What We're Reading: 2/8/22
Columbia student makes $300,000 selling NFTs using only an iPhone
The first NFT Elise Swopes, a senior arts management and graphic design major, took was from a helicopter flying over New York City. Using only her iPhone to shoot and edit the NFT, she made it look as if a waterfall was actively falling from the edge of the city. She sold this piece in February 2020 for 11 ETH, or the equivalent of $17,000 at the time.
NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, are digital representations of ownership or rights to original pieces of content or art. Swopes, still using only an iPhone, has now made 104 ETH, a cryptocurrency called Ethereum, which is equivalent to $300,000 in the current market.
Via Columbia Chronicle
This summer, the Brooklyn Museum will stage a version of the first institutional survey dedicated to the late fashion designer and creative visionary Virgil Abloh. The show, titled “Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech,” will build on an earlier exhibition of the same name that originated at the MCA Chicago in 2019, and then traveled to ICA Boston, the High Museum in Atlanta, and Qatar Museums.
Via Artnet
How auction houses became the big winners of the pandemic
Consolidated sales of at least $7.3bn, Sotheby’s highest annual total in its 277-year history… $1bn of that spent on “luxury”… $7.1bn at Christie’s, the auction house’s highest total in five years, including $69.3m for an NFT… Record sales at Phillips, up 35% on 2019.
It seems the only way is up for the biggest international auction houses after a pandemic-challenged, but ultimately lucrative, 2021. Meanwhile, back in the realm of beleaguered bricks-and-mortar galleries, nearly 300 art and antiques dealerships are coming to terms with the postponement of the Tefaf Maastricht fair from March to June while Art Basel in Hong Kong, also scheduled for March, has announced a “contingency tenancy” at its venue in May, should it too need to shuffle backwards at the eleventh hour due to Covid.
Via The Art Newspaper
Tate is to remove the Sackler name from five locations at its two London museums amid ongoing calls for institutions to distance themselves from the family which manufactured and sold the highly addictive opioid OxyContin through their firm Purdue Pharma.
Via The Art Newspaper
