizzling, fluctuating consciousness which, defending itself, reflects with elemental force on the questions of physical reality, of human culture, which draws on its traditions. Matter? Reality beyond matter? Tradition? The medieval theologian Duns Scotus' concept of virtuality? Traditional forms of art? Artistic freedom created by digital means? Self-identity? Virtual identity? And while we're at it: the unlimited reproducibility of digital works of art versus the unreproducibility of the material artistic object?
Schedule
Non-fungible token.
Non-replaceable object.
If we look back at the term from the digital present, not only in its current place, but in its traditional sense, it becomes bizarrely valid for the visual arts as a whole. The contemporary ingenuity of its virtual metamorphosis captures something of the essence of art before and after digitalisation.
The spectacular change in contemporary art over the past five years is that its traditionally created forms are no longer immune to the increasingly powerful influences of a digital cosmos that is racing at breakneck speed. The exhibition seeks to explore the richness of personal reflections on the shifts in society and with them the infiltration of the virtual world, organised in the present, into traditional artistic thinking. Whether this manifests itself in form and/or content is a decision for the artistic subject. The exhibition seeks to explore a way of seeing the world that reflects our times, in which both the need to rethink tradition and the so-called digital thinking at work in the background of material works of art are at work.
The exhibition is curated by József Baksai, co-curated by György Verebes
Artistic adviser: Katalin Kállai
Kunsthalle Budapest
The largest exhibition hall in Budapest, in Heroes Square, just the opposite the Museum of Fine Arts.