American Artist Wants To Send Sculpture To The Moon In SpaceX

JAKARTA - American artist Jeff Koons plans to fly 125 miniature versions of the statues named "Moon Phases" to the moon using Elon Musk's SpaceX spacecraft.

Quoted from AFP, Sunday, June 19, every physical statue that is flown to the moon will be sold as a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) which functions as a certificate of ownership. The statues will be placed 384,400 kilometers (238,855 miles) apart from their owners.

A life-size “Moon Phases” statue was unveiled by Pace Gallery at the Art Basel exhibition in Switzerland. The moon-shaped statue the size of a beach ball is still on display at the exhibition, which runs from June 16 to 19.

In the future, buyers of Koons' artwork will also receive a life-size statue with a gemstone marking the location of the miniature version of the statue on the moon. In addition, "Moon Phases" is also equipped with photos of locations on the moon where the miniature statues are placed.

Pace Gallery is one of the few large galleries to have ventured into the NFT field. According to Clare McAndrew, author of an art market report for Art Basel, only six percent of galleries will sell NFT by 2021.

According to McAndrew's records, the sales volume of art-related NFTs jumped to US$945 million in August 2021 but has now dropped to US$366 million in January and then to US$101 million in May.

However, the ups and downs of the NFT market have not hindered the establishment of Pace Gallery which believes that NFT represents “a new methodology for distributing digital art”.

In addition to Koons' work, the digital art exhibition at Art Basel also presents the work of Turkish artist Ozgur Kar on an LCD screen showing a man surrounded by skeletons. This work is being sold by the French gallery Edouard Montassut.

Vive Arts, meanwhile, offers an experience to dive into digital art with the help of augmented reality (AR) glasses. The artwork features an avatar in 3D by German artist Albert Oehlen.

In addition to digital art, Art Basel also exhibits several non-digital works ranging from installations by French-Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping depicting a kitchen infested with giant cockroaches to a series of portraits carved into wood by French-Cameroonian artist Barthelemy Toguo. A spider sculpture by French-American artist Louise Bourgeois has sold for $40 million.