Zero 10 is really Art Basel's sixth fair
The digital art section unveiled at the brand's Miami Beach show is its own customer-acquisition ecosystem
Installation view of the inaugural Zero 10 at Art Basel Miami Beach. Courtesy Art Basel
Welcome back to The Gray Market, coming to you live (in what is rapidly becoming a fair week tradition) from the departure gate of an airport! This week I parse the inaugural edition of Art Basel’s latest and largest attempt to onboard new collectors through the quasi-populist tunnel of contemporary digital art.
As a reminder: TGM is a completely solo, twice-weekly project funded entirely by paying subscribers interested in tracking the evolution of art through the mutations and ruptures of the business around it. If you too appreciate this weird cultural-capitalist research, consider upgrading your membership for $8/month or $75/year. Every additional paid subscriber defrays my cost of subjecting myself (and by extension my loved ones) to the sun-wasted, bedazzled, and gridlocked melee of Miami Beach once a year without being tacitly beholden to some brand over a press trip.
Officially speaking, Art Basel runs five annual fairs: one each in its Swiss namesake city, plus Qatar (debuting in February 2026), Hong Kong, Paris, and Miami Beach. But its Floridian show (which ends Sunday) underwent a kind of mitosis this year with the debut of Zero 10, a section of the fair fully devoted to digital art. Although it’s technically only one new wrinkle within Art Basel Miami Beach, both the works on view and the audience for them were so distinct from the rest of the show that they felt like an entirely new event nested inside the familiar one.
Curated by Eli Scheinman, Zero 10 is made up of booths by 13 exhibitors, a designation that here (unlike elsewhere in the fair) includes startups, mega-galleries, and even artists’ studios presenting their work independently. The projects themselves span tech tributaries ranging from crypto and machine learning to generative algorithms and robotics.1
Aside from a few pre-existing industry die-hards with omnivorous taste, I personally didn’t recognize any of the people who were engrossed in Zero 10 perusing the main fairs’ aisles with anywhere near as much interest in any of the thousands of analog works there over the succeeding seven-plus hours I was doing the same on ABMB’s first preview day. That doesn’t mean it never happened—I’m not running a panopticon over here—but from my eyes and my conversations with people, the crossover was minimal.
If I’m right, I doubt the outcome surprised anyone on Art Basel’s management team. In my experience, A similar segmentation played out during most, if not all, of the company’s earlier art-tech initiatives, like its NFT-focused partnership with the open-source blockchain platform Tezos in Miami Beach in 2021.
The difference is that, based on the eye test, Art Basel has never committed as much space or as many resources to an art-tech experiment as it did with Zero 10. The other ones were essentially activations; this one approaches the square footage of Meridians, the fair’s neighboring section for super-sized art. Unless you’re watching closely for the signage, it can be tough to distinguish where the former ends and the latter begins.
The integration is key. If the powers that be had siloed Zero 10 offsite—even within easy walking distance of the convention center—it’s reasonable to think that vanishingly few of its fans would have bothered to stop by the convention center to see any of the roughly 270 other exhibitors making up the rest of the show. Instead, Art Basel at least set up the possibility of enticing its digital devotees to wander across the invisible border and circulate among the analog-first crowd (and vice versa). The cross-current still seemed fairly anemic to me while I was at the fair, but it would have been entirely theoretical if the company refused to put its Swiss thumb on the scale by arranging the show floor as it did.
More than the audience, however, the starkest split between Zero 10 and the rest of ABMB was the experience of circulating through the section. Three installations featured there surface what are, to me, the three most vital building blocks of that experience…
The arcade atmosphere
Yours faithfully, activating Mario Klingemann’s Appropriate Response (2020). Photo: Cabelle Ahn, courtesy of the institution of marriage and infinite patience
Interactivity is a defining element of Zero 10—and not just in a “selfies welcome!” or “scan this QR code!” kind of way (which you tended to get a lot of during NFT activations in the crypto boom). Several of the works on view invite or even require viewers to physically engage if they want to understand what exactly the artists are up to. This makes the section feel more like a high-budget arcade than just another zone in an art fair, especially with the type of healthy crowd that was there on opening day.
