‘The Gateway’ attracts NFT and digital art fans to Miami for web3 festival
Miami, Dec 1 (EFE).- Aficionados of the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), digital art and cryptocurrencies have descended upon Miami for “The Gateway: A Web3 Metropolis,” a five-day web3 arts and culture festival.
The festival, which is presented by nft now and Mana Common and has taken over two city blocks and a dozen buildings in downtown Miami’s Flagler District, serves as a portal into the so-called web3 world, an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web that incorporates decentralization, blockchain technologies and crypto-based economics.
The panelists at this gathering include gurus such as Joseph Lubin, one of the main contributors to decentralized cryptocurrency platform Ethereum; and the outgoing president of Time magazine, Keith Grossman, who announced this week that he is leaving that legacy publication to take on the role of president of enterprise at crypto payments startup MoonPay, a web3 infrastructure provider and one of The Gateway’s sponsors.
Other key participants in the festival, which kicked off on Tuesday, are musicians and artists who are currently selling their work as NFTs, unique digital assets that unlike conventional cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin cannot be exchanged for one another.
“It’s an evolution of art,” Misha Vladimirskiy, an agent with Beverly Hills, California-based talent agency WME who represents artists in both traditional and web3 spaces, told Efe, adding that NFTs are simply a further evolution of “charcoal, graphite, oil, acrylic and now digital drawings.”
Behind Vladimirskiy, no paintings hang on the walls in the exhibition space occupied by that veteran agency, whose roster of talent includes Jim Carrey and Dwayne Johnson.
In their place are screens with surrealistic, dreamlike and figurative works with prices ranging from $3,000 to $200,000.
Vladimirskiy, the agent for artists such as Frankynines, Snuffy and Andre O’Shea who have made the transition from traditional to digital formats, said fairs and events like The Gateway are important in educating the population about the ever-evolving ecosystem of web3 and digital art, a medium in which he said “millions of financial transactions” already are being carried out.
Along the same lines, Katie Narain, partner marketing manager at MoonPay, told Efe that an increasing number of people are interested in cryptocurrencies and that “more interesting things” are coming in the future.
In the downtown Miami buildings where the festival will run through Saturday, companies not generally associated with web3 like Porsche, Instagram and auction company Christie’s are rubbing shoulders with specialized web3 firms such as “generative art” platform Art Blocks, crypto-native lifestyle platform 9dcc and NFT project CloneX.
Immersive installations from a multi-disciplinary group of artists, music, games, technology and other aspects of web3 culture are on display at “The Gateway,” which Alejandro Navia – co-founder and president of nft now, a digital production company – says is offering an overview of the revolutionary potential of web3 technology. EFE
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