<img decoding="async" class="wp-image-1604517 size-full-width" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/ABMB25-Zero-10-Public-Interactions-MC-PR-Fellowship-and-ARTXCODE-IX-Shells-014.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A person stands with hands raised toward a large brightly lit digital screen filled with swirling, hair-like lines and pixel clusters that form an abstract, moving pattern." width="970" height="644" data-caption='Zero 10, Art Basel’s new digital art section, debuted in Miami, building on the fair’s growing engagement with techno culture. <span class=”media-credit”>Martina Hoyos</span>’>
In a year when discussions about A.I. and the role of big tech giants have dominated the news, it feels almost inevitable that the most headline-grabbing artwork at Art Basel Miami Beach—after Catellan’s infamous banana and ATM gimmicks of recent editions—was a work of digital art (or rather, a digital-physical hybrid) by Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple), the artist who also set the first major record for a purely digital work at a traditional auction with Everydays: The First 5000 Days selling at Christie’s for $69,346,250 in 2021.
Beeple’s record came at the absolute peak of the NFT boom, a moment when speculation, hype and a flood of new collectors drove prices to historic extremes. Yet as crypto values plunged and speculation-driven production saturated the space, the correction was swift and brutal. Enthusiasm curdled into skepticism, then into a cultural fatigue that often registered as outright NFT hate. This did not mean digital art was dead, as evidenced by the crowded VIP opening of Art Basel’s inaugural digital section, Zero 10, where digital connoisseurs mingled with curious traditional fairgoers.
Beeple stole the show with Regular Animals, a performance installation of humanoid robots with hyper-realistic heads of tech titans and art-historical icons—including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Andy Warhol, Picasso and Beeple himself—roaming in a ring, capturing photos of visitors, “learning” in real time and excreting art prints and NFTs in their respective styles. Beneath its grotesque humor, the installation doubled as a critique of how technocrats now shape the collective imaginary and of the escalating tension between human creativity and machine intervention. Editions of each “Regular Animal” sold out immediately for $100,000 to longtime collectors, with an additional run of 1,024 prints and 256 NFTs generated from the robots’ snapshots, turning the audience into co-producers.
In an ArtTactic interview, Beeple noted that Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz visited his studio multiple times, convincing the fair that it needed to integrate digital art amid clear shifts in collecting habits. “Zero 10 reflects a strategic conviction: digital art is no longer at the margins—it is integral to how art and the market are evolving in real time,” Horowitz said in last month’s launch statement. Beeple welcomed the chance to show at Art Basel Miami Beach, seeing it as an opportunity to “let the outside world peek into this corner of the internet we inhabit,” acknowledging that digital art has long thrived within insider spaces and online echo chambers.
Importantly, Horowitz chose not to treat the section as a satellite or appendage but to integrate it into the fabric of the fair itself, with 10,000 square feet of floor space adjacent to the curated sections at one of the main entrances of the convention center. “I think it is a great continuation of what we’ve been pushing since digital art sort of started to be on more people’s map in 2021,” Beeple told Observer, but he also still thinks there is a lot of work to be done. “One of the things that makes it both exciting and challenging versus other media is that it is changing very rapidly. What is possible, the tools, etc.—these are moving at an insanely rapid pace relative to other mediums.”
Beyond the virality of Beeple’s installation, the twelve galleries and studios presenting in the inaugural edition of Zero 10—curated by digital-art strategist Eli Scheinman—demonstrated the range of evolving trajectories within digital art and how these practices are reshaping the way art is created, experienced and sold.
Underscoring the timeliness of the section was its very title: Zero 10, referencing “0,10,” the groundbreaking 1915 exhibition organized by Kazimir Malevich, the launching moment for Suprematism. That exhibition not only marked a decisive rupture with figuration and a move toward pure abstraction but, as many argue, opened a conceptual line of artistic evolution in which the idea increasingly became more significant than the mastery of execution that had long defined artistic value.
Perhaps even more telling, Beeple was not the only one selling. The appetite for this work is real, and most exhibitors reported strong early sales that continued throughout the weekend, largely in the four- to six-digit range (in dollars, though this raises another important question we will return to). Many exhibitors told Observer they were genuinely amazed by the response from both traditional and digital buyers alike.
