Alt Coins, Bear Market, Crypto Winter, Down Bad, Expected Returns, FTX Fraud, Government Oversight, Hacked ($477M), Insolvent, JPEGs, KYC, Liquidity Gone, Margin Trading; I could easily go through the whole alphabet alluding to the current crypto market conditions, but anyone who follows web3 or blockchain technology understands that there is blood in the streets. Well, that is not 100% true across the board. The traders are down and the holders have been defrauded, but what does that mean for those of us here for the digital ART? Honestly, it doesn’t mean all that much unless you are down bad and need to sell. Inherently there is less new money liquidity or as some like to call it—“fake internet money liquidity”—but the truly rich are still rich and the collectors are still collecting. Those with money know that accumulating during a down market is the best time to accumulate.

Not everything is sunshine and roses and some of the rich have even taken an L this last year in the digital space; Meta (Facebook) loses over $30B on metaverse projects and fires a small city worth of employees (Ouch!), the owner/CEO (SBF) of FTX trading platform and crypto government oversight activist announces that he had “a bad month” in October as he loses over $10B in customer funds prior to stepping down and filing Chapter 11 (Oopsy). To add insult to injury—let’s call it the pixelized cherry on top—current market evaluations say that Justin Bieber’s Bored Ape has lost over 90% of its value this year ($1M+ USD). (Poor Guy).

These major losses didn’t slow anything down in Miami, where collectors at this year’s Art Basel flexed their digital wealth in a volume of ways. One of my favorites was interacting with a technology-based sculpture by Brooklyn art collective MSCHF. The artwork—essentially a functional ATM located within the Perrotin Booth at the fair—oh so much more than that. The subversive art collective known for celebrity collabs retrofitted this ATM with a digital screen that scrolled through a real-time monetary leaderboard. As each patron stepped up and withdrew from the ATM, their picture was taken, ranking them based on the amount of money left in their wallet. For the opulent at Basel Miami, is was the perfect piece to feed your hubris or provide some hilarious content for social media. If you had $3.1M in the bank and a private jet—one could jaunt down to South Beach and overtake the current leader, Music DJ Diplo, who clocked in at $3M. For those over-invested in crypto—don’t be embarrassed by your account balance, you are probably at home in front of a computer anyway!

Across the bridge in downtown Miami was the new NFT event for Basel that took over two city blocks and 12 buildings, “The Gateway: A Web3 Metropolis.” Touted as a festival with classic fair-style booths, IRL art installations, NFT speakers and music—massive sponsors such as Christie’s and global galleries to the scale of Pace even grabbed a foothold. Pace Verso (the web3 division of Pace Gallery) showed a mix of artists, in which a fan favorite was Tara Donovan, known for her sprawling sculptural installations built from thousands of standard household goods. QWERTY, Donovan’s first NFT project, used the letters/symbols found on a computer keyboard in much the same way as she would use a stack of buttons in an installation. A repeated character is layered, spaced and patterned in a way that toes the line between legibility and design. In the end the 500-piece collection had the feel of digitally woven tapestries that embodied the thesis behind much of her work, yet pushed into the new realm.

For those over-invested or simply without generational wealth, just hunker down and wait it out. As Hal Borland said, “No winter lasts forever.” Or even better, as our favorite singer-turned-angry-intellectual writer Henry Rollins said, “In winter, I plot and plan. In spring I move.”

If you are rich, kindly disregard the above statement and show us that generational wealth. Now is the time to accumulate, buy the digital art and fuel the fire that will keep us warm through the rest of this cold winter.