Zero 10 Returns to Basel with a Museum, Not a Marketplace

Art Basel’s sector for digital art, Zero 10, opened earlier this week in a dedicated space away from the main fair floor. Curated by artist Trevor Paglen and curator Eli Scheinman, it brings together 20 galleries on 16 booths. While Beeple’s robot dogs went viral in Miami Beach last December, in Basel, the proceedings are much more sedate, with crypto-native works from artists including 0xdeafbeef and Leander Herzog interlaced with anchor pieces by Hito Steyerl, Andreas Gursky and Vera Molnár.

It did not start this way. When Zero 10 launched at Art Basel Miami Beach last December, OpenSea was an official partner and the sector had a single stated purpose: ‘connecting the expanding digital art community with the established structures of the international art market’. Half a year on, in Basel, OpenSea is gone. In its place are Paglen as co-curator,  and a rather generic curatorial theme, ‘The Condition’, which frames the presentation not as a digital-art niche but as the universal predicament of making art under digital saturation. The frame allows the curators to hang blue-chip painters and photographers alongside post-blockchain and AI work. Paglen makes the bridge explicit. ‘These aren’t niche ‘digital art’ concerns,’ he says of questions surrounding images, AI, and creating, ‘they go to the heart of what it means to be an artist now.’ Almost every artist, he argues, already works digitally; the divide is a fiction worth dissolving.

Aziza Kadyri at eastcontemporary, Zero 10, Art Basel 2026. Courtesy Art Basel

Paglen and Scheinman go large on history. ArtMeta is presenting highlights from 50 years of digital art history. Gazelli Art House has a solo booth of 1970s AI-art pioneer Harold Cohen. Interface Gallery and Galerie Oniris are co-presenting Vera Molnár, the late French-Hungarian pioneer of generative art. On the floor, one of his exhibitors is less sure. “I don’t know why people are so keen on [art history],” the artist told me, walking through his own booth. “Let’s sort out contemporary problems first.”

According to the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026, 51 percent of high-net-worth collectors bought a digital work last year — the third most-purchased medium, and the fastest-rising. Yet digital, film and video art together made up 3 percent of dealer sales by value. The numbers on most digital platforms, like OpenSea, are even worse. Plenty of buyers; not so much spending. The question Zero 10 sets itself is whether a curated hall at the world’s largest art fair can turn participation into spend, and whether including more conventional works in the presentation will lead to buyer cross-pollination.

Easily the highest-priced work in Basel was Avery Singer’s Shit Coin Maxi (2024). While the gallery did not disclose the price, similarly-sized works from 2026 are currently on sale at Hauser & Wirth’s Zurich space for CHF800,000 (£750,000). Gursky’s Ocean V is one of an edition of 6. A sister work, Ocean VI, sold for £231,250 at Phillips in 2019.

Still, sales were brisk on the first day, with works totalling around £830,000 changing hands. Half of that went for John Gerrard’s STANDARD, 2022, at Fellowship, a triptych digital simulation, which sold for $500,000 (£380,000) to a ‘significant private US collection of classic and contemporary art’. Bitforms/Max Estrella also found success, placing Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Agglomerate (2024), an installation of lightbulbs that respond to visitors’ heartbeats, to a private foundation in Ukraine for $180,000 (£140,000). Neither work is digital in the screen-native sense the section trades on; both are objects, and both went to traditional art collections, not the Web3 collector Miami Beach’s edition was built to court.

Avery Singer, Shit Coin Maxi, 2025. Photo: Lance Brewer © Avery Singer. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

At Art Blocks, William Mapan’s paintings sold at €80,000 and €28,000 (£60,000 and £21,000), while his plotted drawings, with digital works attached, went for €3,000 (£2,300). Jan Robert Leegte’s pigment prints, face-mounted on acrylic, made €4,800 (£3600) each. The genuinely algorithmic, screen-based work sat at the bottom: Leander Herzog’s Infinite (Botanical) Garden went for $9,000 (£6,800). Andreas Gysin sold 15 custom generative pieces at $4,500 (£3400) each. Aziza Kadyri’s installation combining AI-generated Uzbek suzani embroidery with an interactive screen sold for $23,000 (£17,000) at eastcontemporary. Even Paglen’s headline bet proved the rule. He had singled out 0xDEAFBEEF as the post-blockchain artist who would ‘read immediately as a serious piece of contemporary art’. The validation came at $40,000 (£30,000) — for a forged-iron, steampunk-adjacent sculpture with the code bolted on.

Tellingly, the pieces Zero 10 leaned on as links to the traditional art world –  Gursky’s photograph at Sprüth Magers, Steyerl’s installation, Singer’s crypto-wallet painting at Hauser & Wirth, the AI AARON paintings of Cohen – were all absent from the first day’s reported sales. What sold was made by artists native to the section, not the blue-chips imported to expand it.

The asymmetry of the first day’s sales points to a question Art Basel needs to resolve: what is Zero 10 for? Is it a marketplace for Web3 collectors buying physical work at a name-brand fair, or an educational exercise aimed at establishing digital art? And if, per Paglen, all contemporary art is digital anyway, why have a dedicated sector?