Daata Suggests Miami Art Week Must Chill

2021-12-03 00:00:00

Between 2011 and 2018 David Gryn was curator of the film and sound programme for Art Basel Miami Beach. He went on to start Daata in 2015 in order to commission artists to create new artworks in digital media. This week David and the Daata team are back curating <a href="https://daata.art/news/nameless-grace">an exhibition</a> in Miami Beach at a moment when suddenly digital art is getting all the attention, so we thought we should share how things look here from our perspective. 2021 has been a momentous year for digital artists, if not the whole art world, and with the cities of Miami and Miami Beach being already heavily involved with cryptocurrency and decentralised finance, it’s inevitable that Miami Art Week would have a heavy focus on cryptoart. These are also cities that aren’t shy of vibrancy and ostentatiousness, so perhaps no surprise to see a certain type of brightly coloured, flashy and often sexualised digital art getting a lot of the airtime this week (Playboy are amongst the many hosts of crypto-related parties being thrown). Also as ever with Miami Art Week the hospitality industry is jumping on the action, with many of the big hotels along Collins Ave hosting events such as the Sagamore’s youth charity fundraisers that showed NFT artworks by Marvel’s Stan Lee and offered NFT tickets to ‘VIP Penthouse Parties’. But there is still substance beneath the glitz and hype; <a href="https://thebass.org/art/naama-tsabar-perimeters/">Naama Tsabar’s beautiful performance</a> at the Bass Museum activated the architecture of the space through walls that could be played to make music, whereas alongside her show Alex Israel’s collaboration with Snapchat allowed visitors at the Bass to use the AR function of the app to engage with his work on new levels as well as making a timely observations about the relationship between the audience, artwork and artist’s own image. As well as the local museums and foundations, we were very curious to see how the crypto events this week connected with the long-standing exhibitors and collectors at Art Basel Miami Beach. At Daata we see a bright new future in the way that Web3 tech is empowering artists to make new work but, as one of the first companies to focus on selling art digitally and with artists’ needs at the forefront of everything we do, we have also been very cautious of the gold rush into the NFT market. We are well aware that some traditional art galleries feel defensive about <a href="https://superrare.com/features/scope">confrontational statements </a>about overthrowing the establishment or conceptual gestures that involve the destruction of physical artworks. So this week it’s been interesting to see where the ‘establishment’ and the new ‘trailblazers’ will come closer together, and if there remains a divide. Firstly the most obvious dividing factor is between those with a crypto wallet and those without. The large number of the events being thrown by Web3 organisations are token-gated, meaning that only those who have purchased an artwork are allowed past the glamorous door staff and burly bouncers. Although, ironically for those who are disrupting the art industry there are close parallels between this form of exclusivity and how the big Miami Art Week parties are traditionally the sole domain of art collectors and influential industry figures. Perhaps this is why crypto and art dealing have quickly become bedfellows, because they adopt the same behavioural traits in terms of gaining exclusive access to something that is hard to come by, rare or unique. A difference comes from the fact that in the world of Web3, a token can be generated not just in exchange for currency but also for services rendered. This is how DAOs and tokenised communities are becoming such exciting and fertile places for art, creativity and new ideas, where token-buying members of the community are encouraged and incentivised to become active participants as opposed to passive consumers or voyeurs. It’s this new cooperative way of working and spirit of openness which is the most exciting thing for us at Daata. Yet this spirit isn’t something that is really coming through in the Miami events this week, possibly this is simply due to the very nature of art fairs and their satellite events, the inevitable objectification of art, the time constraints and pressure to keep moving as opposed to dwelling for too long in one place, considering concepts deeply or even experiencing an artwork. Thankfully, from a scheduling perspective, before the art fair and the museum openings, the week’s events kicked off with the first annual crypto industry conference DCentral, a wide-reaching event to rival the scale of Art Basel Miami Beach yet taking on all aspects of crypto from art to finance and fashion, as well as a dome hosting 360 metaverse projections. The poppy look and feel was very much a world away from the art fairs and in fact had much more in common with Miami’s other huge annual trade convention, the Winter Music Conference. In fact throughout Miami this week the crypto industry events felt much more in line with the music industry than to the commercial art world. The two of course sit comfortably together, from the perspective of personality-led drops, collectible merchandise, live events and most excitingly the blockchain revolution in how musicians collaborate, create, distribute, reach fans and receive royalties for their work. As one of the most established communities in the DAO space, Friends With Benefits (FWB) threw a party for Miami Art Week with one of our favourite NFT marketplaces