BASEL, Switzerland — The world’s leading contemporary art fair has taken a futuristic turn
this year, offering buyers the chance to see their sculptures placed on the
moon.
اضافة اعلان
Non-fungible
tokens, or
NFTs, are all the rage at the Art Basel fair in Switzerland, where
the world of digital assets is taking off.
Artist Jeff Koons
plans to send 125 miniature sculptures to the moon with multi-billionaire
Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.
The sculptures —
set to be installed 384,400km apart from their owners — will be sold as NFTs,
which work like certificates of ownership.
The “Moon Phases”
statues come with a photo of their lunar location, and buyers will also be able
to take home a sculpture with a gemstone marking their extra-terrestrial
counterpart’s place on the moon.
“We’re also seeing
it for the first time,” said Pace gallery director Marc Glimcher as he unveiled
a moon-shaped statue about the size of a beach ball at his stand in Basel.
Elsewhere at
Art Basel, Turkish artist Ozgur Kar’s LCD display of a man surrounded by skeletons
is being sold by the French gallery Edouard Montassut.
Artist Jeff Koons plans to send 125 miniature sculptures to the moon with multi-billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.
The Vive Arts
platform, meanwhile, offers a dive into digital art with the help of augmented
reality glasses, presenting an avatar of the German artist Albert Oehlen in a
3D universe.
The fair, which
ran from June 16–19, also features a host of non-digital works — from an
installation by Franco-Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping depicting a kitchen
strewn with giant cockroaches, to a series of portraits carved in wood by
Franco-Cameroonian artist Barthelemy Toguo.
A spider sculpture
by the French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois fetched $40 million.
Along with sales
of yachts, luxury cars, watches, and jewelry, the art market recovered strongly
in 2021 after the shock of the pandemic in 2020.
The stock market
rebounded sharply last year, swelling the coffers of the ultra-rich — and
inflation is giving wealthy collectors yet another reason to splash out on a
multi-million-dollar painting.
Pace is one of the
few major galleries to have ventured into the field of NFTs. According to Clare
McAndrew, author of an art market report for Art Basel, only six percent of
galleries sold NFTs in 2021.
Since peaking in
August 2021, NFTs have plummeted. While art-related NFT sales volumes soared to
$945 million in August, they fell to $366 million in January and then to $101
million in May, according to McAndrew’s records.
These ups and downs don’t
faze the owner of the Pace gallery though, who believes that NFTs represent a
“new methodology for distributing digital art”.
Read more Music
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
