Tezos’s New Permanent Collection Will Champion Unsung Crypto Artists – SURFACE

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Tezos is quick­ly becom­ing one of the art world’s go-to blockchains, espe­cial­ly among cre­ators who’ve embraced NFTs but are con­cerned about the high mint­ing fees and envi­ron­men­tal impact of chains like Ethereum. The Tezos Foun­da­tion, the ener­gy-effi­cient blockchain’s Swiss non­prof­it arm, is fur­ther cement­ing its sta­tus as an art-world play­er by launch­ing the Tezos Foun­da­tion Per­ma­nent Art Col­lec­tion, which aims to cel­e­brate artists push­ing bound­aries with­in the NFT space.

For the inau­gur­al col­lec­tion, the foun­da­tion allo­cat­ed $1.2 mil­lion to the renowned pho­tog­ra­ph­er and activist Mis­an Har­ri­man, who will curate a dig­i­tal art gallery to debut this sum­mer. Harriman’s cura­tion will show­case an array of artists through­out the Tezos ecosys­tem with a spe­cial focus on up-and-com­ing tal­ents from Africa and Asia—two regions often under­rep­re­sent­ed in the NFT com­mu­ni­ty. An esteemed cre­ative direc­tor and activist who rose to promi­nence as a Black Lives Mat­ter protest pho­tog­ra­ph­er, Har­ri­man became the first Black per­son to shoot the cov­er of British Vogue. Edward Ennin­ful, the magazine’s edi­tor in chief, describes Harriman’s work as “era-defin­ing.”

“The Tezos Foun­da­tion Per­ma­nent Col­lec­tion will sup­port and cel­e­brate a new gen­er­a­tion of artists that have cho­sen a smart con­tract-enabled path to be their true selves,” Har­ri­man says. “As the first cura­tor of this col­lec­tion, I want to make sure the world sees the diverse voic­es that are mak­ing tru­ly extra­or­di­nary work with cryp­to art. We’ll be the cus­to­di­an for this new community.”

Tezos made waves this past year at Art Basel Mia­mi Beach by stag­ing an immer­sive instal­la­tion by Ger­man artist Mario Klinge­mann in which vis­i­tors mint­ed their own NFTs—an abstract dig­i­tal por­trait ren­dered using an algorithm—on the Tezos blockchain. Tezos is plan­ning to con­tin­ue on to Art Basel fairs in Hong Kong and Basel, Switzer­land, this sum­mer as the offi­cial blockchain part­ner. 

Despite Tezos’s suc­cess, the NFT mar­ket is suf­fer­ing: it post­ed a steep 92 per­cent decrease in trans­ac­tions com­pared to this time last year and recent­ly lost $1 tril­lion in val­ue, spark­ing com­par­isons to the dot-com bust in the late 1990s. Cryp­to trad­ing plat­form Coin­base unveiled its high­ly antic­i­pat­ed and first NFT mar­ket­place on May 4 and report­ed a slug­gish 110 trans­ac­tions and $60,000 in sales. 

Cryp­to enthu­si­asts remain opti­mistic, dis­miss­ing spec­u­la­tion of a crash as an inevitable mar­ket fluc­tu­a­tion due in part to the freefalling stock mar­ket spurred by infla­tion, surg­ing glob­al inter­est rates, and the effects of Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine, as well as the unex­pect­ed melt­down of the sta­ble­coin Ter­raUSD that has sent shock­waves through cryp­tocur­ren­cy mar­kets. (Sta­ble­coins are pegged to a “sta­ble” reserve asset like the U.S. dol­lar or gold, and sup­posed to reduce volatil­i­ty com­pared to dig­i­tal cur­ren­cies that are not pegged such as Bit­coin.) 

Sur­face Says: We’ve been track­ing the rise of NFT art with both intrigue and skepticism—there’s a lot of flot­sam out there. As with any nascent tech­nol­o­gy, things will shake out, but we’re bull­ish on the func­tion­al­i­ty of NFTs to buoy the art market—both dig­i­tal and physical—in the future, but there will inevitably be some grow­ing pains.



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