Writer: Vittorio Parravano
2 min read December 2022 — Besides celebrating 20 years as an artistic staple in the City of Miami, Art Week has further cemented itself as an international art hub spearheaded by NFTs.
This year’s Art Week Miami Beach was the largest installation to date, featuring 282 exhibitions from 38 countries and territories at Art Basel alone. Art Basel and Art Week are often used synonymously, but the latter refers to everything that transpired during the first week of December in Miami.
“Twenty years of Art Basel has shown us the very best version of our community. So much of our investment in our cultural assets and amenities is a result of Art Basel’s example,” said Dan Gelber, mayor of the City of Miami Beach in a press release.
A good example of that development is the extensive effort to incorporate non-fungible tokens (NFTs) into the art world.
Modern artists have resorted to minting NFTs to express themselves creatively and gain a financial edge over traditional art trade. Through minting, artists can skip the appraising process while maintaining a secure transaction through the blockchain — a decentralized digital ledger used to record transactions.
With Miami Art Week being an artistic landmark, artists are now utilizing the international attention to promote their art through NFTs. Besides promoting themselves and the virtual reality-focused Metaverse, they are also promoting the City of Miami as a place to do business and contributing to the economy through online transactions.
An example of this year’s innovation in the NFT space is attributable to Miami’s Scope Art Show, which minted NFTs as tradable VIP tickets featuring art from collections by Cool Cats and Mason Rothschild, among others.
But one of the biggest collaborations of the year in the gradually emerging metaverse came from the joint effort between analytical outlet nft now and Mana Common — titled, The Gateway: A Web3 Metropolis.
The term Web3 refers to a cyberspace where users can establish an online presence and profit from NFTs, cryptocurrency and other digital assets. The phrase is being adopted by those in the community to describe an enhanced version of the internet, dedicated to financial freedom and encryption.
The two entities curated a three-block space in the heart of Wynwood dedicated to the metaverse. The five-day event featured panel discussions with NFT artists, creative leaders in cyberspace and musical entertainment. Some of the panelists included Instagram’s top influencers, Gary Vee, Beeple executives and others.
Despite a looming ‘crypto winter’ and other other factors that have impacted the NFT market, revenue from the NFT segment is projected to hit $2.52 billion in 2022, while user penetration is expected to grow from 0.6% in 2022 to 0.8% by 2027, according to Statista.
For Miami’s Art week, more than one million visitors were estimated to pass through Miami International Airport and hotels to exceed 80% occupancy rates, according to the Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau.
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