After the big busts of 2022, seemingly everyone buying and selling at the uber-chic Swiss fair Art Basel has closed their digital wallets. The NFT-based art that shot onto the scene in 2021 was a notable absence from the stalls of all but a few of the 284 exhibitors this year. And Tezos, once the crypto-currency darling of the art world, was also absent as an official partner at the marquee Swiss fair (unsurprising, since it has lost 56 percent of its value year-over-year).
Given the uncertainty swirling 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 in to take over Credit Suisse), can anyone really be blamed for a bit more caution? A sense of risk-aversion was felt among buyers here—and crypto is especially risky. And yet, perhaps now that the froth of speculation has gone, the blockchain experiments that remain are more sustainable and meaningful.
“What we’ve learned is that an art fair is not necessarily the best place to debut an NFT,” said one gallery director who had previously brought NFT-based works to this fair. “Transactions for them happen online, so if we do bring them it is to show them, not for a point-of-sale.”
AI Data Paintings by Refik Anadol were among the prominent projects incorporating artificial intelligence. NFT-based art was few and far between. (Installation view of Jeffrey Deitch’s. booth with Neural Paintings by Refik Anadol. Image: Stefan Altenburger.
In 2021, Kenny Schachter debuted NFT-based art for Art Basel with a special project at Galerie Nagel Draxler called “NFTism,” packing the booth with curious, confused, and excited onlookers. This year, he said he was not surprised by the sudden lack of crypto-art on the fair floor. “The crypto market crashed, so no one here wants anything to do with it,” he said, sitting inside the atrium of the fair with some friends. He rolled up his sleeve to show me his famous “NFT” tattoo, which he recently updated to add the word “post” above it.
“People here are so conservative, 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.” (U.S. regulators are currently knocking on the doors of big crypto exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance.) The fizzle of interest was felt already at Art Basel Miami Beach last fall, he noted. “There has been no change from December to June. As soon as things cool down, the art world will be back in no time.”
Galleries that had been quick to charge into the crypto space were taking a pause this year, including Galerie Nagel Draxler and Pace, the latter of which presented Jeff Koons’s first-ever NFT project, Jeff Koons: Moon Phases, last year. Now, both continue to work in the crypto space, but in the expanded fields beyond the Messeplatz (Pace is still active online and Nagel Draxler has a dedicated gallery called a Crypto Kiosk in Berlin that is presenting all kinds of works that engage with blockchain). In their Art Basel booths, paintings and sculptures and art historical classics dominate.
Kenny Schachter at the Crypto Kiosk at Nagel Draxler Gallery in Basel in 2021.
A spokesperson from Pace said they may consider presenting some works later in the week at Art Basel, but that depends on what gets changed out at the booth when sales close.
However, work that engaged NFTs was present in a few places, if you really looked. Simon Denny, who has long engaged with emergent technologies in his practice, was perhaps the only NFT-based work at the main art fair, and it was designed to blend in: His painting on view at Petzel, from the new “Metaverse Landscapes” series, appears on the surface like a traditional work on canvas featuring fragmented images. It was nestled next door to a massive, €1.65 million painting by Martin Kippenberger.
Denny’s work only reveals its full meaning when you notice that there are QR codes on its side, one of which shows you a piece of private property in the metaverse that the work is representing. Denny minted a bit of virtual real estate as an NFT that you get with the painting, conjuring questions about property ownership in virtual space. Still, the work cleverly borrows from landscape painting and classic conceptualism to make its point—crypto-art designed to give the art-historically inclined something to hold onto (literally).
Simon Denny’s Metaverse Landscape 8: The Sandbox Land (-196, 23) (2023). Oil on canvas, UV print, Ethereum paper wallet, dynamic ERC-721 NFT. Photo: Nick Ash. Courtesy: the artist
“People are looking for things secure in value and crypto and NFTs are quite insecure,” the artist told me. “This project addresses the viewers here because it is a painting first and speaks about art history. Plus, you do not need to be literate in crypto to buy it.” Of note: Implanted on the back of the painting is a chip with a crypto wallet so that whoever buys the piece may access the NFT without having to learn how to set one up. It seems to be a winning strategy. Denny’s work, which has a price tag of €30,000, was on reserve by 4 p.m. on preview day.
Meanwhile, galleries have made moves towards using the technology for actual concrete business strategies. Arcual, now an official partner of Art Basel, was set up near the champagne in the collectors’ lounge on the third floor, presenting talks and artworks. The company uses blockchain technology to create ownership chains that benefit both artists and dealers, hoping to change the way business as usual is done in the art market. They are creating NFTs for any and all works of art.
“I am a strong believer in what blockchain can bring to the industry, but I was always skeptical of the speculation we were seeing,” said Bernadine Bröcker Wieder from Arcual. “We want to focus on the art again.” She noted this current moment in crypto is less of a wild ride than 2021 when NFT-based art prices went soaring. “We follow some of the standards of what was set with the NFT boom, but have helped it evolve to work seamlessly in the art world within the way the art world already works.”
Phoebe Cummings at the Arcual Booth, Art Basel in Basel, 2023, photos by Gloria Soverini Photography.
The hot topic in tech has clearly moved on to artificial intelligence. Vast public anxiety looms over this field, and so art has felt a new sense of urgency to engage. Digital paintings by Refik Anadol, who was subject of a major exhibition at MoMA earlier this year, were front and center at Jeffrey Deitch’s booth—though the dealer was emphasizing how easy to understand they were in ordinary art terms.