But while the Web3 community showed up in full force—circulating around the booths, buying, posting and supporting this moment of acknowledgment—the section did not arrive without criticism and skepticism, much of it voiced from within the community itself. A provocative article written by Web3 advisor Kate Vass on LinkedIn, for instance, suggested that if the original “0,10” stood for rupture, for burning down systems and starting from zero, this Zero 10 risks functioning instead as a marketing gesture at the world’s most established art fair. “Is this what passes for avant-garde now? A digital corner for ‘innovation,’ sanctioned by tradition and sold to the same collectors it once sought to disrupt?” she asks, pointing out the contradictions inherent to the initiative since Web3 was never meant to live inside walls; it was born in opposition to them. “Trying to fit Web3 art into the architecture of art fairs is like streaming the internet through a picture frame,” she writes, arguing that Art Basel did not lower its entry barriers to embrace a new ideology but to fill economic gaps left by galleries that closed or withdrew earlier this year.
This is certainly one of many points worth reflecting on after the inaugural edition of Zero 10. Here are a few key questions and takeaways.
Digital art beyond screens and NFTs
Upon entering the section, the great variety made immediately clear that digital art is not only about pixels, code and crypto, nor does it necessarily exist only as a file on a screen. The Web3 and digital-native artists presenting in Zero 10 were engaging with technology in very different ways, working with different tools and processes. These were primarily works made using software code, computational systems and often machine learning and A.I., yet the outputs could still be entirely analog or, more often, hybrid installations that integrate digital systems within a physical—and frequently interactive—experience.
“The works shown in the Zero 10 sector bring an exciting level of experimentation into the fair, exhibiting a diversity of form, aesthetic and commentary on the condition of today,” said Adam Heft, who has long been active in the field, exploring the intersection of physical and virtual media. In an interview with Observer earlier this year, Heft noted that he now finds it increasingly difficult to define digital art, as so much of what we do involves digital technologies, whether through our phones, A.I. integrated into daily workflows, digital manipulation of photography or even the source materials used by painters and sculptors. The digital world, he argued, is now the native world, embedded in our existence and culture.
Seeing this breadth of innovation at Art Basel’s Zero 10 felt, for him, like an essential reflection of the entangled nature of technology in the lives of everyone visiting the fair. That artists would use digital processes native to our time is not a novelty but an inevitability, one that will continue to lose its shock value as it becomes more deeply integrated into rigorous contemporary art-making. “This was a strong statement in the continuation of this assimilation, especially given the strength of craft and familiarity of formats in so many of the works in this sector,” he added. One of the gallery’s goals is not to elevate the perception of digital art as a distinct medium but to reduce the perceived separation between artists who use digital processes and those who don’t, Heft clarified.
Aligned with this viewpoint, Heft presented a solo booth of Michael Kozlowski’s Tessellations, in which Kozlowski reimagines circuitry as ornament, transforming hidden architectures into visible, speculative archaeology: code-based resin reliefs coated in copper and framed in walnut, each paired with a generative Ethereum NFT. As many of the architectures that govern contemporary life remain hidden inside devices and data centers, the series turned them into demonstrations of what it might mean to treat pervasive circuitry as ornament, making it present and visible. By early afternoon, Heft had already sold four of them for $25,000 each. “Collectors of all types were drawn to unique qualities of work across beauty, craft and originality—in this case referencing both ancient sacred geometries and futuristic technical aesthetics,” he told Observer, noting how physicality in a context of a fair is essential to how the work is considered for collecting.
“Zero 10 really helped people understand the breadth and creativity digital art can offer,” Alastair Walker, chief creative officer at Asprey Studio, told Observer, noting how the inaugural edition showed that digital art is simply a new canvas for artists, collectors and galleries to explore. Founded in 2021, the London-based gallery and atelier merges Asprey’s three-century-old silversmithing tradition with contemporary digital practices, producing hybrid works that pair physical objets d’art with digital artifacts created collaboratively by digital artists and master silversmiths in Kent.
