Art goes from Miami to moon

ART Basel Miami Beach was dubbed a “crypto celebration with an art fair on the side” by Bloomberg — but with the cratering of the virtual currency market, the outlook for go-go sales at the annual gathering grew grim.

However, sales were reportedly healthy this year: Works by living and late artists including Agnes Martin, Mark Bradford and Kerry James Marshall went for multimillions.

Famed artist Jeff Koons told Page Six of the crypto market, “I have been almost in a cashfree situation of not carrying paper money on me . . . The direction it’s been going in, the digital electronic world, seemed to make sense.”

He added, “But, I’m sure there’s a lot of problems in that area that are being worked out. Like how something can exist and be regulated and meet the needs of the world community. But I’m sure it’s going in that direction.”

In 2019, he became the highest-selling living artist when his “Rabbit” sculpture sold for a record-breaking $91.1 million at a Christie’s auction in NYC.

While his sales have been astronomical, he’s working on a project that will send his art into space. Koons was in Miami at a dinner at Bagatelle celebrating his cover story for Haute Living. His latest project, “Phases,” will send 125 sculptures of his that are named after past cultural innovators to the moon, which will be photographed, minted and sold as NFTs.

NFTs were also a huge driver of recent art fairs, and seemed to have cooled this year, but Koons is still optimistic about the digital medium.

“I wanted to bring meaning to the NFT dialogue,” he told us. “So many NFTs have been PDFs, kind of somewhat on the surface . . . Humans are the carriers of meaning, and I wanted to share that and embed that in the NFT.”

Crypto companies had also been behind some of Art Basel Miami’s biggest bashes and threw in the towel this year. But the party scene still drew major stars without them as backers.