Spend 47 days in the art world with Seen. Adam Lindemann and Kenny Scharf.

Photo: Madison McGaw/BFA.com

Bitcoin and Basquiat, they both made certain people a lot of money. But for the investment-minded who might be interested in both, it’s not just about a well-rounded portfolio. Blockchain technologies are poised to change how we buy and sell art. “The world of tokenization of different asset classes is on its way here,” billionaire entrepreneur and art collector Adam Lindemann announced on Tuesday while hosting “The Art of Blockchains.”

The day before the VIP preview day at Art Basel Miami Beach and a short Uber ride away at the Koolhaus-designed Faena building, the invite-only conference Lindemann organized with the blockchain startup Artblx (he’s an investor) brought together collectors, gallerists, and developers. A focus of the discussion was how new tools that tokenize art works can make it possible to buy art cooperatively, so if you can’t afford a $3 million dollar painting, maybe you can buy a 5 percent share of it for $600,000.

“The Art of Blockchains” wasn’t the only blockchain-related event in Miami this week, though it was maybe the most well-curated one. Speakers included super-curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist and gallerist Marc Glimcher, as well as representatives from leading blockchain companies, like Ethereum’s corporate marketing arm, ConsenSys. Investor, socialite, and rumored Chinese spy Wendi Deng Murdoch was there as an attendee. As was Brock Pierce, a tie-dye-clad millionaire who founded a crypto cult in Puerto Rico. Kenny Scharf live-painted a single work across 100 small canvases, a metaphor for how blockchain can make co-op art-ownership possible. And art on display included Richard Prince’s Instagram girls and a CryptoKitty poster by Simon Denny.

Photo: Madison McGaw/BFA.com

Lindemann is well-known in the art market for his record-breaking deals, including a $57.3 million sale of a Basquiat in 2016, but he only started studying blockchain technologies last year. “I took a Warholian view of this whole thing,” he says about new blockchain startups. “Like, let’s make it happen and just go for it. I like change, I’m a contrarian, so if blockchain could change the art world, I want to be a part of that.”

There have already been several boom-and-bust cycles in the crypto-sphere that have made millionaires out of 19 year olds, making Lindemann’s wide-eyed interest in Bitcoin seem less contrarian and more business-savvy. For him, both the tokenization and fractionalization of art are obvious next steps for managing an asset class that has already earned him millions, and the closed-door conference appeared to be a ploy to bring his powerful peers onboard. He sees the potential in collaboration as well as the parallel between how value is made in both art and crypto-spaces. “Art Basel and all the galleries in it, they’ve made art an asset class by promoting it jointly into these very expensive things,” Lindemann says. “I mean, art is already a cryptocurrency at this point.”

Not everyone at the conference was enthusiastic about fractional art ownership. Emmanuel Aidoo, head of distributed ledger and blockchain strategy at Credit Suisse, underscored the potential for fractional art ownership to bring liquidity to the market. But former chairman of Sotheby’s Nanne Dekking, whose blockchain-based company Artory is already being used to record transactions and verify the authenticity of artworks and collectibles at auction houses like Christie’s, was less convinced: “Is it really good for an artwork when all of the sudden there are 2,000 people involved? I’m leaning towards no.”

A panel featuring Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Ben Vickers, Ian Cheng, and Amy Whitaker.

Photo: Madison McGaw/BFA.com

Blockchain technology has the potential to change how we buy and sell art in other ways. Right now, paintings and sculptures are much more collectible than artist-made GIFs and videos, but blockchain technology can be used to verify authorship and ownership of digital works, making them more own-able. There are people fighting for artists to get a cut of all secondary sales, and Blockchain’s ledger system could actually make this feasible by tracing the sales of works over time.

Though never directly stated on stage, there was an implication that for collectors and dealers, the democratization of the art market is a disturbing idea because of its potential to disrupt business as usual. Buying and selling works via blockchain could cut out the need for auction houses altogether, while fractional ownership of works could reduce the ability of gallerists, dealers, and collectors to artificially inflate the value of works through high-profile sales, fundamentally altering the hierarchy and underlying value of the market.

According to Andy Milenius, CTO of MakerDAO, fractionalized ownership also has the potential to create a market for a whole new generation of less wealthy consumers buying into expensive, collectible work. In this democratized art world, co-owned works would be displayed in publicly traded museums while new, utopian communities could form around lesser-known artists, who in turn could crowdsource funding for their works on the blockchain, or even sell shares in art that has yet to be produced — something Jeff Koons has been doing for years.

But still some artists are wary. “I guess part of me is a bit scared to see a securitization of art,” says Denny. “Is that something we want to accelerate into?” Denny doesn’t see fractionalized art ownership affecting emerging artists like him and is skeptical of utopian narratives around blockchains. He recently curated the blockchain-themed “Proof of Work,” on view at Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, which he describes as “slightly trolly.”

Leelee Kimell (formerly Leelee Sobieski) and Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum.

Photo: Madison McGaw/BFA.com

While the crypto enthusiasts want to disrupt the art market and art world elites are scared of losing their roles as industry leaders, there’s a general consensus that, whether we like it or not, blockchain technology is going to have an impact on the art world.

“We’ve been talking about art-meets-blockchain for about five years now,” says Pierce. “When it’s starting to become a topic of conversation at Art Basel, that means it’s now at that point where enough artists are thinking about it and we’re going to see some extraordinary use cases emerge that will lead to big things.”

In the eyes of power players like Lindemann and Pierce, it doesn’t really matter how blockchain-based art market scales, as long as they stake their claim as early investors of the most viable technology. Lindemann wouldn’t say how much money he’s invested in Artblx, but what he did say is that he’s not putting all his eggs in one basket. “I’ve invested in a couple of different blockchain [companies]. Some tokens, some ICOs, an art protocol,” he told me. “Actually I did this [conference] in part to invest in more.”

But it’s not only up to investors. Ben Vickers, CTO of Serpentine Gallery, says that it’s up to artists, too — how they use blockchain technologies will determine how history plays out, and the fact that young artists usually favor radical, anti-market positions will have an influence. He predicts, “In the same way the conceptual art movement sought to dematerialize the object — artists will produce infrastructure using decentralized blockchain tools in order to create market structures.”