Art Basel is not immune to the NFT craze and Galerie Nagel Draxler is including a “Crypto Kiosk” of NFTs and NFT-related digital art within its booth at the fair. Featured artists include Luke Willis Thompson, DotPigeon, Sarah Friend, Olive Allen and Kevin Abosch.
The gallery sees NFTs as the avant-garde art movement of today. “It has the potential to change aesthetic perception, and to add new possibilities to the traditional genres of painting, sculpture, installation and media art,” says co-founder Saskia Draxler.
The gallery has history in this field and has already held a bricks-and-mortar show of NFTs in its Cologne venue earlier this year, curated by the artist and dealer Kenny Schachter, who also curated the booth at Art Basel.
Works at Art Basel include an NFT of the photograph (a) breathing: collective noun (2021) by the London-based artist Luke Willis Thompson of a Black man lying on his back in a field of bluebells. The original image is currently emblazoned on the former US Embassy building in Oslo to raise awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The gallery will be accepting Ether (ETH) for the NFTs and prices range from ETH1 to ETH40 (around $2,500-$100,000). The gallery’s online viewing room is also reserved for NFTs.
Meanwhile, Photo Basel (until September at Volkshaus Basel) will collaborate with Samsung to present a NFT Cabinet, offering digital photographic NFTs available for sale.