For Walker, the physical-digital pairing is a powerful bridge: it allows traditional collectors to approach digital art through something tangible while extending an endangered artisanal lineage into new technological terrain. The resonance was clear. By Sunday, Asprey Studio had sold out its presentation of new works by Andrea Chiampo and the Ethiopian collective Yatreda, each of which paired a digital artwork with a sterling silver sculpture, for a total of $225,000. One buyer came from a digital background, the others from the traditional art world. “That balance reflects where the market currently sits,” Walker explained. Traditional collectors are curious and increasingly open to digital work while digital-native buyers continue to engage naturally.
To gain a fuller sense of the breadth of work on view in Zero 10, Pace presented works by James Turrell in the section, underscoring how deeply technology has shaped the artist’s practice for decades. Even Beeple’s Regular Animals combined digital tools with physical presence, performance, robotics, installation and new forms of distribution such as print outputs linked to NFTs.
And as hybrid works become more common, it seems clear that the traditional art market and collectors are increasingly open to valuing them as “real art” rather than as digital curiosities. Most of the exhibitors we spoke with agreed that Zero 10 felt like a marker of progress, but many also pointed out that there’s a long way to go.
SOLOS, for instance, presented two bodies of work by Tylor Hobbs (one of the established names in the NFT space), both born from the same algorithm but then printed on European birch panels to introduce a tactile surface. As gallerist Leyla Fakhr noted, the choice may seem at odds with a digital process yet reflects how Hobbs moves fluidly between physical and digital modes. “Many artists are navigating this terrain, whether or not their work circulates on the blockchain,” she told Observer. While they expected the strongest response from digitally native collectors, SOLOS also saw significant interest from traditional buyers. “People responded to the work immediately, drawn to the colors and palette, without needing any prior knowledge,” she added. “The complex process added depth, but the initial reaction was purely visual and emotional.”
The way digital art is displayed certainly contributes to how audiences respond to it. Angelo Sotiracopoulos—an early digital art pioneer and co-founder of DeviantArt—recently launched Layers, an ultra-high-resolution, museum-grade digital canvas designed to give institutions, artists and collectors a high-fidelity format that treats digital work with the same seriousness as traditional media. At Zero 10, bitforms used Layers to show historic works by Manfred Mohr—widely regarded as the father of digital art—alongside prints and generative pieces by Mohr, Casey Reas and Maya Man, creating a tight intergenerational dialogue. “The presentation was rooted in digital practice, but the Canvas helped display the work in a new way,” Sotiracopoulos told Observer, noting how it provided the physical presence and precision expected of traditional media. The format resonates with traditional collectors because it offers a familiar, museum-grade object crafted with the rigor of painting or photography. “For many, this is the first time digital art has felt legible in their homes and collections.” Digital-native collectors, meanwhile, respond to the code, the continuous variation and the ability to maintain a private Vault of works. “For them, the Layer ecosystem feels both intuitive and overdue.”
In a recent Gray Market column, Tim Schneider described Zero 10 as “Art Basel’s sixth fair,” with a separate “customer-acquisition ecosystem,” but the fact that the megafair specifically didn’t launch a separate offering is telling. As technology becomes more deeply intertwined with daily life, it is not only natural but inevitable that all artists—including those working within the traditional contemporary art system—will continue engaging digital and computational tools as part of the available, present-day creative vocabulary, much as collectors may grow more accustomed to experiencing art in ways that mirror their daily interactions with devices. Soon, these categories may seem as incongruous as they sometimes feel now, no more distinct than photography or video art once appeared when set against the broader field of contemporary production.
The question, then, is what the traditional art system could learn and take from the dynamics of value exchange, production and circulation within digital art communities—and how some of these principles may become newly relevant as technological elements increasingly shape artistic practice, distribution and the market itself.
Digital artists exploring different ways to circulate art and value
Most of these Web3-native and digital artists still consider themselves outsiders in the “official” art world and this position allows them to question—and even choose not to engage with—the long-established value systems, customary business practices, requirements and power dynamics of the art world, many of which have already been dismantled in the digital space.
