A bear market looms over this year’s NFT.NYC conference – ARTnews.com

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Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, The ART news newsletter about the art market and beyond. sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

On Rainbow Room On Tuesday evening, the former and future NFT community gathered to kick off the third edition of NFT.NYCthe premier Web3 conference that has served as a barometer for the crypto market since its inception in 2019.

“Frank Sinatra used to sing here, but what matters most now is the people in this room!” Matt Medvedco-founder of Web3 media company, nft now, told the audience at the company NFT100 Galaand projects a confidence undermined by the scene at the top of the Rock.

The tables were pockmarked with empty seats, while the remaining attendees talked somberly about tax season. Meanwhile, in the open bar, the signature cocktail this year was titled “Bear Market” (Tito’s, grenadine, a twist, splashed into a coupe glass). The party line appeared to be: Sure, things look bad now, but actually they had always looked bad.

“Over the last 24 months, everyone here has been laughed at for their choices. It takes courage to say, ‘I see something no one else does'” Alejandro Navia, another nft now co-founder, said from the podium. “Web3 is not just an industry, but an economy that changed people’s lives. How many of you can pay your bills because of NFT?” His speech was met with a cruel silence, before a kind of heart-sick laughter bubbled through the room. The sincerity and evangelism that drove NFT’s value creation had finally reached its limit. Let’s call a spade a spade.

Over the past year, NFT sales fell by 77 percent, and the community has shrunk back to more or less its original makeup: dedicated digital artists and crypto true believers, with the occasional VC-type hype man present.

And which ART news Editor-in-chief Sarah Douglas often recalls that she knew the financial crisis had hit the art market when she arrived at the UBS dinner at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2008: There was no caviar.

During the 2021 edition of NFT.NYC, held in November, I spotted Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort, looking a bit haggard in the strobe lights of a party hosted by Sotheby’s and Serotonin, a Web3 marketing firm. I took his presence as confirmation that this often embarrassing beat was coalescing into something of historical significance. Maybe all this can become a movie one day. Rappers floated in the background at another party, as indie-pop darling Caroline Polachek performed for Web3ers. It was clear: the money flowed in.

It wasn’t as fast. Last year’s edition in late June may have attracted 15,000 participants, a jump of more than 5,000, but people were on edge. By then, bitcoin had fallen below $20,000, far from its previous peak of $69,000. Still, with over 1,500 speakers set to take the stage, crypto enthusiasts are putting on a brave face. Didn’t have so many disturbing drops in the value of predefined crypto lines on the graph that were initially parallel? Hadn’t winter come before spring? “We haven’t hit zero yet — it’s not over,” David Pakman, a crypto VC, assured the audience during this year’s opening remarks.

In retrospect, we should all have known that was the end of the dazzling reign: the parties were not so good.

A couple of weeks later came the death knell. Devin Finzermanaging director of the wholesale platform NFT Open sea, announced layoffs. Things weren’t going to get better anytime soon, and OpenSea was bracing itself for a long winter. Finzer calculated that they had enough funds to see them through five unfavorable years.

Some places still feel the lost promise of crypto. During Art Basel Miami Beach last December, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez metaphorically broke a bottle of champagne over the ship that was “The Gateway”, an NFT gallery inside an old bank with Web3 pop-ups lining the street. He grinned into a phone aimed at his face, “You have to come here!” Meanwhile, the Web3 NYC Gallery in Midtown Manhattan, which billed itself as the first brick-and-mortar Web3 store, has apparently closed.

Cynicism, irony, sarcasm – it had little place in the fraternal light of the NFT community of yesteryear, whose motto was WAGMI – We’re All Gonna Make It. No longer. As Navia, nft now co-founder, discovered with her ill-timed comment on Tuesday night, it is too gratifying to pretend that everyone is about to catch a wave collectively.

“I’m just here to get a job,” one of my seatmates, a Web3 artist, told me. Time to squeeze a few more drops of blood from this rock. — Shanti Escalante-De Mattei, reporter

Meet Gallery Bringing Ghana’s Art Scene Global

When Marwan Zakhem founded Gallery 1957 in Accra, Ghana, he probably didn’t expect it to have a big impact on the country where it’s based. In fact, Zakhem had not planned to open a gallery at all – he began to build oil and gas reservoirs. But since the gallery opened in 2016, it has become one of the forces helping the growth of Ghana’s art scene and one of the most important commercial venues on the continent at large. ART news contributor Gameli Hamelo reports on Gallery 1957’s humble roots and its many functions, which include not only mounting exhibitions, but also hosting an art prize and a residency program. “We did all this to make sure they knew that this country was great and that the artists that came out of it were even greater,” Zakhem told Hamelo.

The big number: $120 million.

More than 30 works from the collection of music director Mo Ostin, who died in July 2022, are expected to sell collectively for that amount at Sotheby’s in May. Works by René Magritte, Cy Twombly, Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell will be among the best on offer.

Industry is moving

Read this.

Poet and fiction writer Ben Lerner is no stranger to the art world. In 2016 he wrote an article for One from New York on how the Whitney Museum handles art conservation. Last week, Lerner again included a subject of museological interest in a piece for the magazine—this time a work of fiction called “The Ferry.” The narrator, a photo archivist, participates in a panel discussion entitled “Criteria for Resignation.” At the end, he makes a comment: “People need to understand the relationship between preservation and destruction, I mean, how the former must entail the latter.” In an interview about the story with editor Cressida Leyshon, Lerner says, “A work of art or a library or a museum collection or any significant form requires subtraction as much as addition, right? It requires omission, resignation, etc., not just hoarding . Infinite accumulation in an ever-expanding cloud flattens everything.” – Angelica Villa, reporter