Happy shoppers: the art collective buying ecstasy on the deep web

From pills to Lord of the Rings, Mediengruppe Bitnikan brings the illicit side of the internet to life in an exhibition of items bought with bitcoins

Art has always drawn on the dark side. The sleep of reason produces monsters, warned Goya – but those monsters are prodigiously creative. Goya took macabre inspiration from witches and other horrors of the mind, and so have many artists through the centuries.

When Max Ernst found frightening faceless hordes and sinister forests in his unconscious, he was echoing the ancient Greeks who carved savage battles with centaurs on their temples. From antiquity to surrealism, the source of the most powerful images has again and again turned out to be the deep dark inner ocean of dreams and intuitions – what Freud named the “unconscious”.

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