Miami Art Week Live Blog Day 4: The Gateway and Beyond

In a separate panel, nft now co-founders Matt Medved and Alejandro Navia also engaged in an open conversation with former Time president Keith Grossman on the specific allure of Web3 for budding and established media companies alike.

So, with yesterday firmly in the rearview mirror, what’s dominating Saturday’s Miami Art Week headlines?

The Duchess of York’s digital gallery shows how Web3 is a continuation of classic art

A new digital art collection called “The Duchess Gallery” will be featured on Nifty Gateway later in December, with an initial exhibition going live at Art Basel Miami. Curated by Sarah, Duchess of York, the gallery will feature collaborative exhibits from several iconic artists in Web3, with spoken-word poetry accompanied by animated paintings, AI art, novel media, and special effects. Together, these will generate new forms of storytelling in a brilliant work of cinematic fine art.

“As technology evolves, traditional aesthetics can find a new life in this contemporary viral world.,” said Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, in a press release. “I am delighted to work collaboratively with renowned artists, and as well highlight emerging artists worldwide to expand my passion for storytelling through art.”

As a unique chance for artists to reimagine classics in the contemporary art world, “The Duchess Gallery” has parallels to the Pre-Rahaelite movement in visual arts, in 19th-century England, which was heavily influenced by John Ruskin and John Keats — in addition to their French counterparts like the poet, Charles Baudelaire. Using new technology to enhance digital culture, the evolution of literature and visual art will move with, and not against, the best of traditional aesthetics.

Literature comes to life with Web3

When people think about NFTs, they typically think of PFP pictures. However, NFTs can be used to store (and provide proof of ownership for) any physical or digital item. In a panel discussion at The Gateway, Sasha Stiles and Ana María Caballero, Co-Founders of theVERSEverse, joined moderator Matt Medved to do away with this myth and discuss the ways in which NFTS can be used by poets and literary artists.

Throughout the conversation, Stiles and Caballero highlighted the ways blockchain technologies are leading to a paradigm shift by helping creators reconsider how their poetry can be experienced. And by changing the way that these pieces are experienced, the duo said that blockchain and NFTs ultimately give new dimensions and meanings to the art.

To highlight how this works, Stiles and Caballero discussed their efforts at theVERSEverse. 

Through the company, Stiles and Caballero said that they onboard poets to Web3 by pairing their works with crypto-native artists to create unique pieces of poetic art and utilize a number of different mediums and art forms. They also work to elevate text-based artists who are already active in the NFT space by, for example, pairing a poem with audio of the artist reading the piece. Stiles and Caballero said that this work moves a poem beyond the page and brings it to life in new ways, which makes it appeal to wider audiences — audiences who may be interested in collecting and owning it.

In this respect, Stiles noted that theVERSEverse (and blockchain in general) empowers poets both creatively and economically. It “brings poetry out of the pages of the New Yorker, where only a handful of people are ever going to read it, and allows people to put it on their phones and carry it around,” she said.

Piggy-backing off these statements, Caballero noted that NFTs are enabling many poets to support themselves financially for the first time in their lives. “A book sells for $14, if at all, and it can represent years and years of work,” she lamented, but she was quick to note that this is changing in Web3. “What we’re doing here is saying that poetry has value.”

A celebration of the women in generative NFT art kicks off

A group show spotlighting 23 generative artists identifying as female will also feature talks on the artists’ unique perspectives on and about NFT spaces and generative art on Saturday, at Miami Art Week 2022. Called Femgen, it’s the latest in cultural developments about the directions for Web3 expression. With OpenAI’s Chatbot going live for public testing recently, it’s clear that AI will continue to be of special emphasis in new and emerging spaces, playing a crucial role in equal representation and digital identity.