Where has all the crypto-art gone?
After the big busts of 2022, apparently everyone is buying and selling at great-chic swiss fair Art Basel closed their digital wallets. The NFT-based art that popped up in 2021 was a noticeable absence from the booths of all but a few of the 284 exhibitors this year. And Tezos, once the darling cryptocurrency of the art world, was also absent as an official partner of the great Swiss fair (not surprisingly, since it lost 56% of its value of year to year).
Given the uncertainty in the art market in general (the Swiss have their own banking scandal on their hands as UBS, a major sponsor of Art Basel, sweeps to take control of Credit Suisse) , can you really blame someone for being a little more careful? ? A sense of risk aversion has been felt among buyers here, and crypto is particularly risky. And yet, perhaps now that the scum of speculation has subsided, the blockchain experiments that remain are more enduring and meaningful.
“What we learned is that an art fair is not necessarily the best place to launch an NFT,” said a gallery director who had previously presented NFT-based works at this fair. . “The transactions for them are done online, so if we bring them in, it’s to show them, not for a point of sale.”
Refik Anadol’s AI Data Paintings was among the leading projects incorporating artificial intelligence. NFT-based art was rare. (Installation view of Jeffrey Deitch’s stand with Neural Paintings by Refik Anadol. Photo: Stefan Altenburger.
In 2021, Kenny Schachter made his NFT-based art debut for Art Basel with a special project at Galerie Nagel Draxler titled “NFTism“, packaging the stand with curious, confused and excited spectators. This year, he said he wasn’t surprised by the sudden lack of crypto art on the fairground floor. “The crypto market has crashed, so nobody here wants anything to do with it,” he said, sitting in the fair’s atrium with friends. He rolled up his sleeve to show me his famous “NFT” tattoo, which he recently updated to add the word “post” above.
“People here are so conservative that they want to have what their friends have,” Schachter added. “The art world has its finger up and the wind is blowing away from NFTs, especially with the onslaught of the SEC.” (US regulators are currently knocking on the doors of major crypto exchanges such as Coinbase And Binance.) Interest was already bubbling at Art Basel Miami Beach last fall, he noted. “There was no change from December to June. As soon as things calm down, the art world will be back in no time.
Galleries that had been quick to load into the crypto space were taking a break this year, including the Nagel Draxler and Pace Gallery, the latter featuring Jeff Koons’ first-ever NFT project, Jeff Koons: phases of the moon, Last year. Now the two continue to work in the crypto space, but in the expanded realms beyond Messeplatz (Pace is still active online and Nagel Draxler has a dedicated gallery called Crypto Kiosk in Berlin that features all kinds of work who engage with the blockchain). In their Art Basel stands, paintings and sculptures and the classics of art history dominate.
Kenny Schachter at the Crypto Kiosk at Nagel Draxler Gallery in Basel in 2021.
A Pace spokesperson said they may consider showing some works later in the week at Art Basel, but that depends on what will be changed on the stand when sales close.
However, the work that engaged the NFTs was present in a few places, if you really looked. Simon Denny, who has long embraced emerging technologies in his practice, was perhaps the only NFT-based work at the major art fair, and it was designed to fit in: his painting on display at Petzel , new “Metaverse Landscapes», appears on the surface like a traditional work on canvas with fragmented images. It was nestled next to a huge 1.65 million euro painting by Martin Kippenberger.
Denny’s artwork only reveals its full meaning when you notice there are QR codes on the side, one of which shows you a private property in the metaverse that the artwork represents. Denny coined a bit of virtual real estate as the NFTs you get with painting, bringing up questions about ownership in virtual space. Yet the work cleverly borrows from landscape painting and classical conceptualism to make its point – crypto art designed to give historical art something to cling to (literally).
