Artist Arvida Byström on bitcoin, Beanie Babies and her new solo show

Arvida Byström is a modern-day Joan of Arc, albeit without the fervent religious visions or partaking in actual battle. Nevertheless, Byström does lead the charge in practicing what she preaches or, at the very least, leads with the best intentions.

On a grey Friday morning in a café in Södermalm, where we meet to discuss her artistic practise, her strong beliefs immediately shine brightly.

Byström’s story might be familiar to some. She started out very young, creating a platform for herself online as a digital creator, model, photographer, and finally conceptual artist. The trajectory to becoming a contemporary artist comes in all shapes and forms, but I feel both out of the loop and incredibly inspired as she tells me about the many moves she’s made around the globe. From Värmdö (an island outside of Stockholm), to London, later to Los Angeles and then back to Värmdö again. She eagerly fills me in about her early internet friends and collaborators, including fashion wunderkind Tavi Gevinson and photographer Petra Collins. In the beginning of her artistic journey, Byström started photographing herself because she was “too shy to ask anyone else if she could take their picture.” Her earliest work was a consequence of a lack of confidence, which led to her forming a unique aesthetic and artistic practice. As her confidence built, so did her artistic prowess. “I was a little lost until I was 25,” Byström, now 29, admits.

With internet notoriety comes power, or at least influence, and Byström’s persona, her blog and Tumblr, have influenced a sizeable group of young women, and men, online. As we speak about her road to becoming an artist, she is incredibly transparent, touching upon milestones, including her past relationships and bouts of depression. Her emotions lay close to the surface, especially as she wipes away tears while speaking candidly about her battle with clinical depression, which lasted throughout her teenage years, leading into her early twenties.

“I was a high functioning depressive. I didn’t know I was depressed, but it was clear I was a difficult partner in relationships, an unhappy person,” Byström says. She explains that through self-realisation, and some distance, was she able to feel better. “I cry often,” she says. “Thing’s move me, and I cry,” and just like that, the tears are gone and we’re off to the next topic, albeit another sensitive one.

Byström has recently ended a long-term relationship with her girlfriend, a spoil of the global pandemic we still find ourselves in. “Ultimately I think it is a positive thing,” she says. “I moved back home, which was good. The pandemic has allowed me time to focus, and I have so many ideas, new things I want to try out.” Sitting in front of her, I am refreshed, and, admittedly, impressed. In the back of my mind, I make a mental note regarding how my generation, we were made to feel the crying is an admission of defeat (I’m only slightly older than Byström, yet I’m starting to realise how the norms for what was deemed ok in social situations radically shifted shortly after I left adolescence). A young woman displaying emotion, seen as vulnerability, was something that should be avoided in the context of serious conversation. Byström’s tears have the exact opposite effect. Her emotion, much like her artwork, is a display of unconscious self-assurance and power.

Byström’s previous work has explored narratives that include sexuality and identity, baking these themes into photography and video work marred with symbolism. She is very aware of her presence in the artwork she makes. I imagine it is difficult to separate the two. The artist is not afraid to work beyond the bounds of what is often considered the “traditional art world,” including taking on collaborative projects with fashion brands and publications: a refreshing development that flourished with the millennial generation. The stance is simple: collaborating and engaging with institutions, commercial or otherwise, to generate opportunities in your artistic practice is acceptable, and encouraged. The work is at the forefront, and the intention behind her films and photographs take center stage in every collaboration.

I am curious to know more about the artist’s solo exhibition, Artificial Scarcity, which opened this past Friday at Gallery Steinsland Berliner just around the corner from where we’re sitting. “It focuses on the social constructs of the economy. I have researched how so many elements of society, including our global economy, are man-made – and not based on a force of nature,” she explains. “I researched economic bubbles, including the earliest documented bubble in modern history, Tulip Mania in Holland.” All throughout the Netherlands, during the Dutch Golden Age in the early 17th Century, the value of tulip bulbs skyrocketed, with people investing vast sums of money until the market crashed in 1637. Nowadays, the term Tulip Mania is used metaphorically when describing an economic bubble, when the assets price differs extraordinarily from their actual value.

