Digital art and NFTs are making inroads at Art Basel, the great contemporary art fair, with art market stars such as the American Jeff Koons launching themselves into this booming segment.
The Pace gallery unveiled the first piece of a series of sculptures that the artist known for his balloon dog and his tulips intends to send to the moon with SpaceX, the space exploration company of Elon Musk.
Jeff Koons, one of the most expensive living artists in the world, plans to install on the moon 125 miniature versions of these sculptures called Moon Phases with a photograph of their location, sold as an NFT (non-fungible tokenor non-fungible token).
Buyers will also receive a life-size sculpture, set with a gemstone to mark its location on the moon.
“We too are discovering it for the first time,” enthuses Marc Glimcher, the gallery’s director, presenting this 39.4 cm moon-shaped statue, freshly arrived on its stand in Basel.
Pace is one of the few major galleries to have ventured into NFT territory. According to Clare McAndrew, author of an art market report for Art Basel, only 6% of galleries sold NFTs in 2021.
Highly speculative, their prices have skyrocketed since the sale last year at Christie’s auction house of an NFT by American artist Beeple for 69.3 million US dollars.
But since their peak in August 2021, NFTs have plunged. While art-related NFT sales volumes soared to $945 million in August, they fell back to 366 million in January and then to 101 million in May, according to statements by Clare McAndrew.
These ups and downs do not, however, make the boss of the Pace gallery back down, convinced that NFTs are the sign of a nascent market for digital art. He compares their excesses to the dotcom bubble of the early 2000s.
Spider at 40 million
For this edition, the organizers of the fair have joined forces with the platform of blockchains (blockchains) Tezos, which features digital works by artists with new versions generated by machine learning in the form of NFTs.
Alongside it, the Vive Arts platform offers a dive into digital art using virtual reality glasses, notably presenting an avatar of German artist Albert Oehlen in a 3D universe.
In the aisles of the fair, the French gallery Édouard Montassut put on sale a digital creation by the Turkish artist Özgür Kar which represents a man surrounded by three skeletons and which recalls the bas-reliefs of churches, but on a liquid crystal screen.
“I think NFTs are going to have a place in the market in the future,” Art Basel director Marc Spiegler told AFP, even though their prices have “collapsed recently,” as of today. where artists are experimenting with digital tools.
In the immediate future, the hard works that wealthy collectors can install in their living rooms have returned to the big numbers: a spider by the Franco-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois snatched up 40 million dollars, a work by the conceptual artist Félix González-Torres went for 12.5 million, an oil on canvas by German Georg Baselitz sold for 5.5 million.
The fair, which takes place from June 16 to 19, brings together a host of very real works ranging from a gigantic bronze statue of the British Thomas J. Price to an installation representing a kitchen dotted with huge cockroaches created by the artist Franco-Chinese Huang Yong Ping or a series of portraits carved in wood by Franco-Cameroonian Barthélémy Toguo.