The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, and Misako & Rosen, Tokyo, are pleased to collaborate on presenting 100 Wall Safes, an online exhibition by artist and writer David Robbins.

The Wall Safes address with cheeky candor the fact that artworks today are often purchased for their investment value. Depicting imaginary vaults created using artificial intelligence software, 100 Wall Safes comments on the assetization of art, literalizing the development with cracked panache. Gold and jewel-encrusted, the Wall Safes are impossible cartoons of opulence. Their look, combined with the surrounding details of outré decor, conjure the over-the-top 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 $100, each unique Wall Safe jpeg 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.

100 Wall Safes

    “Make Class Warfare Fun Again!” David Robbins talks to Jacob Fabricius about the online exhibition, 100 Wall Safes

“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