“Our market is conventional,” said Jeffrey Deitch when asked about the appetite for collectors when it comes to digital art. “People are buying these works as ‘living paintings,’” he emphasized, a reference to the title of the ongoing series. Anadol’s triptych (on sale for $300,000) had a prominent space at the front wall of Deitch’s booth. Though still available at 4 p.m. on preview day, it had a seemingly ever-present cluster of VIPs in front of it.
In the foyer of Unlimited, BMW’s annual art car this year brought a high-tech spin to artists who do not typically work in the digital space. The South African artist Esther Mahlangu’s boldly geometric abstract paintings were among those featured for a spectacular generative art piece.
Also inside the fair’s Unlimited section was a work by Croatian artist Tomo Savić-Gecan. Basically, what you saw there was a large screen explaining its own premise; the real show was throughout the fair, and could even be a joke about tech-based art trying to blend in with the environment and speak using the symbols people know.
For the piece, selected lights all around Art Basel were made to vary in intensity at certain times. These changes were governed by an algorithm, fed by data based on randomly selected art news articles which are analyzed in relation to the latest Art Market: An Art Basel and UBS Report.
The various locations of the piece are announced daily on the project website as well as on large screens situated at Unlimited and the booth of galerie Frank Elbaz. The public is invited to go to those locations and observe their surroundings—thereby becoming part of the performance themselves.
It’s a fun work. But even Elbaz’s reps noted the learning curve is steep for digitally engaged art in general. “It is a type of artwork that collectors are not familiar with, but it’s also ephemeral,” said a spokesperson from the Paris-based gallery. “You really do have to accompany collectors and educate them about the work, but also about conceptual art in general.” (There are two versions for sale, priced at €70,000 and €95,000.)
For now, the overall emphasis on painting-like objects seems telling. It may be that the recent spectacle of the crypto bubble has dampened appetites not just for crypto-art but for the more adventurous forms of tech art in general. Once the markets feel more sure of themselves, maybe more works similar to Savić-Gecan’s data-based environmental work, which feels as if it is relevant to changes that are sweeping across society as a whole, will make a more overt return to the art fair floor.
As for crypto-art, plenty of people are still betting that it is due for a comeback. “NFTs are revolutionary,” Schachter said. “It is here to stay. The dust just needs to settle.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
In a case that has sent shockwaves through the Vancouver Island art community, a local art dealer has been charged with one count of fraud over $5,000. Calvin Lucyshyn, the former operator of the now-closed Winchester Galleries in Oak Bay, faces the charge after police seized hundreds of artworks, valued in the tens of millions of dollars, from various storage sites in the Greater Victoria area.
Alleged Fraud Scheme
Police allege that Lucyshyn had been taking valuable art from members of the public under the guise of appraising or consigning the pieces for sale, only to cut off all communication with the owners. This investigation began in April 2022, when police received a complaint from an individual who had provided four paintings to Lucyshyn, including three works by renowned British Columbia artist Emily Carr, and had not received any updates on their sale.
Further investigation by the Saanich Police Department revealed that this was not an isolated incident. Detectives found other alleged victims who had similar experiences with Winchester Galleries, leading police to execute search warrants at three separate storage locations across Greater Victoria.
Massive Seizure of Artworks
In what has become one of the largest art fraud investigations in recent Canadian history, authorities seized approximately 1,100 pieces of art, including more than 600 pieces from a storage site in Saanich, over 300 in Langford, and more than 100 in Oak Bay. Some of the more valuable pieces, according to police, were estimated to be worth $85,000 each.
Lucyshyn was arrested on April 21, 2022, but was later released from custody. In May 2024, a fraud charge was formally laid against him.
Artwork Returned, but Some Remain Unclaimed
In a statement released on Monday, the Saanich Police Department confirmed that 1,050 of the seized artworks have been returned to their rightful owners. However, several pieces remain unclaimed, and police continue their efforts to track down the owners of these works.
Court Proceedings Ongoing
The criminal charge against Lucyshyn has not yet been tested in court, and he has publicly stated his intention to defend himself against any pending allegations. His next court appearance is scheduled for September 10, 2024.
Impact on the Local Art Community
The news of Lucyshyn’s alleged fraud has deeply affected Vancouver Island’s art community, particularly collectors, galleries, and artists who may have been impacted by the gallery’s operations. With high-value pieces from artists like Emily Carr involved, the case underscores the vulnerabilities that can exist in art transactions.
For many art collectors, the investigation has raised concerns about the potential for fraud in the art world, particularly when it comes to dealing with private galleries and dealers. The seizure of such a vast collection of artworks has also led to questions about the management and oversight of valuable art pieces, as well as the importance of transparency and trust in the industry.
As the case continues to unfold in court, it will likely serve as a cautionary tale for collectors and galleries alike, highlighting the need for due diligence in the sale and appraisal of high-value artworks.
While much of the seized artwork has been returned, the full scale of the alleged fraud is still being unraveled. Lucyshyn’s upcoming court appearances will be closely watched, not only by the legal community but also by the wider art world, as it navigates the fallout from one of Canada’s most significant art fraud cases in recent memory.
Art collectors and individuals who believe they may have been affected by this case are encouraged to contact the Saanich Police Department to inquire about any unclaimed pieces. Additionally, the case serves as a reminder for anyone involved in high-value art transactions to work with reputable dealers and to keep thorough documentation of all transactions.
As with any investment, whether in art or other ventures, it is crucial to be cautious and informed. Art fraud can devastate personal collections and finances, but by taking steps to verify authenticity, provenance, and the reputation of dealers, collectors can help safeguard their valuable pieces.
