Vintage NFT:
after the success of the Beeple auction at Christie's
, Sotheby's will sell the first
Non Fungible Token
ever created online.
Auction house announcement rides the popularity of a brand new form of digital art: Kevin McCoy is the name of the
crypto-artist
who seven years ago, in 2014, "coined" the piece titled "Quantum" using blockchain technology for the first time. The bids, accepted on the Sotheby's website between 3 and 10 June, will start from one hundred dollars or the equivalent in cryptocurrency: the auction house has announced a collaboration with Coinbase and will allow payments in Bitcoin and Ethereum for the first time. A portion of the sales will go to two foundations, the Mint Fund and the Sevens Foundation, which help crypto-artists from around the world pay the cost of producing their works. Three lots have been announced so far, but other NFTs will join the catalog in the coming days.
"The Non Fungible Tokens will be considered
one of the fundamental artistic turning points of this century
", Sotheby's argued in a statement:" After rising to prominence in recent months, they have gone from a subversive artistic counter-culture to a global dominant trend in art and media. Day after day, NFTs continue to redefine the very nature of art and the artist's place in the world ". With" Quantum "," generatively built entirely in code ", and which" prefigures the explosion of digital creativity through NFTs "Larva Labs'" CryptoPunk # 7523 "and British Anna Ridler's" The Shell Record "will also go up for auction." We went
looking for crypto artists on four continents
, convincing emerging figures and 'Old Masters' to show their work, "explained curator Robert Alice. Larva Labs rose to prominence by creating and selling images known as CryptoPunks, nine of which were sold by Christie's last week for 16 , $ 9 million, double the starting estimate. "There are over 10 thousand
CryptoPunks
but no two are exactly alike. The auction will feature one of the rarest, one of nine alien punks and the only one of those nine with the mask. "In turn Anna Ridler works with knowledge systems to better understand the world. Her" Shell Record ", based on images of shells collected on the banks of the Thames, it is inspired by the story of shells as one of the earliest means of exchange.
Until then confined to industry sales, NFT exploded onto the art market last March,
when Beeple (real name Mike Winkelmann) became the third most-rated artist in the world after Jeff Koons and David Hockney when his monumental file Jpeg "5.000 Days" was sold for 69 million dollars.