One of these is Jack Butcher (aka Visualize Value), whose Self Checkout presented a conceptual and transactional artwork consisting of a series of kiosks where fairgoers (or remote buyers) were invited to pay any amount, producing a receipt that became the artwork itself. The payment amount determined the physical receipt’s length, transforming both the act of art-making and the work into a participatory performance and an active form of fundraising—or more precisely, crowdfunding—to offset the costs of exhibiting. A live digital display tracked the artist’s cumulative profit or loss, beginning from a declared production-cost deficit of -$74,211, the amount required to participate in Art Basel, including booth fees, travel and logistical expenses. By folding financial dynamics, crypto mechanisms and physical receipts into a single gesture, Butcher made transparent the economics of exhibiting at a major fair and the significant risks involved—risks that are often even more pronounced for digital-native practices entering this high-stakes arena.
Interestingly, despite the considerable costs of participation and production—borne entirely by exhibitors even with the last-minute invitation—many of the presentations in Zero 10 offered works either for free or at strikingly accessible prices, upending the traditional logic of art-fair transactions and replacing it with an ethos of open exchange and co-creation that reflects the dynamics of digital culture and its economies. Beeple distributed the prints “pooped” by his humanoid dogs for free, allowing some recipients to claim their NFT counterparts, which are currently listed on OpenSea (Art Basel’s official partner in this section) for around 10 ETH.
Similarly, artist XCOPY debuted in Nguyen Wahed’s four-sided stand with a new participatory installation, Coin Laundry: a full reconstruction of a scrappy laundromat environment where fairgoers could leave their email to subscribe and receive a free NFT by the artist—“at once token and memento”—granting entry into an ephemeral blockchain performance. However, most of the over 2,300,000 free NFTs claimed by Sunday were programmed to self-destruct, their value as fleeting as the gesture itself. Poetic press materials described the installation as a “ritual-space where smart contracts become dramaturges, orchestrating encounters between digital promise and material necessity,” and where “immaterial architectures meet material residue.” The work cleverly explored themes of value, loss, liquidity and impermanence, critically highlighting the vulnerabilities and risks inherent in the crypto ecosystem itself, often associated with “money laundering” and still susceptible to wash trading, anonymous wallets and manipulated valuations—issues documented by blockchain analysis firms.
In the same booth, Kim Asendorf’s Raster und Spektrum explored the generative, fluid and potentially infinite nature of computational creativity, embracing radical non-repeatability that resists any fixed form. The digital artwork becomes an open visual phenomenon of color and light, apparently impossible to crystallize into a single editioned object, unfolding instead through infinite variations generated from immutable instructions without external dependencies. The PXL Deck, real-time animation, WebGL2/JavaScript, eventually sold for $145,000.
Okonous presented Appropriate Response by A.I. pioneer Mario Klingemann, an interactive installation that invites fairgoers to kneel on a wooden prayer bench and contemplate a 120-character split-flap display trained on the GPT-2 model to deliver short, evocative aphorisms—each visible only for a few seconds, never to repeat again. In a ceremonial act of invocation, the viewer must capture their own fleeting, luminous sentence delivered by the machine’s neural network as a contemporary oracle. Meaning emerges not through instruction but through interpretation, as each viewer participates in processing and transforming the text revealed before them.
Digital art circulates differently—dynamic, iterative and inseparable from technology—said Sotiracopoulos, noting that this fundamentally alters a work’s lifecycle. “Galleries today aren’t just exhibiting and placing digital pieces; they’re safeguarding the integrity of the code,” he explained, as artists and galleries now think together about long-term access, storage and the collector’s day-to-day experience.
Inevitably, these works also resist the traditional channels through which value is exchanged in the art world—systems built on scarcity, exclusivity and hierarchical gatekeeping. Many Zero 10 projects encouraged participation, remixing or interaction aligned with digital culture’s decentralized ethos. In various ways, they open the door to collaborative or distributed authorship, positioning the artwork not as a fixed object but as something that can evolve through ongoing cultural and creative engagement.
