OONA’s The Treachery of $Tickers
OONA is an artist whose work interrogates identity, gender, symbolism and value (within crypto context), specifically exploring how the history of art, cryptocurrency culture and societal perceptions come together in current times. In her latest project, called ‘The Treachery of $Tickers’, historical symbols are reappropriated and market dynamics are shown and evaluated live. Below a deep-dive into OONA’s new work, that challenges us to reconsider what and why we value.
A shifting persona
OONA’s artistic practice is highly performative and has transitioned through different eras, each characterized by their own thematic and conceptual frameworks. In the early phase, in what OONA now refers to as ‘era one’, she embraced the performative ethos of the 1970s: her work was imbued with gestural immediacy – a kind of live, physical intervention on the blockchain. This radical openness included direct audience participation, confronting intimacy head-on. In quite the striking performance, she invited over 450 people to touch the breast implants that she once had inside her [privately in a small space with just you and the artist there]. Such intense bodily exposure speaks to her dedication to creating art that transcends physicality, actively interrogating the symbolism of the body within patriarchal and capitalist systems, addressing identity and gender through performative explorations.
Recently, a decisive pivot (i.e. the literal political and social shift in the world) led to ‘era two’, in which OONA inhabits a more surreal and absurdist territory, emphasizing a satirical and nihilistic stance. This transformation presents a recalibration of her identity as both the artist and the artwork. She has adopted a new persona that privileges a tongue-in-cheek declaration of “crime season”, a state in which the rules of engagement are redrawn, and boundaries are defiantly asserted. In this mode, she insists: “You’re not allowed to touch OONA anymore.” This statement is as much about reclaiming agency as it is about critiquing the invasive tendencies of digital culture, and actually society as a whole [looking at the current state of affairs].
Interrogating value
In this new period, OONA is appropriating popular crypto culture symbols. All under the banner The Treachery of $Tickers. At the core of it is a (self-)examination on value and the symbolic lexicon of crypto culture. Drawing inspiration from art historical references - most prominently René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images - she repurposes familiar icons into a system of continuously changing artworks.
In total, OONA created twelve pieces based on existing crypto tokens, each represented by the symbols $Kiss, $Rose, $Eggs, $Milk, $Butter, $Cow, $Feet, $Boobs, $VVV, $Veil, $Anon and the notorious $Dickbutt. It is important to note that OONA did not create these tokens herself. Many of these symbols had already been minted as memecoins prior to the project, and several have long featured in her performative and conceptual practice. In The Treachery of $Tickers, she recontextualizes them not as inventions, but as ready-mades: cultural artifacts repurposed for critical reflection. These symbols, already ubiquitous in (crypto) culture, are presented through digital artworks that shift visually in response to their own market volatility. The artworks will fluctuate between four dynamic states – green (positive), red (negative), white (moon/neutral), or black (zero value) – reflecting the real-time economic and cultural value as ‘live price tracking performances’.
The color coding is emblematic: green may suggest stability or optimism, red a downturn or crisis, while white and black capture moments of transition or ambiguity. This constant metamorphosis reflects the cyclical nature of both the crypto market and cultural valuation, underscoring OONA’s view that “the present is determined by the future”.
Underlying power dynamics
The project’s framework is built on a foundation of appropriation and memetic performance. By reusing the symbols that have long circulated in both art history and now in everyday culture, OONA highlights the inherent instability in how meaning is assigned. Her approach is deliberately irreverent – she teases the conventional hierarchies of the art world, which often reward popularity over genuine innovation. In doing so, she comments on the fickle nature of value and challenges the immature tendencies of crypto art, where notoriety and virality often, [sadly], eclipse substantive artistic output.
In OONA’s opinion, the symbol is never the thing itself – the essence always exceeds the signifier. A $Kiss for example might evoke love or desire, yet its market performance as a token (with one example boasting a liquidity of over 168 million, while another like the $Rose languishes at 38.6K) exposes the unpredictability between cultural significance and market forces. Symbols like $Eggs, $Milk, and $Butter evoke domesticity but inherently interrogate underlying power dynamics. Others, such as $Boobs, $Feet, and $Cow, probe societal perceptions of feminine value – whether sexual or productive – asking why particular symbols gain immense cultural and economic recognition while others remain hardly seen or simply overlooked.
The question then arises: what do we value most in this? Duality is at the heart of OONA’s work: the unending dance between what is represented and what is ‘seen’, between the aesthetic and the economic. In that regard, OONA’s dynamic artworks also examine anonymity’s paradox, represented by symbols like $Veil and $Anon. These tokens symbolize both the liberating potential of anonymous actions online, as well as their darker association with criminality and concealment. Market fluctuations become metaphors for broader social, ethical and political dialogues around anonymity, value and morality.
OONA shows and emphasizes that although symbols like $Boobs or $Rose hold immense cultural weight, their tokenized versions frequently lack substantial financial valuation, thereby questioning societal value judgments. Moreover, OONA examines the cultural perception surrounding internet humor and juvenile aesthetics, such as the ‘dickbutt’ meme. She provocatively suggests that depending on crypto culture’s future success or failure, the $Dickbutt symbol could be revered historically like Marcel Duchamp's groundbreaking Fountain, or dismissed as an embodiment of crypto’s childish obsessions.
The nightmare of reality
The Treachery of $Tickers highlights a fundamental conceptual tension: symbols represent but never fully embody the things themselves. This tension between symbol, reality, representation and value is central to OONA’s research practice. Through an historically informed and at the same time a very sharply satirical approach, she provocatively explores how cultural valuation is constructed within speculative frameworks, reaffirming René Magritte's pivotal assertion that symbols obscure deeper realities than they represent, yet their interpretation and valuation are continually reshaped by collective belief and speculative anticipation.
OONA’s work urges us to reconsider what we value and why we value it – specifically the mechanisms by which such values are established, perpetuated and contested. Her artist practice is a living negotiation between identity, power and representation. It reveals how our interpretation and valuation remain continuously subject to speculation, anticipation and collective imagination; at least up and till now that is. Maybe she will splash some water (or milk) in your face and wake you up.
In anticipation of The Treachery of $Tickers, OONA has assembled a curated list of essays, interviews, and videos to deepen your understanding of the performance’s conceptual framework and its embedded art historical references:
Uddenberg, Adda. ‘Continental Breakfast.’
Brooklyn Rail, April 2023.
OONA recommends Uddenberg’s essay for its playful reimagining of traditional forms – a reading that invites you to reconceive established narratives with the unexpected dynamism of scrambled eggs.Teicholz, Tom. ‘The Chill of Duchamp’s Étant donnés.’
Forbes, April 30, 2015.
In this analysis, Teicholz dissects Duchamp’s seminal work with a critical stance.Lady Gaga. ‘Abracadabra (Official Music Video).’
YouTube, February 3, 2025.
The music video is presented by OONA as an expression of mutual fascination and reciprocal allure.Byung-Chul Han. The Transparency Society. Chapter 3: ‘The Society of Exhibition.’
Are.na (PDF resource).
Han’s work is invoked for its incisive discussion on the limits of transparency and the enduring potency of mystique.Great Art Explained. ‘René Magritte: Great Art Explained.’
YouTube, September 3, 2023.
This video provides an essential grounding in Magritte’s oeuvre, clarifying the historical and symbolic antecedents that OONA reinterprets in her dynamic artworks.
