 continues as Artwrld will "slice" Vladimir Putin's birthday cake. Our early access list gives Artwrld's early friends and supporters the opportunity to purchase (0.2 ETH) 1 of 69 unique slices "celebrating" this truly horrific world leader. 

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"Celebrating" Putin's 69th birthday, 69 unique cake slices will be generated. Each slice is unique with either a poison or an elixir on its base.

The twentieth century ushered in a new global era of authoritarian rule. Leaders leveraged mass media to prey upon the anxieties of their respective populations, relying on cults of personality and saccharine images to launder their reputations for violence.

, Raad presents a series of twenty unique 3D-animated birthday cakes—and hundreds of individual cake slices—each dedicated to some of the world’s most toxic or larger-than-life leaders. 

The slices will be generated from the the Vladimir Putin cake NFT in 

Christie’s “Trespassing” auction on July 8

What a crowd of sublime images and beloved names press upon my recollection! Immortal warriors, posterity will not believe the multitude of your triumphs; but to us history loses all its improbabilities.

(b. 1967, Chbaniyeh, Lebanon) creates performances, installations, videos, and photographs to address how violence affects bodies, minds, cities, art and tradition. His work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennial, and Documenta, and in solo exhibitions at MoMA, the Louvre, the Stedelijk Museum, and Whitechapel Art Gallery. Recent exhibitions include 

 (2021-2022, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza). His work is in the collections of museums worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou, the Stedelijk Museum, Kunsthaus Zürich, the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He teaches Art in The Cooper Union, and he is a founding partner of Artwrld.

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“Festival of Gratitude” presents a series of birthday cakes for world rulers actively engaged in a narcissistic expansion of their will—which, predictably, comes at the expense of democracy in most instances. They are confections for strongmen (and women) enraptured with their own power whose shadows loom large over headlines, lives, and the everyday minutia of the global politic. Why celebrate these tyrants?

The 21st century has ushered in a renewed age of the autocrat. The globalism and neoliberalism that shaped the ‘90s and the aughts has given way to national leader as mobster boss, crime lord, grifter. Sparking the anger of the working class, deploying racial epithets and harkening to myths of cultural nationalism, these leaders, when considered in aggregate, represent a trend more than a singular diabolical impulse.

For artist Walid Raad, the project takes its cue from an early memory of Beirut. As an aspiring teenaged photographer, he frequently snapped birthday cakes at his favorite bakery. As he documented cake after sumptuous cake, he realized that the names inscribed in viscous icing were as likely to be those of the military, political, and other thuggish leaders who were in the midst of laying waste to the city as part of the ongoing wars, as they were to be of his friends from school, his cousins or neighbors. He began to fantasize about the cakes going out to warlords as poisoned.

The image of a dictator with their birthday cake says much about these attention-hungry leaders. We can easily imagine that these hoarders of power love their cakes baroque and gigantic. They demand decorative twists and turns. And of course, they must have a party every year, even after they’re gone. The cutting of the cake reminds us of childhood birthday parties, or ostentatious adult ceremonies, both of which align with the psychic needs of these larger-than-life personalities.

These works are most certainly dark and cynical (in the sense of sneering fault-finder). Cakes for Lukashenko, Mubarak, Thatcher, Reagan, Mugabe, and Putin? The list is long, and one irony is that the cakes land differently depending on your political orientation; Many on the left still adore Chavez and Arafat just as some on the right still revere Reagan, Thatcher and Netanyahu.

In addition to these model confections, Raad offers individual slices, either “poisoned” or “blessed.” More than the intact emblems of the insatiable appetites of the ruler, slices provide a chance for those at the party to share in the moment—for better or worse. They are distributed, much like the scene in Godfather II where Hymon Roth hands out slices of birthday cake in Havana to the gathered captains, all the while describing how the mob’s holdings will be carved up after his reign. Or, the selling of slices are like the divvying up of the imaginary “King Cake” of the art market’s never-ending Mardis Gras. 

The greatest irony of Festival of Gratitude lies deep inside the cake. Each one utilizes a Non-Fungible Token, or NFT, that contractually establishes a specific circulation of money with each sale.  For the Putin cake, 100% of proceeds go to Ukraine artists and activists. For all other cakes and projects, 60% of proceeds go to an arts-based non-profit organization chosen by the artist. In this way, a project that foregrounds the grandiosity and excesses of despots also helps build a different kind of art world that literally pays every time a work is sold and re-sold, and in this case, supports arts organizations in need at a higher rate than individual artists. Not to sugarcoat it, the NFT-as-philanthropy thumbs its nose at autocracies in all their forms.

And for that, we’re willing to eat cake.

A Festival of Gratitude

Artwrld is heading to NFT.NYC! Join us for a day of conversations about art, technology, and the creative possibilities and challenges of web3.

In collaboration with SearchLight.Art, we are hosting 

, a conference and gathering space for considering the expanding space of digital art from the perspectives of artists and cultural practitioners. Located adjacent to NFT.NYC in Times Square.

The free event will feature a series of vibrant panel discussions on topics including: arts infrastructures from artist collectives to DAOs, generative and on-chain art, and how NFTs are changing both the creative and financial trajectories of working artists.

Hear from artists including Mitchell F. Chan, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Nate Mohler, Suki Violet, and Jimena Buena Vida, as well as Carolina de Bartolo from Art Blocks, Jordan Gabris from BeetsDAO, and more.

The Art Hub at NFT NYC is part of the Cr3ative X satellite event. For a full schedule and additional details, visit 

. The event is free, but advance registration is required.

 Toward a new arts infrastructure: From collectives to DAOs

; Lila Nazemian, Special Projects Curator, 

; Moderator: JenJoy Roybal, Founder & CEO, 

 The form is the art: Generative and on-chain experiments

, with: Carolina de Bartolo, Creative Director, 

Artists: Creative journeys on and off the blockchain

/Nuiro, Artists; Moderator: Hannah Gulledge, Communications Director, 

Keynote by Josh Goldblum, Partner & Co-Founder, Artwrld

The Paradise Club at the Edition Times Square
701 7th Avenue, New York, NY 10036

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