Last night’s Grammy Awards featured two notable art-related elements: designs by Refik Anadol and a prominent allusion to a work by Nam June Paik.
At the awards show, which was held in Los Angeles on Sunday, Beyoncé broke an industry record for the most Grammys won in the show’s history. Meanwhile, stadium-filling artists like Bad Bunny, Lizzo and Harry Styles were present to accept their awards against a stage design produced by Anadol, an ascendant media artist.
Drawing from Anadol’s digital art series “Machine Hallucinations,” these visuals were shown on screens mounted to the stage of the newly unveiled Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. Anadol’s work can also be seen across the country, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he is currently showing a new piece on a gigantic screen that loosely take its inspiration from the institution’s collection.
Anadol’s work has been gaining serious traction, given his forays into NFTs and AI-generated art. His work has been featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale and has been projected onto the Frank Gehry–designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
At one point during the Grammys, R&B singer Mary J. Blige performed alongside people reenacting a version of Paik’s 1971 work TV Cello. In the original produced by Paik, the cellist Charlotte Moorman ran a bow across a group of stacked television sets mimicking the structure of a cello.