THE RARE FISH MARKET BY NOPER AND CYDR OPENS TOMORROW

Rare fish have long been the stuff of sailor’s tales and speculative bubbles, but in CYDR and NOPER’s new collaboration they become wry emblems of a planet in meltdown and a market gone mad. Humor in art, scholars remind us, is a slippery instrument, at once critical scalpel and escape hatch. “Humor can sharpen political consciousness or just as easily anesthetize it,” writes Annie Gérin in a survey of comic strategies in visual culture, while many critiques warn that work which makes us laugh is still too often dismissed as lightweight. CYDR & NOPER embrace that double-edge: their piscine NFTs are bait and critique in the same gesture, trolling late-capital appetites even as they feed them.