From Physical Spaces to Digital Platforms
How social media, a pandemic, and NFTs have changed the art world forever.
Last year was devastating for many art institutions — from galleries to auction houses to museums. A recent survey conducted by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) in April 2021, found that 15% of museums (the equivalent of 5,000 museums in the U.S.) face a “significant risk of permanent closure.” Half of all the museums surveyed had to drastically cut their staffing and educational programming. Many art galleries saw major decreases in sales, had to furlough employees, and lost a significant source of revenue usually generated by art fairs. Galleries that didn’t have a robust online presence before the pandemic struggled the most, as online sales became the only source of revenue. Some were never able to reopen and had to shut their doors permanently.
We now find ourselves halfway through 2021 — art institutions have reopened, art fairs are back, and the art market is quickly rebounding. It has become increasingly clear that the galleries, museums, and auction houses that survived did so because they focused their energy on enhancing their digital strategies and embracing new technologies.
Some of the new technologies that have proven to be quite revolutionary for the art world are NFTs and the blockchain. Certain sectors of the art market jumped on the tech with apparent ease and massive success, choosing to collaborate with the crypto community and embrace the rise of the NFT. Most notably, the auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Both have capitalized on the NFT boom, hosting auctions of NFT art that have resulted in millions upon millions of dollars in sales. These sales have been especially beneficial for digital artists, who have never seen this type of success through the traditional art market.
Physical NFT galleries have begun springing up in places like New York City, Miami, Chicago, and the list keeps growing. A handful of museums have also figured out ways to benefit from the sale of NFTs. The Uffizi Gallery, a museum in Florence just sold an NFT of a painting by Michelangelo for $170,000 and is planning on minting other masterpieces in its collection. Embracing this strategy provided the Uffizi with much-needed capital after seeing their visitor numbers drop from 4.4 million in 2019 to 1.2 million last year due to the pandemic.
On a smaller scale, galleries that focused their attention on growing their social media presence and adapting their websites to include virtual exhibition spaces also seemed to face fewer losses than galleries that were unwilling to adopt a robust virtual strategy.
Many art institutions have rapidly evolved and adapted to the increasingly digital world created by the pandemic — but what does this mean? Are these changes beneficial? Or are they just a new way of maintaining the same institutional goals?
The shift to digital platforms over physical spaces has definitely pushed the art world into the mainstream. In my opinion, this shift alone is quite revolutionary.
The growing focus on social media, the prioritization of online art experiences over physical ones, and the ability to mint artworks on the blockchain all have the capacity to completely topple the long-established hierarchy of the art world and democratize it. How? Because all of these things expand the market and increase accessibility. Anyone with access to a smartphone or computer can now consume art.
The shift online has also been beneficial to many artists. Social media has given artists unprecedented control over the narrative surrounding their art and has allowed them to generate a following independent of gallery representation — simply put, it places power in the artists’ hands. For artists experiencing decreases in sales and canceled exhibitions during the pandemic, leveraging social media became more important than ever.
As we have seen, the blockchain accomplishes much of the same by providing artists with increased transparency and control over the sale of their artwork. The blockchain also has the added benefit of allowing artists to financially benefit from future sales of their artwork, by establishing a system of royalties.
So far this technology has been primarily beneficial to digital artists, museums, and auction houses but I foresee it exploding far beyond that. The technology already exists for creating a one-to-one link between a physical artwork and a digital title on the blockchain. Soon, we will see traditional artists start to leverage the advantages of the blockchain and benefit from increased control over their artwork, transparency in the sales transaction of their art, and the system of royalties from the re-sale of their artwork.
It is no wonder that this recent boom in NFT sales and the focus on digital art came about. This entire past year has been pushing us toward this moment. The pandemic forced the art world to think up digital alternatives to the traditional model. Such shifts have increased accessibility and have put more power in the hands of the artists. There is work still to be done to make the art world more accessible and equitable, both for artists and consumers but I think that we’re on the right track.
By Chad Little, CEO/Founder of Del’art