Foundation. Entry - of course - was reliant on having a crypto wallet and purchasing 5 FWB tokens. At the time of writing this we are yet to get a clear picture of how many of Art Basel’s regular visitors got their first crypto wallet to dip their toe in this week or in fact FWB’s rise in token sales but judging by the buzz at the event and <a href="https://www.fwb.help/events/fwb-basel-dec1">incredible musical line up </a>we are guessing the numbers were high. We are asking around and will report back. This will be a good measure of whether the new art platforms managed to syphon new audiences from Art Basel’s network. <a href="https://www.fwb.art/">Friends With Benefits launched their first NFTs </a>with artists this week in a brilliantly creative and entertaining way, creating a treasure hunt style game that encouraged members to explore sites across the city, collecting NFT artworks along the way, to unlock access to exciting new benefits and levels of engagement with the art. With such a broad range in the creativity and artistry taking place this week in Miami Beach, possibly our biggest takeaway is that the impossible pace of events that defines Miami Art Week creates an environment that perfectly reflects the frantic excitement that has blown up around NFTs, from both a financial and artistic perspective. Just as we need to spend time with art to fully appreciate its value beyond economics, now is a good time to slow down and take a breath to carefully consider all the incredible things that we can now do together thanks to these creative applications of Web3 technology. When Daata’s founder, David Gryn began curating the film and sound programme for Art Basel Miami Beach back in 2011 it was partly in response to the fact that artists making time-based work didn’t thrive within the physical and time constraints of an art fair. Compared with the immediacy of paintings and the relative ease with which they can be displayed, galleries struggled to present film and performance in ways that would do justice to the work and engage the transient audiences. Taking the works away from the fair and screening them outdoors with comfortable seating, at times when viewers had more time to spend with them, David’s programme gave everything and everyone some room to breathe. Daata has continued this way of thinking since it launched in 2015, and even since stepping into the NFT space, we have taken time to maintain our emphasis on presenting work in the right setting regardless of length. Many popular NFT artworks are either static or looping, which fits more easily with the art fair environment and cultural trends but with our curated projects both in the physical world, online and in between (Metaverse and AR) we are creating opportunities for longer durational artwork, immersive and expansive experiences, metaverses, world building and everything in between and beyond. Daata aims to develop both institutional and public recognition for artists working in this field, reaching the public at-large as well as established art audiences and those at new frontiers of digital. We demonstrate this in Miami Beach this weekend by hosting <a href="https://daata.art/play/jane-bustin-parcel-of-airs-2?type=playlist&playlist=nameless-grace">a free public exhibition of artists’ films</a> on Saturday 4 and Sunday 5 December at the New World Symphony. And we hope that our events will bring the week to a close in a way that allows for reflection and to consider the medium in new ways. We couldn’t honestly say that the events of this week brought the established galleries art and Web3 together in perfect harmony. From the established side of things, Scope Art Fair announced a <a href="https://superrare.com/features/scope">partnership with SuperRare </a>seemingly at the last minute, which didn’t feel much like a ‘partnership’ and featured a lot of the <a href="https://superrare.com/features/scope">disruptor rhetoric </a>that polarises these communities. Art Basel partnered with Tezos to allow visitors to play at being crypto artists by <a href="https://artbasel.com/stories/mint-your-own-nft-at-art-basel-miami-beach">minting their own NFTs</a>, which felt like it undermined serious artists. From the galleries there were occasional nods from exhibitors towards selling NFT artworks, but as ever galleries have to hedge their bets in terms of what they show. It didn’t feel that the interest was channeling as much in from the other direction. Like everything else in the city at this time, most events appropriated the brand name Art Basel (and bastardised variants of it) but that is more of a shorthand description for the whole week and the connections to the fairs stopped therethere. We believe that Web3 is a huge force for good and is nothing but beneficial to established galleries and non digital artists. Art fairs are useful for seeing lots of art and also for meeting up with people, but traditionally the real business is done before and after so in that vein we hope that there will have been many ‘interesting conversations’ this week that will forge even closer collaborations between established art sector and the Web3 pioneers to support artists and the making of new artwork from the ground up. <a href="/play/jane-bustin-parcel-of-airs-2?type=playlist&playlist=nameless-grace">Nameless Grace</a> presented by Daata is at the New World Symphony, SoundScape Park, Miami Beach Saturday Dec 4, 2021 at 8pm / Sunday Dec 5, 2021 at 8pm SoundScape Park, New World Symphony, 400 17th St, Miami Beach, FL 33139 Playlist streamable<a href="/play/jane-bustin-parcel-of-airs-2?type=playlist&playlist=nameless-grace"> here</a>