Nobody Buys Art With Bitcoin - Ask the Galleries at this year's Armory Show.

(Observer.com) If technology is going to radically overhaul every industry on our planet and software is going to “eat the world”—as Silicon Valley investors are wont to say—the art world will be the absolute last to go, dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.

But if you read the headlines, you’d think Bitcoin and other tech marvels are making a huge splash in the art world. The Winklevoss twins—who are serious Bitcoin enthusiasts— recently put their money behind online auction site Paddle 8, that would allow for cryptocurrencies to be accepted, and artist Sarah Meyohas has even created an alternative cryptocurrency called Bitchcoin, a speculative investment backed by the market value of her art by square inch. And what a natural fit for selling art: Bitcoin can send money anywhere the Internet reaches in enormous sums, often without the ability to trace where it’s coming from or going to.

So we decided to ask the exhibitors at the Armory Show this week—where startup Artsy has bought up a huge presence—if any of them had actually used Bitcoin as a method of transaction.

“Never, ever,” said João Paulo Siqueira Lopes, Associate Director at Lisson Gallery. “Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever.”

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