Byström’s recent obsession with tulips is expressed in precise photographs of the flowers, set in dreamy hues of lush rose and pink. “I never used to think tulips were beautiful, but now they mesmerise me, they just need to bloom and expand, then their shape becomes wonderful,” she says. Byström delves into the world of economic bubbles, excitedly recanting the Beanie Baby phenomenon. For those who don’t remember, during their heyday in the 90s, small, plush Beanie Babies were manufactured in limited editions by Ty Inc toy company. “Unlike previous stuffed toys, these were not stuffed to the brim, so they could flop around, and were more photogenic,” Byström tells me. “It’s crazy, but the secondary market that was created by the Beanie Baby boom was beyond, and it coincided with the rise of eBay; people invested in Beanie Babies, selling and trading online.”

Subsequently, not dissimilar to the tulip market, the Beanie Baby market crashed, and collector’s once priceless collections were rendered worthless. The Beanie Babies recur throughout the exhibition, expressed through small marble sculptures in Italian and Swedish marble, in the shape of toy bears that Byström has sculpted during and after taking a sculpting course in Italy this past summer. Like the soft toys, her sculptures have small ear tags in the shape of hearts, in pink and purple plastic.

The artist has also created NFT (non-fungible token) artworks. “Initially, I created NFTs on the online forum Foundation because of its a more environment friendly approach to creating art NFTs. It was later moved to Ethereum, which doesn’t deliver on the same sustainable aspects," Byström explains. “An hour building: creating an NFT on Ethereum, offsets the same amount of energy as a transatlantic flight. It’s terrible for the environment.”

Although the world of digital art, only existing in the digital realm, along with mining for Bitcoin and other digital currencies has existed for some time, the practice has really come to the forefront in the last couple of years. Byström continues, “I have several NFTs in the exhibition, but since Ethereum is the more recognisable platform, along with its currency Ether, it carries this illusion of more value, simply because it uses more actual energy. It’s as if its carbon footprint legitimises the currency. Despite being a digital artwork, or rather a digital certificate, its value is still based on actual energy consumption, and therefore is considered more valuable… which plays into the whole theme of my exhibition and research – the social construct of implied value and worth.”

Byström takes the notion of value to another level through one of the NFTs she’s created, or rather a as a commentary on NFT artwork, which she created in collaboration with developers; ‘Hajen’, Carl-Gustaf Ewerbring and Sebastian Edholm. The digital artwork, named “1999," is an effigy of a Beanie Baby collectors manual, something that was widely spread during the soft toys’ meteoric market rise. “The artwork is tied to 0.5 Ether (the digital currency) and depending on the market price of the Ether, the monetary value of the work will go up or down. If you buy this digital document, that only exists online, and decide to sell it because the market price of a unit of Ether goes up and you cash out the Ether to a currency such as SEK, USD, EURO etc., it will self-destruct.”

Toying with the concept of worth: money versus art, the artist is bringing the commercial undercurrents of any commoditised market, including that of art, into focus. Basically, if cashing in is more important to you than the artwork itself, you kill it. Byström can proudly take her place among established artists, including German Tobias Rehberger and Italian Maurizio Cattelan, who take on our global society’s confidence in the economy, and express it via their artistic practices. Rehberger created small futuristic sculptures in car lacquer, each one housed a key to a fancy, expensive car. If you wanted the key, and the car, you had to break the sculpture. Cattelan created a toilet in solid gold, which was exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and later stolen, not by thieving art enthusiasts, but criminals clearly out for the gold.

By engaging in this dialogue, Byström is cementing her position as an artist with a distinct point of view, bringing her arsenal of commentary on western society’s behaviour in relation to perceived notions of worth and value centerstage. “When the legitimacy of art is often reinforced by its price, leading some people to believe the artwork is worth more, whereas others might become so provoked by these crazy prices; the notion of art and the art world in general, that this could all be seen as a huge bluff,” she says. “Economics, the price of things, has a huge impact on objects, and therefore on art. When we simply measure success and value through the gaze of monetised value, it isn’t representative.” She smiles, adding, “Just look at the Beanie Babies.”

Arvida Byström’s exhibition, Artificial Scarcity, is on view 24.09 – 23.10.21, at Gallery Steinsland Berliner, Bondegatan 70, 116 33, Stockholm, Sweden.