Mom, I Bought A Picasso for Just $1000

8:12:00 AM

Event: 10101.art on Art × Fractional Ownership

When: Saturday, [18 Oct 2025] (public start 4:00 PM; I arrived 7:00 PM)
Disclosure: Unsponsored. 


I woke up stuck. The heavy, airless kind of stuck. Meta ads crawling, Canva refusing a clean zoom, even my paid LLMs blinking back at me like, “That’s not a prompt. Try again.” When the 10101.art ad drifted across my screen, I didn’t overthink it. I put on shoes and went.


On showing up again

I hadn’t been to events in a while. The last time I tried, it was a business networking night and my legs did that ridiculous tremble where it's like my extrovert hadn’t been used in years and my introvert was dragging me back to the door. I live on the ambivert spectrum, but lately the scale has tipped hard toward quiet: study, build, post, repeat. Part of saying yes to 10101.art was testing whether I could still walk into a room full of strangers and not disappear into my phone. Spoiler: I could. It just took a nudge.

Finding the Grand Atrium at peak hour is a game with no map. I looped past the same perfume counters twice, asked three different security guards for “the art show,” and still materialized at escalators to nowhere. When I finally stepped through the right glass doors at 7 PM, I’d missed the early talks. The setup was intimate but not hushed; this is Dubai Mall. There’s a soft, expensive buzz that slips into every pause. 

I caught the last speaker Denis Ravizza, Founder and Managing Director of ESMOD Dubai, tying fashion back to art. It's practical, a little romantic. Then the CEO of 10101.art Alina Krot stepped up and talked plainly about blockchain and fractional ownership. That’s when my brain sat up straight.





What 10101.art Is (as I heard it, in human words)

You buy a tiny slice of a real, high-value artwork.
Not a print, not a JPEG—an actual piece of a work you can point to and say, “That one.” The idea is simple enough to carry in your pocket, and heavy enough to make you stand a little taller in front of a canvas.

There’s paperwork—and there’s an on-chain receipt that won’t conveniently disappear.
You sign a legal agreement that spells out what your slice means. Then your share is recorded on a blockchain, which time-stamps the fact that you own it. Paper first, chain second. That order matters.

The art lives somewhere real, and you can go see it.
Professional storage and public exhibition make the ownership feel like more than an app notification. “I own part of that” lands differently when that is under real lights, in a real room.

There’s a plan for selling your slice later.
Liquidity isn’t a promise; it’s a mechanism. The point is that the platform is building a way for fractional owners to exit, and those paths are being designed in the open. Less hype, more architecture.



Why Fractional Is Worth Considering 

1) Access that doesn’t ask for permission.
You don’t need a family office to sit at this table. A small slice lets you participate without pretending to be someone else. It’s the difference between looking through the gallery window and having your name on the guest list—even if it’s on the last line.

2) The unglamorous parts are handled by grown-ups.
Sourcing, custody, insurance—none of it is sexy, all of it is essential. When those pieces are handled, your “I own this” becomes a statement you can defend, not just a feeling you hope no one questions.

3) Loving art stops being passive.
When you co-own a work, you read wall texts differently. You notice condition, provenance, movement. You stop treating art as décor and start treating it like a story you’re inside.

4) The chain is just the receipt—but a very useful one.
I don’t need blockchain to feel like magic. I need it to be a public ledger that refuses to lie about who owns what and when. In this model, it’s there to keep the record honest. That’s enough.

5) Seeing the work changes the decision.
You can only stare at dashboards for so long. Standing in front of the piece you partly own compresses the distance between money and meaning. It’s the moment your “why” becomes obvious.

“Isn’t this just NFTs with extra steps?”

No—because there’s a contract that governs reality.
NFTs were often vibes-first. This starts with the legal document that defines rights and obligations. That’s the adult in the room.

The blockchain is a tamper-resistant log, not the product itself.
It’s the receipt you can’t quietly edit at 2 AM. Useful, boring, reliable. That’s precisely the point.

Custody makes it physical.
A real painting, in a real facility, under real insurance, with the possibility of public display. Digital proof anchored to an object you can visit is a different animal.

How I Decide To Take a “First Slice” (each thought stands alone)

I need to read the custody and insurance details in plain language.
If I can explain who holds the work, who insures it, and what’s covered to a friend over coffee, it passes my first test.

I want fees spelled out where no one can blink past them.
Upfront, ongoing, and exit costs belong in daylight. Hidden math is a dealbreaker.

I need to understand how selling my slice would actually work.
Who might buy it, where that happens, what the timeline and friction look like: mechanics beat promises.

I want to know who gets a say over the artwork’s future.
Exhibit, travel, or sell? What voice do fractional owners have? Even a modest vote tells me the platform respects its base.

I want to see the work with my own eyes.
An exhibition schedule or viewing policy moves this from theory to skin-in-the-game. If I can stand in front of it, I can stand behind it.

The Night After



I didn’t go home. I was giddy in the useful way. I rode that feeling straight into the work I’d been ducking for weeks: funnels, blog posts, Whop set-ups, PDF rough drafts, ad creatives rough cuts, test reels, tiny edits that suddenly felt possible. Export, delete, try again. No overthinking, just lots of movement, caffeine and Caribou energy boosters. I worked until the sun drew a thin gold line across my keyboard and the first metro started its route. It even got me thinking about moving to this more bustling emirate than Sharjah. Although fun fact: I heard during the event that it’s more culturally attuned than anywhere else, good for art fixations.

Somewhere between the Grand Atrium’s buzz and that morning train, a decision settled in: I’m going to take that first slice: small, verified, real, and see how it behaves in my life. If you love art but always filed “ownership” under “other people’s money,” picture yourself in front of a canvas, knowing a sliver is yours, with the paperwork to prove it and a record that won’t lie about it later. You don’t have to be early to be reckless. You can be early to be included.

Unsponsored. Not financial advice. Just one Saturday that did its job and a new way of being in the room with the art (and marketing bit and strategy I've managed to get from the event and which I hope to get the guts to pitch to management which I will reveal in a few weeks) I care about.

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