Remilia Corporation (artwork)

This article is about the conceptual artwork. For the organization, see Remilia Corporation. For the social formation, see Remilia Collective.

Remilia Corporation
File:Remilia logo.jpg
Artist	Remilia Corporation
Year	2021–present
Medium	Conceptual art, social sculpture, art-industrial conglomerate
Location	Distributed (internet-native)
Website	Template:URL

Remilia Corporation is a conceptual artwork and social sculpture that encompasses the entirety of Remilia Corporation's enterprise. Described in official materials as an "art-industrial planetary conglomerate corporation-as-artwork," Remilia positions itself not as a company that produces artworks, but as a unified artwork in which commercial operations, community structures, and cultural production function as constituent elements.

Founder Charlotte Fang has articulated this framework by stating: "Remilia Corporation is the body of work for the artist known as Remilia Corporation, who is a conceptual construct defined by the artwork Remilia Corporation." The work draws explicit comparison to Andy Warhol's The Factory and Bernadette Corporation, but extends these precedents by treating the entire operational structure—from NFT launches to fashion collaborations to social infrastructure—as elements of a single, evolving artwork rather than products generated by an art collective or corporate studio.

Concept

Corporation as artwork

Remilia Corporation operates under the premise that the entire enterprise functions as a conceptual artwork rather than merely producing artworks. This framework treats commercial projects like Milady Maker not as products but as components of a larger artistic statement about the relationship between art, commerce, and community in the digital age.

Fang has compared this approach to Warhol's conceptualization of The Factory, suggesting that if Warhol had pursued actual industrial production ("actually canning literal soup"), it would parallel Remilia's method. In this framing, Milady Maker represents "canned soup"—an actual commercial product that simultaneously functions as art because it emerges from an artwork (the corporation itself).

Structure

Institutional multiplicity

The artwork's foundational statement, presented at the June 2021 I Long For Network Spirituality exhibition, declares Remilia's intentionally contradictory institutional nature:

Remilia is an institution. Remilia is a self-organization. Remilia is a lifestyle brand. Remilia is a master-planned community. Remilia is an investment fund. Remilia is an artist's colony. Remilia is a crowdfunded video game. Remilia is an autonomous smart contract. Remilia is an independent record label. Remilia is a community center for the digital village. Remilia is a manifesto. Remilia will save the internet.

— Remilia Corporation exhibition statement, 2021

This multiplicity forms a core element of the conceptual framework—the artwork consists of simultaneously occupying multiple, often contradictory institutional forms. Each aspect (lifestyle brand, investment fund, artist colony) represents a facet of the complete work rather than separate ventures.

Cross-industry integration

The artwork encompasses projects spanning multiple industries—NFT collections (Milady Maker, Remilio Babies, Bonkler), cryptocurrency infrastructure (CULT Token), fashion collaborations, publishing (Remilia Quarterly), and social networking (RemiliaNET). These diverse ventures are unified under the conceptual umbrella of the corporation-as-artwork, with each serving as a different register through which the total work manifests.

Fang has described this approach as strategic rather than scattered: "The reason this otherwise fairly insane, wide berth 'global art-industrial conglomerate' strategy works specifically for Remilia is we're an avant-garde art-cultural movement wrapped into a decentralized cult wrapped into a lifestyle brand wrapped into financialized tokens that can easily be speculated on as a proxy of attention."

Layered organizational structure

During the Bonkler 9/11 crisis, Remilia's internal structure was partially revealed, exposing a complex organizational apparatus far exceeding what would be necessary for simple NFT production. The disclosed organizational chart included divisions such as Remilia Agency, Remilia Atelier, Remilia Quarterly, Remilia House, R.E.I.S.E.N. Global, YAYO Industries, Metaverse Research Group—entities whose functions remain largely undisclosed.

This revelation of complexity serves as part of the artwork itself—the gradual unveiling of operational depth contributes to the work's conceptual impact by demonstrating that apparent simplicity ("just another NFT project") masks genuine organizational sophistication.