A decentralized system of validation with a very different audience
“Decentralization must stay at the forefront—and we must resist the slide back into old gatekeeping reflexes,” writes Kate Vass in the previously mentioned LinkedIn article. Most of the artists in the Zero 10 app appeared to respond directly to this call, with presentations that, to some extent, subtly functioned as performances of autonomy, quietly yet unmistakably asserting independence from the “official” structures that Art Basel embodies. Within the section, many of them set their own terms for how their work would be shown, circulated or acquired, generally reversing the top-down dynamics that usually govern an art fair booth.
“Digital art operates with reduced physical constraints, which changes the scope of how artworks can be conceived,” said Hugh Heslep, president and COO at Art Blocks, a platform for generative art created through algorithms written by artists using computer code as their medium. “On Art Blocks, our project sizes often run into the hundreds or thousands, with each individual artwork being algorithmically unique yet still part of a larger, coherent collection.” This, he told Observer, creates a network effect among collectors: each one owns a singular work while participating in a community organized around a shared artistic system. For galleries working in generative art, the role shifts from selling discrete objects to stewarding an entire algorithmic body of work. “It expands to helping collectors understand the logic of the algorithm, the range of possible outputs and how each artwork fits within the broader collection.”
At Zero 10, Art Blocks presented Quine by Larva Labs, the duo Matt Hall and John Watkinson, best known for creating CryptoPunks. The project draws on the computer-science concept of a quine—a program that outputs its own source code—with each artwork incorporating its own code into the visuals it generates. Their booth used a primarily physical format to demystify the underlying digital mechanics. “We offered ten Quines, each with a different ‘quinity,’ the number of generations the work cycles through before returning to its original state. Collectors received signed prints of all variations within that quinity along with the digital artwork and provenance,” Heslep explained. A vitrine displayed small prints of all 497 works and an animation demonstrated how each artwork’s embedded code could be extracted and rerun. “Beyond selling the available artworks, our goal was to help visitors understand how generative art functions and how the artwork comes into being. For many traditional collectors, seeing the physical prints helped bridge the gap between digital process and tangible output.” While many familiar faces from their digital community appeared, Heslep estimated that more than 90 percent of their conversations were with fairgoers encountering generative art for the first time. “They were genuinely interested in how the platform works—how an artist writes an algorithm, how collectors mint unique outputs, how the blockchain serves as both provenance record and distribution mechanism.”
“Digital art coming from this new ecosystem does not need the traditional gallery model in the same way it has been done throughout the past two centuries,” confirmed Aniko Berman, director at AOTM Gallery, which presented Dmitri Cherniak’s digital tokens born from algorithmic code while also presenting them in physical form as unique prints and sculpture. The hybrid format, she said, revealed meaningful unlocks for new digital collectors. “Artists frequently promote their work themselves; collectors value direct communication and can bypass the historically opaque ivory tower of the traditional gallery model.” Still, she emphasized, great gallerists remain essential: they champion artists, contextualize their work and provide the strategic guidance and cultural investment that emerging ecosystems cannot offer on their own. As the digital art space matures, this support becomes increasingly necessary. That’s why most galleries in Zero 10 not only enabled resource-heavy activations but also remained on the floor every day, advocating for their artists, answering questions and meeting collectors directly.
Notably, most of these artists arrived at Art Basel with their legitimacy already established—not through traditional gatekeepers, museum endorsement or long-term gallery representation, but through peer-to-peer platforms, tools and communities native to digital culture. Their audiences were built online; their reputations—and the value of their works—emerged through visibility and interaction on these platforms, driven by the viral logic of community networks rather than the slow, closed circuits of curatorial approval. Their validation is decentralized, transparent and collectively produced.
This has created both a different audience and a different model of artistic value circulation that gives digital creators a wider degree of autonomy while also tying their practices to direct engagement with their own communities. Digital art often escapes the gallery model not out of rejection but because its systems of creation, distribution and recognition have evolved alongside it, shaped by open networks, peer-to-peer economies, remix culture and collaborative authorship. In many cases, a production-studio or collective format serves these artists more effectively than traditional representation.
At Zero 10, two validation systems briefly coexisted, though not on equal terms. These artists are not asking to enter the traditional structure; they are showing that they have already built another one—at a time when an art market in rapid transition may have something to learn from it, especially as more “traditional” artists question the role of galleries, empowered by social media and new forms of online visibility.
