NFT and crypto art have exploded in the last two years, becoming a new backdrop for important markets used by artists. Today, Concept Art House will take you to see the great works of ideas from artist Simon Denny, and share how the blockchain field examined by Art Basel is expanding the opportunities for artists to create and disseminate new Art.
Simon Denny
First we introduce Simon Denny, a contemporary artist based in Berlin. Born in Auckland in 1982, he represented New Zealand at the 2015 Venice Biennale and has been HFBK Hamburg's Professor of Time Media since 2018. In addition, Simon Denny has exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York), Serpentine (London), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Venice Biennale and curated art and cryptography exhibitions, Proof of Work was held in Schinkel Pavillon in 2018 and Proof of Stake in Kunstverein Hamburg in 2021.
Called Pets.com (1998-2000), the project was reimagined by Guile Twardowski with Simon Denny and Cosmographia. It was a website that sold pet-related products to retail customers. Twardowski summons pet purgatory to bring their favorite mascot back from the dead. Unlike other calls, Pets.com is a single spirit, destined to live forever alone. Therefore, the resurrected entity will be auctioned on OpenSea.
"Whether people are interested in NFT or not, they should watch carefully how Denny uses the medium to turn it into conceptual art," said one person who saw Simon Denny's work. "I'm one of those people who isn't generally interested in the NFT phenomenon, but I'm very interested in what Denny is doing with them."
Denny has a long history of incorporating blockchain technology into his work. In 2018, he co-curated an exhibition dedicated to cryptocurrencies at Berlin's Hinkel Pavilion. The exhibit includes a display of the first CryptoKitty ever sold. Art Basel is not the first cultural institution to sell NFT as a fund-raising device, but most other institutions see them more as commodities than works of art, so that's why Simon Denny chose Art Basel.
Basel Gallery
Founded in 1970 by gallery owners from Basel, Art Basel now hosts the world's premier modern and contemporary art fairs in Basel, Miami Beach, Hong Kong and Paris. Defined by the host city and region, each show is unique, as reflected in the galleries it participates in, the artwork on display, and the content of parallel programmes produced for each session in collaboration with local institutions. Art Basel participation has expanded beyond the art fair through new digital platforms and a number of new initiatives such as Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Reports, Crosspoints: Art Basel Podcast and BMW Art Tour.
As NFT begins to appear more frequently at Art Basel, museums and galleries in Miami Beach will add to traditional art in the form of irreplaceable tokens.
The popularity of NFT has led crypto to be regarded as a legitimate art form by the art world, with prestigious art fairs such as Art Basel providing artists and creators with the opportunity to display their art, as well as a market for those artists to sell their work.
According to statistics, the average time between the first purchase and resale of NFT works is only 33 days. In other words, a piece of NFT art is traded about once a month. The average resale time for a work in the traditional art market is 25 to 30 years. Compared with traditional art trading, the anonymity of NFT art trading means that the barriers to entry for buying or selling art are very low; Coupled with the fact that it can be traded anytime and anywhere, the high liquidity and continuous trading has attracted many speculative buyers. There are plenty of speculators who buy NFT art on the basis of whether the work can be resold at a higher price, with little interest in the content or the art itself and only a quick turnover to make a profit.
So how much of these deals is the real demand for NFT art versus the froth of the market? It's impossible to put a figure on it because it's impossible to tell what motivates people to buy NFT art. But in terms of the segmentation of the market and the shift in the proportion of direct sales and resales, a significant portion of my trading was speculative.
Obviously, today we can expect economic volatility and inflation, but consumers' expectations for the future remain highly variable. The turmoil in the world will have a negative impact on people's willingness to buy and sell art. Whether it will improve in the future and whether people think it is a good time to trade art, it remains to be seen how the global art market will develop in 2022.