CENTS in Taschen’s On NFTs

Rutherford Chang’s CENTS exists at the intersection of the analog and the digital, and in line with the late artist’s lifelong practice of obsessive collecting. Chang’s best-known project, We Buy White Albums, entailed a quixotic, decades-long pursuit to buy and catalog every extant copy from the first pressing of the Beatles’ signature release, allowing him to compare the accretions and distortions to the palimpsest-like surfaces of these originally identical objects. He generally exhibited this work in the form of a record shop, turning gallery-goers into a community of crate-diggers. For CENTS, he collected pre-1982 pennies, minted in the years before the US Treasury, recognizing the increased value of copper, changed to a zinc alloy. Having dutifully photographed and cataloged these coins, he melted them down into a 68-pound copper block. The individual cents, as well as a 3D model of the cubic copper ingot, were then minted on the blockchain and continue to be circulated as digital inscriptions.

Consistently amused by the divergent valuations assigned by societies and economies to different objects, symbols and uses of time, Chang was particularly interested in how, just as the value of a physical copper penny had long surpassed $0.01, the value of his digital CENTS became permanently indeterminate. A lively online community has since arisen around the work, echoing those that have appeared around his earlier projects. As Chang’s first and only work on the blockchain, CENTS connects to his ongoing aesthetic and conceptual concerns, and reflects poetically on his own life and career, in which the demands of a role in a family technology business were often in tension with the Palo Alto native’s own work as an artist. Ironically and tragically, Chang’s obituary ran in the New York Times on the same day as a story announcing a government decision to discontinue the production of new pennies.

Philip Tinari
Director, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art