Theoretical framework

Art-business integration

The work challenges conventional boundaries between art and commerce by treating commercial success as an element of artistic practice rather than its corruption. Unlike traditional art collectives that maintain separation between artistic and commercial operations, Remilia Corporation positions financial performance as integral to the artwork's meaning and effectiveness.

This approach extends Warhol's statement that "making money is art, and working is art—and good business is the best art" by fully actualizing the concept: Remilia does not merely make art about business, but creates a business that functions as art through its structure, operations, and cultural impact.

Cultural warfare as medium

Fang has explicitly framed Remilia's arena as "global culture war" rather than the art world or crypto space, positioning the corporation as a vehicle for cultural intervention that operates across multiple domains simultaneously. The artwork's effectiveness is measured not only by aesthetic impact but by its ability to influence broader cultural dynamics.

This framing draws on Futurist precedent, with Fang describing Remilia as "like the Italian futurists but in the era of memes not machines"—extending Futurism's project of using art to reshape culture, but replacing manifestos and machines with memetics and financial speculation. As Fang states: "Wearing a Milady on the timeline is like what racing the motorcycles was like to Marinetti."

Spectacle-recruitment reflexivity

The artwork operates through what Fang terms a "reflexive spectacle-recruitment loop"—financial speculation on tokens (particularly Milady Maker NFTs and CULT Token) incentivizes holders to propagate the spectacle, which increases attention and speculation, funding further cultural production in a self-reinforcing cycle.

This mechanism treats financialization not as external to the artwork but as a core component of its operation—token holders become participants in the work through their economic and cultural investment, similar to how Futurist audiences participated in provocations or Factory visitors contributed to the social sculpture.

Artistic lineage

The work explicitly positions itself within a lineage of artists who have treated organizational structures as artworks. Bernadette Corporation, a 1990s New York collective that adopted corporate form to critique and emulate business structures, serves as a direct antecedent. However, where Bernadette Corporation primarily parodied corporate structures through fashion and film, Remilia Corporation fully operationalizes the corporate form—generating actual revenue, managing real infrastructure, and functioning as a viable business—while maintaining that this functionality itself constitutes the artwork.

The comparison to Warhol's Factory extends beyond mere influence to structural similarity. Like the Factory, which functioned simultaneously as workspace, social scene, and living artwork, Remilia operates as what Fang describes as a "groupchat-as-studio-collective modeled as if CCRU met the Factory." The Factory's integration of commercial production (silkscreen prints), social space (gathering place for artists and celebrities), and artistic statement provides a template for Remilia's more comprehensive integration of business and art.

Reception and interpretation

Claimed valuation

Fang has claimed Remilia Corporation as "the most expensive artwork in history," asserting that the corporation's market capitalization—derived from the floor prices of its NFT collections and token valuations—exceeds the sale prices of any traditional artwork.

This claim is contested, and depends entirely on accepting the premise that Remilia Corporation qualifies as an artwork rather than a business that produces artworks. The assertion extends the work's conceptual framework by treating market capitalization as a metric of artistic achievement, further blurring boundaries between art and commerce.

Critical challenges

The work faces fundamental questions about its classification: whether a functional commercial entity can be considered an artwork, or whether actual commercial operation disqualifies it from art status. Traditional art world institutions have largely not engaged with Remilia Corporation as an artwork, though this exclusion may reflect institutional conservatism rather than invalidation of the concept.

The work's post-authorship framework, which intentionally obscures individual contribution in favor of collective attribution to "Remilia Corporation," complicates traditional art historical analysis that relies on identifying specific creators and their intentions.

See also

• Remilia Corporation
• Remilia Collective
• Charlotte Fang
• Andy Warhol
• The Factory
• Bernadette Corporation
• New Net Art

External links

• Official website
• Remilia Corporation blog