The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, and Misako & Rosen, Tokyo, are pleased to collaborate on presenting 50 Wall Safes, by artist and writer David Robbins.

With cheeky candor the Wall Safes address the reality that artworks are often purchased for their investment value. Depicting imaginary vaults created with the use of artificial intelligence, 50 Wall Safes comments on the assetization of art, literalizing this development with cracked panache. Gold or silver and jewel-encrusted, the Wall Safes are impossible cartoons of opulence, their style conjuring the exaggerated capacities of excessive wealth as it is pictured in the popular imagination.

An ideal gift for the oligarch in your life, each of the individual Wall Safes is available for purchase as an NFT, the recent innovation in provenance proof and value storage for digital art. Priced at $1000, each unique Wall Safe is on a continuum of collectible between mass-produced trading card, a casino chip, and one-of-a-kind fine art, with the confusion deliberate and timely.

“A comedic master of middle-class vernaculars,”* David Robbins has been playing within and with the art world for forty years, in visual works such as The Art Dealers’ Optical Tests (1987) and the iconic Talent (1986), which is widely acknowledged as key to updating the image of the artist for the entertainment-industrial era.  His art is in the collection of numerous museums. His eight books include Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth Century Comedy (2011), The Ice Cream Social (1996), Accrochage (2020), and High Entertainment (2023). He has just completed a memoir, Rebel Without Applause.

*The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York