Art Basel in Basel

Alright, so, Art Basel happened.

I still don’t know much about art. I start enjoying it more and more though. I also realised that I prefer listening to people talk than to look at paintings made by people I have no connection to or don’t know anything about. The times I get excited about art pieces is because they have something really unique to them. This unique thing almost gives an identity to the painting. It becomes a person, a person I like. I guess I like unique people?

More often I get excited about art pieces after having talked to the gallery people present at the expo or to the artist themselves. At this stage the connection I have to the people connected to the piece seems to be more important than the pieces themselves.

I don’t really know what to do with these realisations. I have this intuition that most people collect art in this way. Even the grand artists from the past, it’s their lives and stories that we value no? or is it the art itself? I need answers.

Now, I also ended up spending a good amount of time listening to the conversations happening on the conversation stage.

The last panel I attended was featuring Sarah Meyohas, an American artist and creator of Bitchcoin. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the name. The way she combined art and blockchain technology early on (2015) was visionary. During the Q&A I wanted to ask her about the new projects she’s working on cause recently I came across a proposal she posted on the nouns.wtf discussion forum. It’s about a project she is incubating called NFTitties. Yeah there’s titties, I guess it’s everyone’s choice whether they like nude art or not…  Anyways, the great thing is she and her partner(?) on the project Carlota are using the nouns “one auction every 24 hours” model to release their art pieces. I talked to Carlota too, she seems like a person who works on this project for the right reasons. I love the experimentation. I’m really curious to see what they are able to create.

Now, the panel discussion itself was quite disappointing. Too many panellists with completely different depths of understanding of the art and NFT space. That was in the way of having a productive conversation. Unfortunately, the person who spoke the most (at least I perceived it like that) was just talking her books without trying to understand where the opinions of the people from the traditional art space where coming from. It was bad advertising for the NFT art space. I guess the take way from this discussion is that there is a lack of understanding and communication between the traditional art space and the NFT art space. A long way to go for everyone. Looking forward to seeing where we are standing next year in terms of NFTs in the traditional art world.

Thanks for having me Art Basel in Basel.