This week marks the return of Art Basel Miami Beach, an annual in-person art fair that is as traditional as art transacting gets. With the presence of NFTs non-fungible token, the digital and physical art are converging, strengthening the impact of the move towards the use of the digital and physical art.
For the first time in history of art, art viewers will interact with NFT artwork on a large scale. NFT pieces are digital files that are created with a blockchain, the same technology used for bitcoin and other criptocurrencies. This effort offers a new take on innovation, to the delight of the elite establishment. NFT art collectors rarely move into more tangible art buying, but tangible art buyers are coming in droves to the digital space, which is ushering in an increasingly virtual art world.
Christie s is inviting a group of VIPs to an event at an unveiled 23,000 square foot Miami bank building called The Gateway, turning each room into an artistic wonderland for 34 NFT artists. They are partnering with six-month old startup nft and the peer-to- peer marketplace OpenSea for the exclusive invite-only event.
Aorist hopes to break them down while Christie builds the walls. The interdisciplinary art initiative Aorist will open Crossroads in the swanky Faena district of Miami Beach on Tuesday. After years of being fully devoted to the blockchain space, the founders of digital art patron Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile spearheaded the Aorist. The rest of the world finally caught on to the potential of NFTs in March when the digital artist Beeple sold a 10 second NFT video for $69 million. The concept of digital artwork has been particularly appealing during the epidemic, as it is unfettered by the conventions of three-dimensional viewing or traditional sales methods.
Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile says that NFTs are really nothing. This is interesting here because they allow for this amazing community building, for this interplay between the different projects. You can bring these into the virtual world, your Metaverse, and your digital creations, and it is easy to be part of the community by just showcasing the NFTs you have in that collection. With Crossroads, Rodriguez-Frailehas partnered with Ximena Caminos to transform Faena into a cross-disciplinary world of high art and cutting-edge technology during Miami Art Week. Forty tangible, somewhat tangible, and non-tangible works will be sold in a tiered system of digital and physical art at corresponding price points.
The showcase artist is Refik Anadol whose vibrant Artificial Intelligence depictions of coral attempt to shed light on climate change. He used NVIDIA's NVDA StyleGAN 2 ADA generative modeling to create Machine Hallucinations: Coral, a 40 x 40 foot AI data sculpture based on 1,742, 772 images of coral. According to Rodriguez-Fraile, this piece will likely go for the high six figures. A second tier of works will sell for $250,000 apiece, paired with a digital representation, a 3 D representation and a physical sculpture. On the lower end, a larger edition print will sell for $2500.
Aorist aims to simplify the barriers to entry by offsetting the technology curve, allowing seamless credit card, debit card, wire, and cash transactions during their auction. Aorist is not accepting Bitcoin BTC-USD or Ethereum ETH-USD as payment.
Rodriguez-Fraile says that I am a huge advocate for pricing in U.S. dollars, or any other fiat currency. It's too volatile to be the price of anything. Sustainability is the emphasis. A portion of all sales will support Miami Beach's South Beach underwater sculpture park and sanctuary, The ReefLine, working with ClimateTrade. Rodriguez-Fraile says they plan to increase over time, because the automatic carbon credits are purchased with every platform transaction, offsetting twice the amount of carbon generated by the platform transaction.
Another purported energy-efficientBlockchain, Tezos, explores the symbiosis between human and technology. Participants can create and mint their own NFTs on site, with the help of their NFT showcase Humans Machines. The pioneering AI artist Mario Klingemann, who goes by Quasimondo, will create a self-portrait NFT using AI by generating code.
The old guard is likely to be astounded by this technology. The technology is secondary to the aesthetic and viewing experience for this one week in December.
Rodriguez-Fraile insists that the blockchain is not the only thing that is important. The art is important. Alexandra Bregman is a freelance art writer who has covered art markets for Nikkei Asia, Air Mail and The Art Newspaper.