Art and Blockchain platforms
As mentioned in one of our last posts, the future of collecting digital assets is here and now. And it’s exciting!
Kate Vass Galerie is proudly working on linking physical and digital art: the gallery is at the intersection of traditional and crypto art, like a ‘portal’ between these two coexisting worlds. We firmly believe in the great power of new technologies which can help especially during these unprecedented times; when it comes to art and blockchain, for example, we see how this can be an amazing tool to help artists and support new type of collectors while keeping trust and security together with uniqueness and provenance of the works at their best. And art can purchased using cryptocurrency.
Reputable digital art collections are now built taking all the best that blockchain technology has to offer. As said above, using tokens to represent assets on the blockchain offers a number of advantages, such as proving provenance, uniqueness and authenticity plus secure and decentralized storage. If we got your interest and you would like to investigate more, we also recommend the Julius Bär article ‘Three ways blockchain is reshaping the art world’.
Blockchain-based platforms like OpenSea and SuperRare , showcased a considerable increase in the number of artists featured and artworks traded especially during the last year. OpenSea is the world’s largest digital marketplace for crypto collectibles and non-fungible tokens (NFT's), including ERC721 and ERC1155 assets. You can buy, sell, and discover exclusive digital assets. SuperRare is a marketplace to collect and trade unique, single-edition digital artworks. Each artwork is authentically created by an artist in the network, and tokenized as a crypto-collectible digital item that you can own and trade.
KVG is showcasing a curated selection of artists on both platforms, where you can find unique NFTs to collect.
Other well established art-related blockchain platforms include KnownOrigin (an artist-driven platform that makes it easy for digital creators to authenticate, showcase and sell the artwork & collectables they produce) and MakersPlace - Truly unique digital creations, by the World's Most Creative Minds, where we recently launched a special NFT book by Helena Sarin 'GANcommedia Erudita', check it out!
Lately, new ones with different missions emerged: that’s the case of Async Art and Nifty Gateway (this one became immediately famous because of its founders, the billionaires Winkelvoss Twins).
Asynchronous Art is an experimental art movement born out of the question “what does art look like when it can be programmed?” The latest advancement in the art space has been the ability to tokenize and sell art online using Ethereum. Although this has been an amazing first step, it still mimics how the physical world operates. What if art could evolve over time, react to its owners, or pull data from the outside world? It’s time to find out what’s possible when modern art takes full advantage of the digital medium.
Nifty Gateway is the premier marketplace for Nifties, which are digital items you can truly own. Digital Items have existed for a long time, but never like this. It was founded with a very simple mission - to make Nifties accessible to everyone.
Also interesting to call attention to is the brand new media platform Nifties; born out of a digital enthusiast's curiosity and the will to spread knowledge about non-fungible tokens, it aims to be one of the main online destinations for digital collectors interested in premium NFTs. NIFTIES team's goal is to give collectors the tools to build their own collections while they contribute to the rise of many creative minds.
All these platforms were founded to avoid the traditional art market model where the artists have somehow to go through museums or galleries in order to exhibit (and sell) their work and become known by the art world. Now things are different, they can skip intermediaries and showcase and sell their works independently. At the same time, those decentralised platforms (where there are hundreds of artists - and collectors - who can easily decide to stay anonymous) started to realise that curation is actually needed and they started to curate their program. SuperRare and others also have their “corporate collections” where they feature selected artists which are on display on virtual spaces in decentralised lands - you can read more about it in our previous post on THE RISE OF VIRTUAL WORLDS AND DECENTRALISED LANDS ON THE BLOCKCHAIN.
A growing secondary market is also on the rise and recently Artnome raised ~$4,800 for visual artists by auctioning off an important work from its collection to support artists during the pandemic.
We at Kate Vass Galerie are extremely glad to have developed our own online sales platform and we started to tokenise and offer digital artworks for sale on the blockchain already back in 2019: since then, we’ve been witnessing a remarkable growth of active collectors and bids which led to a rise in the prices.
As a matter of fact, all the 10 cryptoworks which were produced by Osinachi for his solo show ‘Existence as Protest’ at our gallery are now sold out on SuperRare, with their price rising from 2ETH to 6ETH each in just 2 months. At the same time, his work is being exhibited physically as prints at our gallery in Zürich and this is exactly also where the gallery’s purpose lies: supporting the artists with a show and presenting them to a wider and different audience of collectors.
Selection of Osinachi cryptoworks which went sold out on SuperRare.
Recently we have made available an exclusive selection of works as NFTs on OpenSea (and prints in our store) by Sofia Crespo .
‘Can we use new technologies to dream up biodiversities that do not exist ?’ - Sofia is a generative artist working with neural networks and machine learning with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, this implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object. On the side, she is also hugely concerned with the dynamic change in the role of the artists working with machine learning techniques.
Don’t miss our virtual artist studio visit with Sofia where she is guiding us through a little journey and you’ll get the amazing opportunity to see where & how she produces her work, with a special focus on her latest series ‘Artificial Remnants’ developed together with Entangled Others & ‘{}Chromatophores’ created with engineer Andrew Pouliot.
Sofia Crespo artworks currently available for sale on OpenSea
For us it’s very important to keep linking physical and digital art and bridge the gap between art and technology.
During the last months we've developed and hosted a unique VR show on SomniumSpace: after the successful solo exhibition “Alternatives” of Norwegian digital artist Espen Kluge at Kate Vass Galerie in October 2019, selected Kluge cryptoworks are now featured in a brand-new exhibition in Virtual Reality "giving normal people abnormal experiences". You can experience it on decentralized land of SomniumSpace parcel 1047 at M○CA- Museum of Crypto Art. 10 digital works (NFTs on blockchain) have been acquired from Opensea by the Museum for their collection and the new experience space has been developed just for Espen Kluge art.
The idea of pushing the boundaries of human imagination of how you can exhibit, look at, and experience art came to the reality with technological progress and platforms like Somnium Space, which enables us to curate all of the aspects: architecture, the composition of works, colors as well as audio effects, and create a new type of experience using new technologies.
The Virtual Art Festival took place from May 14 to 17th and Kate Vass Galerie had the pleasure to participate as a speaker!
Last but not least, since this November we have a selection of artworks by female artists available as unique NFTs on Ephimera, the world’s first marketplace focused on the exchange of tokenized photography and video art built on the Ethereum blockchain, which launched during Vancouver Biennale #ArtProject2020.