NFT BAZL

Co-founded and launched with Elitium by GDA Capital in May 2021, and incubated from a single exhibition into a marketplace and an international exhibition programme.

NFT BAZL began as a single event and became a company, which is the ordinary way a studio venture actually starts. The insight it was built on has aged well even though the market it launched into did not: the thing collectors were being asked to buy was provenance, and provenance is indifferent to whether the object is physical.

The execution took that literally. A physical work hung in a gallery in Miami with its deed of ownership digitised and bound to it — so the same instrument carried a canvas and a file. The programme then ran the same argument in three more venues, including MENA’s first NFT art exhibition and an in-world edition in Decentraland, which is as clean a statement of the first condition as the group has ever made: the somewhere is not a metaphor, and it is not necessarily digital.

It is on this page as a completed argument rather than a growth story. What the group learned from it is written into the Archive, and it is not flattering to the category: the collectors were largely buying a position, the artists were largely selling access, and the marketplace layer was the only part with a business underneath it. The first condition was satisfied. Three others were not.

The earliest and most literal test of the first condition. NFT BAZL asked whether a digital object could carry the standing of a physical one, and answered it by hanging both on the same wall. It also produced the group’s first hard read on what the market was actually buying, which was not art.