Online Viewing Rooms & Digital Sales
Art Basel recently announced the first edition of Online Viewing Rooms, the new digital-only platform connecting galleries with collectors from around the world. According to the fair, the inaugural edition will go live soon on March 20, 2020:
Online Viewing Rooms will give visitors the opportunity to browse thousands of artworks presented by Art Basel participating galleries, many of which will be online exclusives. The Viewing Rooms will run in parallel to the three shows in Basel, Miami Beach, and Hong Kong.
The initiative is the latest example of Art Basel’s longstanding commitment to digital technologies and to fostering a healthy artworld ecosystem by creating new ways for its galleries to reach collectors from across the globe.
This is surely not the first initiative towards the commitment to the digital world: as a matter of fact, also mega -galleries like Gagosian and David Zwirner have already implemented their digital sales with the Online Viewing Rooms for the last couple of years - and they’ve been reporting strong results.
The art market is changing, and so are the ways of reaching out to new audiences. In the interdependent world in which we live nowadays, digital technologies represent an amazing tool with (still) a lot of underestimated potential.
We at Kate Vass Galerie are extremely proud to have developed our own online sales platform, allowing clients from all over the world to easily browse and purchase artworks even if they don’t get to see the exhibitions in person (no need to say that, sadly, that’s exactly what the art world is facing now due to the outbreak and spread of COVID-19). For more advanced users, we are also offering works for sale directly on the blockchain; in this case, each artwork has been tokenised on the the Ethereum blockchain as a non-fungible token (NFT) and you’ll be able to buy using ETH cryptocurrency.
Collecting digital art can be very engaging, seeing is believing!
Osinachi
Umunwoke Mama, 2020