Such prizes highlight how banks seek to promote their brands and engage with clients by using arts.

Arab Bank Switzerland, a private bank, has launched the second edition of the ABS Digital Art Prize, a programme designed to honour figures in the non-fungible tokens (NFT) space.

The prize was launched in January this year.

Such prizes highlight how banks seek to promote their brands and engage with clients by using arts – as seen for example in how Julius Baer sponsors the Montreux Jazz Festival. NFTs are examples of entities created from distributed ledger technology, aka blockchain. 

In the first prize announced earlier this year, the winner was Iranian-American artist Marjan Moghaddam with her piece “Glitch Intaleqi,” an animated painting exploring the digital aspects of the ideals of Intaleqi or Arabic for freeing oneself, as an experience, feeling and state of being. 

ABS said the following judges will determine the entrants:

-- Claire Silver, president of the second ABS Digital Art Prize, is an anonymous artificial intelligence artist. Her art can be found in the collection of the LACMA, and it has been sold at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and exhibited internationally. 

-- Dave Krugman is a New York-based photographer and founder of ALLSHIPS, a creative community gathering artists and creatives. 

-- William Mapan, based in Paris, produces abstract digital paintings.

-- Marjan Moghaddam, winner of the first, 2023 ABS Digital Art Prize, is a 3D artist and OG crypto artist [Original Gangster] exhibiting animation, print, sculpture, installation, and AR/VR.

-- Rani Jabban, managing director of Arab Bank Switzerland and Nicolas Gonet, board member of Gonet & Cie and Arab Bank Switzerland. 

While subject to the vagaries of the digital assets space, NFTs remain a talking point. Each NFT is a unique token on a blockchain which stores information about provenance that can be traced back to the original issuer; therefore it provides collectors with the opportunity of building a digital collection. For this reason, NFTs are popular in applications which require unique digital items, including crypto art, digital collectables, and online gaming, where some guarantee of authenticity and ownership history add value.

Financial firms, including private banks, have sponsored the arts for some time. Examples include EFG International, sponsor of The Gramophone Classical Music Awards, Banca del Fucino in Italy and its support of the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, and Société Générale, the French bank, with its music sponsorship programme.