The gallery’s programmatic ambitions are similarly broad. Pace will open an online exhibition of Fischer’s NFTs on July 21. It will showcase an NFT by the artist Simon Denny in its group show Hiding in Plain Sight which opens on July 13, and it’s just begun to represent the conceptual artist Glenn Kaino, who’s planned an NFT project set for mid-July.
In conjunction with the launch of the NFT platform this fall, the gallery will unveil a series of NFTs by the artist Lucas Samaras, drawn from his archive of digital prints.
Pricing Strategy
Pace’s NFTs will not, by and large, be available to those dollar-spending masses. Fischer’s NFTs are priced at $50,000 apiece; Denny’s cost $30,000.
Samaras’s NFTs have yet to be priced, but Glimcher says he has an overall NFT-pricing strategy. “I’m going to pull out my magic eight ball, and I’m going to shake it up, then look at the price, and then I’m going to price it a little less than that,” Glimcher deadpans, adding that for Samaras “there will definitely be plenty of things that cost less than $5,000.”
(A gallery spokesperson clarifies that, at least for the $50,000 Fischer works, “to arrive at this sales price we looked at a range of historic data, including the auction records of other Urs Fischer NFTs from the Chaos series on MakersPlace and NFTs by other blue chip artists.”)
As a bonus, the gallery has begun to accept cryptocurrency for all of its physical and digital artworks.
“I’m a crypto person,” Glimcher says. “I’ve had crypto for a while.” Setting up his gallery to accept Ether took about a week and a half, he continues. “It’s really painless to accept crypto,” he says. “It’s just: Why would you not?”
There are no plans to subsequently convert the Ether payments to dollars. “A little piece of the balance sheet will be in crypto,” says Glimcher. “It will be a very modest amount.”
Cryptocurrency might be an easy thing to embrace, although if NFTs continue to decline, Glimcher acknowledges that Pace’s pursuit of the technology might not pan out.
“We know that getting involved in things that have captured the interest of the artists is worthwhile,” he says, “even if some flame out and some work. We do it anyway, and it leads to other things.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.