Part of the equation is that seeing other people interacting with the work makes visitors more inclined to ask the exhibitors in the booths what’s going on, and the exhibitors are more inclined to approach visitors wandering into or near the booth with a “wtf is this?” expression on their faces. That, in turn, shifts the dynamic away from the coy reserve permeating much of the main fair and amps up Zero 10’s capacity to do one of the things that art fairs in general exist to do: introduce dealers and artists to new clients.
Mario Klingemann’s Appropriate Response (2020), presented by Onkaos, embodies this aspect of Zero 10. The work’s engine is a roughly five-year-old large language model trained to continuously produce pithy new 120-character aphorisms from the raw material of thousands of actual, famous or semi-famous nuggets of wisdom.2
“It’s a piece about meaning and meaning-making,” Klingemann told me in the booth. “It starts with the fascination humans have with compressing our deepest questions about the meaning of life and how to be a good human into an epigram.”
The key, however, is that Appropriate Response only activates when a visitor kneels on a one-person church pew in front of the type of analog, flip-digit display boards you used to find in old-timey train stations. The participant then watches and waits for the machine’s wisdom to manifest on the display, which hangs on the wall like an altarpiece or sacred object.
Klingemann said the setup is a tongue-in-cheek allusion to some people’s musings about AI as a “new deity,” a thing that has gotten more prevalent and more troubling every year since he debuted the piece. The presentation, he added, also “could have been a simple red button, where every time you hit it, it gives you a new phrase. Here you have to take a minute to appreciate it.”
You may also have to put some effort into making sense of what you get. Like any LLM, model is flawed. The aphorism you get “might make sense to you and your experience, or it might not make sense at all,” Klingemann said.3 That puts viewers into a weirdly parallel position to actual religious believers, who tend to actively interpret possible signs and symbols for their divine meaning.
The most important part for our purposes, however, is that viewers also have to physically do something to receive their algorithmic epiphany. It’s a process underpinned by genuine curiosity and an artist’s smart thinking about tech, but it’s also just kind of more fun to feel like you played a tiny part in making the work yourself. Although it’s a rare experience at a top level art fair, it’s a fairly common one within Zero 10—and the way it lifts the crowd’s mood is palpable.
The transparent exchange
Installation view of Jack Butcher, Self Checkout (2025). Courtesy Art Basel
Another strong thread running through Zero 10 is an interest in foregrounding the typically hidden tensions about how the work on view gets produced, distributed, and valued by the public. Conceptual artists were leaning into these themes decades before everyone had a smartphone in their pockets, let alone learned what a blockchain was, but they’ve also been a steady motivator of works in digital and crypto art over the years—including at Art Basel’s fair-within-a-fair.
Why does this matter to an audience that might just be dipping its toes into contemporary art? Mainly because it positions the artists and dealers behind these projects as honest brokers in a market known for elitism and impenetrability—turn-offs that aren’t exactly difficult to find in the aisles of a major art fair.
Enter Self Checkout, a 2025 installation by Jack Butcher under his studio moniker, Visualize Value. The work’s title comes from a set of podiums propping up touchscreens and credit card readers allowing visitors to pay whatever they want for a physical receipt, printed right there at each station, with a link to a corresponding NFT. The length of the receipt depends on the amount they pay: the higher the price, the longer the proof of purchase. Alongside the self checkout kiosks is another printer outputting the results of all the spending—including those made online—onto a single, continuous receipt in a Plexiglas cube.
The transparency aspect comes through in the other element of the installation: as fate would have it, a flip-digit display similar to Klingemann’s, only this time reflecting Butcher’s profit and loss total since the fair opened on Wednesday. It started at -$74,211, the total cost of renting the booth and producing Self Checkout. If and when it reaches the break-even point, he’ll open an auction for the display board on the wall and the transparent kiosk full of receipts for the entire performance. (Bidding will start at $1 and end at noon on Sunday.)
What I like about Self Checkout is that every dealer at a Miami fair has been doing this exact calculus in their head all week; Butcher is just making it visible and, in a way, quasi-crowdfunding his participation instead of trying to make up the cost with a handful of high-dollar sales.
As both the artist and the dealer, he’s also more vulnerable than either one of those parties would be on their own. “It’s less interesting if you do this project with a gallery,” he told me Wednesday afternoon. “I’m very exposed.”