As Heft observed, today’s art world moves faster than ever through global connectivity, new transaction formats and unprecedented access to resources. This creates opportunities for galleries and artists to reach audiences far beyond their local ecosystems and the fair circuit. Such shifts, he argued, will ultimately benefit all forms of art (traditional, digital or otherwise) and require galleries to embrace the advantages that the digital world now offers.
Liquidity and the role of the cryptocurrency market
The robust sales reported by exhibitors in this inaugural edition not only confirmed the presence of a dynamic and passionate community eager to support this moment of “outing” on the art world’s premier stage but also revealed that more collectors are embracing the intersection of technology and contemporary practice.
The 2025 Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting had already shown that digital art officially emerged as a core acquisition category in 2025, with fifty-one percent of high-net-worth collectors reporting a digital-art purchase. Digital art is now the third-largest category of fine-art spending (about 14 percent), nearly on par with sculpture, while painting remains dominant at 27 percent. Looking ahead, 23 percent of HNW collectors plan to expand their digital art holdings, up from 19 percent in the previous survey. This growth is being driven by a new generation of buyers who will shape the future of the art market. Gen Z collectors represented 26 percent of respondents and a remarkable 63 percent of them reported buying digital art in 2024 or 2025. Noah Horowitz’s decision to introduce this section was therefore driven less by intuition than by data and market necessity. As Leyla Fakhr pointedly said, “the medium itself was never the obstacle; artists have been working digitally and conceptually for decades. What has changed is that a market built outside the traditional establishment has grown powerful enough that institutions and the ‘traditional’ art world can no longer ignore it.”
Notably, Art Basel Zero 10 was presented in partnership with OpenSea, the leading crypto-native marketplace for digital collectibles, ensuring that the works showcased in Miami can continue circulating through peer-to-peer networks after the fair closes.
Given that, to what extent might the strong sales at Zero 10 be tied not only to the growing legitimacy of digital art but also to renewed volatility in cryptocurrency markets following a sharp pre-Basel pullback after a bullish year of rising valuations partly fueled by crypto-friendly Trump policies?
Although transactions at the fair have been reported in dollars, some of these acquisitions were executed in crypto or backed primarily by crypto wealth—perhaps as a way for collectors to park value in a digital-friendly asset during a period of intensified market turbulence. After all, digital artworks offer a familiar on-ramp for crypto-native buyers and unlike most tokens, they can be resold through traditional art-market channels, potentially easing the conversion of crypto gains into fiat (legal tender controlled by governments).
We asked several exhibitors about the structure of their sales and whether cryptocurrency played any role in the transactions. “All works were priced in USD. We accept a full range of payment methods, including ETH, Bitcoin, credit cards and wire transfers. For this presentation, one collector chose to pay in ETH, while the rest paid by card,” Asprey Studio told Observer.
Although the CryptoPunks market rise has been mostly associated with crypto wealth, Art Blocks was also accepting payments in both USD and cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency payments were made with both USDC and USD1 stablecoins with amounts ranging from $25,000 to $45,000.
“We were adamant about pricing Dmitri Cherniak’s works in ETH, the native currency for the Ethereum blockchain on which his works are minted,” said Berman of AOTM Gallery. Each of the 20 unique outputs from Polygon Etcetera, his newest algorithm, which debuted at the fair, was priced at 5 ETH. They sold out of the entire series and even helped one new traditional collector purchase ETH to complete the transaction.
“We accept both crypto and fiat. We’re very geared toward new buyers,” said Fakhr of Solos Gallery, which mints on Verse, a digital art marketplace designed for individuals with no prior knowledge of crypto. Collectors can hold their works in custodial wallets or transfer them to their own wallets if they prefer.
It’s clear the art market still sits atop a largely untapped pool of liquidity that could be activated by accepting crypto payments more broadly—and by recognizing the different profile of buyers that crypto can bring into the fold. Beeple told Observer that one payment for his humanoid animals was made in cryptocurrency: “It really is not that big of a deal and I am honestly surprised more galleries do not do this. It really isn’t very complicated and can, of course, be converted to fiat immediately, so I really am honestly a bit puzzled as to why this has not been adopted more generally.”
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