#16 Fusing Worlds: Athlete Collectors & Gucci-Christie's Digital Art Collab
#16 Fusing Worlds: Athlete Collectors & Gucci-Christie's Digital Art Collab
👋 Hello, we are Julian and Marcel, and welcome to our weekly edition of The Curious Collector. Each week we humbly curate what’s happening in the digital art realm. ✨
It is a subscriber-only newsletter, delivered every Sunday, highlighting mainly digital and sometimes physical art news.
Welcome! 🌞 Today we explore the intersection of art, fashion, and technology with Christie's and Gucci's unique digital auction, and immerse ourselves in the innovative digital art scene at London's HERE event.
Discover the captivating works of Eric De Giuli's generative art, the emotional depth of Olga Fradina's 'Naïve,' and the digital expressions of omentejovem, showcasing the diverse landscape of contemporary digital creativity.
News Digest
Parallel Universes: Christie's and Gucci have partnered for a digital auction featuring generative art from eight artists, blending fashion, art, and technology. The auction showcases pieces like digital animations and surrealistic art, with works priced from approx. $1,000 to $8,500 USD (0.5 to 4.0 ETH), reflecting Gucci's evolving influence in the art world and its blend of traditional and modern elements.
HERE: A new digital art event in London showcases pioneering artists and galleries focusing on digital art, including NFTs and AI-generated works. Organized by Verse and taking place on November 25th and 26th, 2023, the event offers an in-person experience of innovative digital works. It includes talks, live DJ sets, and free digital artwork for attendees, aiming to highlight the evolving landscape of digital art and its community.
Professional Athletes: Top athletes are increasingly engaging in the art market, particularly focusing on contemporary art. Figures like Carmelo Anthony and Kevin Love have become serious collectors, influencing trends and driving interest in the sector, with their collections often featuring major Black artists and helping to shape a new collector base in the art world.
Digital Highlight
Eric De Giuli's "Atlas" is a generative art collection that explores the emergent properties of nature through dynamic digital artworks. Inspired by his background in theoretical physics, De Giuli creates works that resemble dynamic "Powers of Ten" paintings, offering a visual journey from microscopic to cosmic scales.
The artworks consist of a mosaic of cells in which intricate patterns and colors reveal themselves as the viewer zooms in, showing the chaotic and vibrant interactions at different scales. De Giuli's works reflect on the relationship between human perception and the complex systems of nature, questioning our understanding of scale and our place in the cosmos.
Notable Insight
“Collectors, make displaying your collection a priority, be it at home or in the office. Lend pieces for exhibitions, contribute to institutions – let the art be seen However, presentation is key. Treat digital art with the same care as traditional art.
The right setup – frame, monitor, aspect ratio – matters immensely. Otherwise, you risk doing a disservice to the artist and their work.”
Sale Spotlight
Olga Fradina is a Kyiv-based generative artist and interior designer known for abstract, biomorphic forms and exploring emotional states.
"Naïve" merges the simplicity of a child's view with the sophistication of generative art, inspired by Ukrainian primitivists like Maria Prymachenko, symbolizing a blend of emotional rawness and technical precision while also marking a personal artistic resurgence influenced by recent Ukrainian events.
Artist to Watch
Omentejovem is a Brazilian digital artist renowned for his abstract, intuitive style and his exploration of personal experiences and emotions through the innovative use of color in his artworks.
Represented by AOTM
Tech & Texture
Foundation Ventures: Foundation is partnering with Highlight to enter the Web3 generative art space, aiming to transform the digital art ecosystem by providing artists and curators with enhanced creative control and flexibility.
This collaboration, debuting in early December, focuses on empowering artists with tools for onchain generative minting and dynamic data inputs, and offers curators an open-access platform, fundamentally shifting the curation process.
Closing Remarks
As we conclude this edition, we've seen how art beautifully merges with fashion, technology, and the emerging trend of athletes becoming collectors, influencing a new generation in the art world.
Remembering Pablo Rodriguez-fraile's advice on valuing and presenting digital art, let’s continue to thoughtfully display and appreciate all art forms.