But with the market machinery on full view, there’s almost undoubtedly a faction of art newbies who appreciate the transparency—and might be more inclined to follow an artist willing to put both their sacrifice and their potential upside out there for all to see.
The promo collectible
Yours experientially, filling out the intake form at XCOPY’s Coin Laundry (2025). Photo by Cabelle Ahn, courtesy of the convergence of happenstance and commitment
Despite the importance of fairs to the art market, it’s worth remembering that the overwhelming majority of the people who visit them never buy a thing besides food or drinks. For these folks, the format is effectively interchangeable with going to a museum, just in a less stuffy environment with more (and hopefully better) dining options.
This is part of the reason it’s powerful that several of Zero 10’s exhibitors offer everyone who comes through an opportunity to take home actual art for nothing (or next to nothing). Obviously, people always like free stuff in just about any context. But when the goal is to try to coax them into collecting art, one of the most rarefied and intimidating hobbies out there, a gratis promo with a cool story behind it goes extra far—even if the art itself won’t last forever.
This brings us to Coin Laundry (2025), the pseudonymous British artist XCOPY’s installation at Nguyen Wahed’s booth.4 Inside an array of actual commercial washers and dryers are 2,000 plastic balls, each containing a little thematic prize, like a tiny cube of soap, and the pathway to mint NFTs tied to the project. All visitors have to do is fill out a carbon copy form with their information and some tongue-in-cheek preferences about their online activity, and they’re given both the smol physical goodie and a claim ticket. Follow the instructions before ABMB closes on Sunday at 6pm ET and they’ll all be able to mass-mint somewhere between 100 and 1,500 NFTs by the artist.5
Here’s the catch: All but one of those NFTs will self-destruct over the next decade. The timing is randomized, meaning yours could each disappear in nine minutes, nine months, or nine years. But in the end, there will be only a single survivor.
This is far from the first time a digital artist has made meta work about the link between trading NFTs and gambling. (I’m really curious to see how this exploding offer impacts the resale market for the Coin Laundry tokens, but that’s a whole other post.) It’s also not exclusively a crypto concern, either.
One of the first big lessons everyone should learn about the art market is that the vast majority of the works being offered day after day, week after week will have no resale value whatsoever in 10 years. In this sense, the calculus a buyer makes is the same regardless of whether they’re copping a painting, a conceptual installation, or an NFT. That’s a serious hurdle to collecting for some people. Why spend a meaningful amount of money on something the odds say will be worthless sooner than later?
The best answer, of course, is that monetary value isn’t the only kind of value out there. (It’s not even the most important, at least provided you’re not on the brink of collapse.) To me, Zero 10 is a wager that artists and dealers can land that message better with new people if they offer a foothold that’s livelier, more transparent, and more affordable than the art trade typically offers. If so, it’s an undeniable step up for everyone involved.
But what will determine the section’s ultimate worth to Art Basel and its hundreds of other dealers around the world is whether, and when, it’s also a step further in to the much larger, quieter, and more refined fair surrounding the digital arcade—and how the dealers manning those 270-or-so other booths react if the digital converts get there. These are the same questions people in the trade have probably been asking since artists started using computer punch cards to make work in the 20th century. Let’s see if the size of Art Basel’s wager also eventually impacts the size of its returns.
Yes, this is the section that features Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann’s Regular Animals (2025), his pack of photo-pooping robot dogs wearing hyper-real latex masks of himself, tech titans, and canonical 20th century artists, including Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Andy Warhol, and Picasso. I’m not focusing on it here because if you’ve been online at all this week, you’ve already been inundated by content about it—and, to me, it’s mostly an attention-courting appetizer to get people into Zero 10 in the first place. (That said, I respect the hustle of all involved: it did exactly what it set out to do.)
For the LLM heads: The first OpenAI chatbot publicly released as “ChatGPT” was a model known internally as GPT-3.5, which came two step-change evolutions after GPT-2. The difference between GPT-2 and its immediate follow-up, GPT-3, was a knee-buckling 500X more compute for the latter—and the decision by leadership to degrade the quality of training data for the quantity of training data, according to Karen Hao’s Empire of AI.
Mine, as you can see in the photo, was kinda half-and-half between sense and nonsense.
To state the obvious, Self Checkout leverages this same theme. All you need to pay is $1 to get something real.
Claim codes are also being handed out across Miami at various public events until the deadline, too.