One of the world’s most expensive artworks is Mark Rothko’s painting No. 6 (violet, green and red) which sold for a staggering €140 million. Whenever new price records hit the art world the question that inevitably arises is: what determines the astronomical value of this work? These days the question is even more difficult to answer, given the technological development of the art market, which raises issues around the value of copies of artworks and the artist’s reputation.

Inspired by the work of Mark Rothko,  director Łukasz Twarkowski, has created a performance that tries to explore what the new trend of  creating artworks in a digital environment and providing blockchain technology really means. How  important is the authenticity of the artist’s work in all this? And more importantly, does the way in which we experience live theatre in the real world mean that it’s protected from such claims of inauthenticity?

The central theme of the story is the relationship between fake and original, and paradoxically how this relationship changes in the virtual environment. On the one hand, “ROTKHO” is a distortion of the famous artist’s surname, in the same way in which famous brands are replaced with counterfeits like Adibas or Dolce & Banana. On the other hand, the name simply illustrates Graham Rowlinson’s hypothesis that regardless of the order of letters, as long as the first and final letters of the word remain in place, we can understand the text.

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premiere: 12.03.2022