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Crypto art: A solution or a problem for the art community?
The rise of cryptoart and NFT markets has led to several accusations of digital art theft, raising the whether the impact on the art community is positive or negative.
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Ardneks has worked on a number of illustrations internationally, including album covers and concert posters. (Ardneks collection/Courtesy of Kendra Ahimsa)
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ver the past two weeks, the Indonesian art scene has been in uproar over alleged plagiarism involving a crypto artist, Twisted Vacancy, whose body of work may have artistically borrowed too much from another Indonesian illustrator, Kendra “Ardneks” Ahimsa.
Even though ownership and copyright have always been issues in the art world, the fact that Twisted Vacancy operates within the crypto art market, which is foreign to many, makes the discussion a lot more complex and nuanced.
The 32-year-old Kendra, however, likes to keep it simple when talking about imitation. Widely known for his psychedelic illustrations using bright, bold colors, which he has been refining for the past eight years, Kendra claimed that Twisted Vacancy had been stealing his “whole artistic identity.”
“It’s not just the color palettes but also the patterns, aesthetics and how he draws trees, for example,” Kendra said, “It’s too obvious to be accidental.”
Some pieces do look suspiciously similar even to the untrained eye.
Twisted Vacancy (TV) doesn’t deny the similarities between his work and Kendra’s. When confronted by Kendra for the very first time, he admitted to using Kendra’s art as one of his many references, but never “totally copied” it.
