The history of Playboy in the NFT collection by Slimesunday Six artworks that blend the archive of the iconic magazine and digital art

We remember Playboy for the playmates, the parties in the Mansion, and the iconic bunnies, but it was so much more. Among Gloria Steinem's boycotts and other several feminist protests, Hugh Hefner created a place in which to weave together eroticism - and why not, pornography - with socially and culturally relevant topics; Nabokov's stories such as interviews with Martin Luther King or Jimmy Carter. Playboy has always entertained and shocked society, trying to intercept the most attractive news, even in the artistic field, from the surreal shooting of Salvador Dalì on the December 1973 issue to the cover created by Andy Warhol for January 1986. 

With the circulating FOMO due to the growth of crypto-art, Playboy and the artist Mike Parisella, better known as Slimesunday, has created a new exclusive collection of digital art in NFT works, Liquid Summer, available on NiftyGateway. In preparation for the launch, they organized an exhibition in a virtual gallery in Decentraland’s Crypto Valley. The six works represent a fluid dialogue between Playboy's historical archive and the digital art of Slimesunday's provocative collages, and thus also recall the dualism between the analogue past and the new realities that are emerging in the blockchain. 

Fun Fact: Playboy's first Art Director was Arthur Paul, graphic designer and illustrator who gave shape to the unmistakable logo. Art Paul decided to insert a "different" rabbit in each cover of the magazine, sometimes clearly, others in more curious and hidden ways, triggering a hunt that has been going on since December 1954. Also in Liquid Summer Slimesunday has continued this tradition, Happy hunting.

ONE SATOSHI

Slimesunday has already used the trick of the puzzle to prevent Instagram from removing his posts, but in Puzzled he doesn't use it to censor nudes, on the contrary, it's a playful way to highlight the models Kalin Olson, Kelly Marie Monaco and Victoria Fuller, photographed in Fiji in 2000 by Richard Fegley. The puzzle had also been used multiple times by Art Paul in his graphics and has been so successful that Playboy really released Playmates puzzles in the 1960s.