At Simon Denny’s Metaverse Landscape 8: Sandbox Country (-196, 23) (2023). Oil on canvas, UV print, Ethereum paper wallet, dynamic ERC-721 NFT. Photo: Nick Ash. Courtesy of the artist
“People are looking for things that are safe in value and crypto and NFTs are pretty insecure,” the artist told me. “This project is aimed here at the spectators because it is first of all a painting and speaks of the history of art. Also, you don’t need to be crypto literate to buy it. Worth noting: a chip with a crypto wallet is implanted on the back of the board so that whoever buys the coin can access the NFT without having to learn how to set one up. It seems like a winning strategy. Denny’s work, which has a price tag of €30,000, was in storage at 4pm on the day of the preview.
Meanwhile, galleries have made strides towards using technology for real, actionable business strategies. Arcual, now an official partner of Art Basel, took up residence near the champagne in the collectors’ lounge on the third floor, presenting talks and works of art. The company is using blockchain technology to create chains of ownership that benefit both artists and dealers, hoping to change the way business is done as usual in the art market. They create NFTs for all artwork.
“I strongly believe in what blockchain can bring to the industry, but I have always been skeptical about the speculations we see,” said Bernadine Bröcker Wieder from Arcual. “We want to focus on art again.” She noted that this current moment in crypto is less wild than in 2021, when NFT-based art prices soared. “We’re following some of the standards of what was set with the NFT boom, but we’ve helped it evolve to work seamlessly in the art world the way the art world works. Already.”
Phoebe Cummings at the Arcual stand, Art Basel in Basel, 2023, photos by Gloria Soverini Photography.
The hot topic of technology has clearly shifted to artificial intelligence. Vast public anxiety hovers over this area, and so art has felt a new sense of urgency to engage. Digital paintings by Refik Anadol, which has been the subject of a big exhibit at MoMA earlier this yearwere at the forefront of Jeffrey Deitch’s booth, although the dealer emphasized how easy they were to understand in terms of ordinary art.
“Our market is conventional,” said Jeffrey Deitch when asked about the learning curve for collectors when it comes to digital art. “People buy these works as ‘living paintings,'” he pointed out, a reference to the title of the ongoing series. Anadol’s triptych (on sale for $300,000) had a prominent space on the front wall of Deitch’s booth. Although he was still available at 4 p.m. on preview day, he had a seemingly ever-present group of VIPs in front of him.
In Unlimited’s home, BMW’s annual art car this year brought a high-tech twist to artists who don’t typically work in the digital space. Bold geometric abstract paintings by South African artist Esther Mahlangu were among those featured for a spectacular generative artwork.
The Electric AI Canvas at Art Basel in Basel 2023. An installation inspired by the new BMW i5. With Esther Mahlangu, 2023. © BMW AG
Also inside the Unlimited section of the fair was a work by Croatian artist Tomo Savić-Gecan. Basically what you saw there was a big screen explaining its own premise; the real spectacle was throughout the fair, and might even be a joke about tech-based art trying to blend into the environment and speak using the symbols people know.
For the piece, selected lights all around Art Basel were designed to vary in intensity at certain times. These changes were driven by an algorithm, powered by data based on randomly selected art news articles and analyzed against the latest Art market: a report on Art Basel and UBS.
The various locations of the work are announced daily on the project site as well as on large screens located at Unlimited and at the Frank Elbaz Gallery booth. The public is invited to visit these places and observe their environment, thus becoming part of the show themselves.
It’s fun work. But even Elbaz reps noted that the learning curve is steep for digitally engaged art in general. “It’s a type of work that collectors don’t know, but it’s also ephemeral,” said a spokesperson for the Parisian gallery. “You really have to support collectors and make them aware of the work, but also of conceptual art in general. (There are two versions for sale, priced at €70,000 and €95,000.)
For now, the focus on painting-like objects seems telling. It may be that the recent spectacle of the crypto bubble has dampened the appetite not just for crypto art, but for the more adventurous forms of tech art in general. Once markets feel more confident, perhaps more works similar to Savić-Gecan’s data-driven environmental work, which seems relevant to the changes sweeping society as a whole, will make a more obvious return to art. fair ground.
As for crypto art, many people are still betting that it’s due for a comeback. “NFTs are revolutionary,” Schachter said. “He is here to stay. The dust just needs to settle.
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