Pace Gallery announces major partnership with NFT Platform ArtBlocks – ARTnews.com

The decline in cryptocurrencies does not slow down Pace’s Web3 ambitions.

The Blue-chip gallery announced a collaboration with the leading generative art NFT platform Art Blocks on Tuesday in an attempt to promise each organization access to each other’s very different collector bases.

“Our priority is to connect our artists to new collector environments, and this [NFT community] is one of them, said Marc Glimcher, President and CEO of Pace ART news.

Art Blocks was founded by Erick Calderon in 2020 after years of trying to get his new idea started: a specially designed NFT platform aimed at generative artists.

“Pace Verso embraces the technology we’ve been using for the past 4+ years to explore and develop,” said Calderon. ART news. “[That will] hopefully give art collectors, especially skeptics of the viability or technology behind NFTs, a reason to dig deeper into what we build and why we build it. ”

Here’s how Art Blocks works: First, artists upload their artistic algorithms to the platform and create one or two examples of the visuals an algorithm can produce, which are random and can never be repeated. Think of it as a pinball game, which strikes and passes through a set of passages and obstacles. When collectors choose an artist they like, they can create an NFT, which asks the algorithm to run and create a new work, whose processes are completely registered on the smart contract.

The platform has been a great success. At its peak in August last year, Art Blocks generated an absurd trading volume of almost $ 500 million, according to Decrypt. In fact, the model was so successful, Calderon said, that he purposefully made adjustments to the bidding model to slow down the transaction speed.

[As Sales Exploded on Art Blocks, Its Founder Looked for Ways to Cool the Fervor]

For Calderon, Pace’s co-sign is a hefty moment of validation, not just for Art Blocks, but generative art in a broader sense.

“Just a year ago, it would have been beyond my imagination to believe that we would be announcing a collaboration with Pace, a top gallery with an incredible list of artists, many of whom have been meaningfully inspiring in my life,” Calderon said.

“As a platform, everything we do is in the service of moving the practice of generative art forward. This is a transformative moment for everyone in the Art Blocks ecosystem, and I could not have been more proud.”

Through this partnership between Pace, the gallery’s NFT incubator Pace Verso, and Art Blocks, Pace’s list of artists and a selection of digitally native artists will have access to the platform’s technology, as well as a leading team of engineers and experts who will help develop NFT collections. The collaboration will also include personal and digital programming that will occasionally take place at Pace’s galleries around the world.

For Calderon, which has experienced the full intensity of the NFT market, now seems like the perfect time to launch this partnership.

“The market has experienced some crazy ups and downs, and right now we’re in a period where it feels like collectors are actually buying art for art’s sake,” Calderon said. “This is a time to build, explore collaboration and promote the narrative of generative art. It would have felt wrong to launch something like this during the madness of late 2021, and I really appreciate Marc and his incredible team for their willingness to be patient.”

Although the project is currently being executed, Glimcher and Calderon met early in Art Block’s history, united by a shared love of rule-based art and, of course, a deep interest in NFTs. In fact, this is not the first time Pace Verso and Art Blocks have collaborated, after working together to release Leo Villareal’s NFT collection in January.

By then, Pace was already quite aggressive when it came to blockchain technology, especially compared to the hesitation of most blue-chip galleries. When asked why Pace stood out in this way, Glimcher answered in a typically stylish French way,

“Artists are not about playing it safe. Representing artists is not about playing it safe, Glimcher said. “We trust our artists, and if our artists are interested and want to take chances, it is our job to take chances with them. Dubuffet said that the only right condition for art is a permanent revolution, and we always try to follow his advice. “

It will be interesting to see how Pace’s list of artists, many of whom have no background in rule-based art, or digital art, use these new tools. Whether they really explore the medium as a new part of their practice or just use it for easy sale to the crypto audience remains to be seen.

To launch this partnership, Pace and ArtBlocks will release Petro National, an NFT collection by John Gerrard, a digital sculptor who joined Pace in 2019.

Gerrard’s collection of 196 NFTs will explore the effects of burning 100 million barrels of oil a day. This marks Gerrard’s second climate-conscious NFT project. 25% of the proceeds from Petro National will go to regenerate.fund, a crypto fund Gerrad created to support sustainable agriculture and land restoration in Ireland and has the added benefit of acting as a compensation mechanism for energy consumption that accompanies embossing and transactions NFTs.

Petro National will be released on Art Blocks on June 21, and will be watching Pace from June 21 to 23 to adapt to the NFT.NYC conference, which attracts crypto enthusiasts from around the world.