London, 10 June 2021 - Later this month, Sotheby's will offer five exceptionally rare Crypto Punks. Of the 10,000 Crypto Punks created, only 24 were issued in physical form, as certified prints signed by co-creator John Watkinson. In an auction first, five of those 24 prints, each of which also exists in digital form, will be offered in a standalone sale at Sotheby's, with bidding open from 24 June to 1 July.
The dedicated sale has been announced just as "Alien" Punk #7523 brought $11.8 million at Sotheby's today, a record for a single Crypto Punk. The NFT was acquired by Shalom Meckenzie, the largest shareholder of Draft Kings.
First released in 2017 by artists Matt Hall and John Watkinson, the founders of Larva Labs, Crypto Punks were one of the earliest NFT projects and a catalyst for the entire crypto-art movement. While the duo released 10,000 Punks for free, besides a small transaction fee, they have since been the subject of a tsunami of interest.
The 24 signed prints created at the inception of the Crypto Punks are in themselves rare, accounting for less than a quarter of a percent of the total number of digital Crypto Punks in existence. Each of the Punks to be offered this month is accompanied by a wax-sealed envelope, rubber stamped and containing a "paper wallet," a mnemonic code that provides access to the unique Ethereum-based token.
The five Punks on offer bear a mix of sought-after characteristics:
Between them, these Punks display traits including "black lipstick," "green eye shadow," "crazy hair," "luxurious beard," "hot lipstick," a "peak spike" and even a "police cap."
"These five fantastically rare 'phygital' punks form a very important bridge between the physical and the digital. By their very nature, they have the power to speak to the broadest spectrum of art lovers, from established collectors of physical art to the digital connoisseurs alike," said Michael Bouhanna, Sotheby's Contemporary Art Specialist and Head of Sale. "In many ways, they represent just what we are trying to do here at Sotheby's: to help build an easily navigable bridge from one artistic realm into another."
Speaking further about the Crypto Punks, Bouhanna added: "In the anti-establishment spirit of the early days of the blockchain movement, the Crypto Punks were conceived as a collection of misfits and non-conformists in an ode to the 1970s London punk scene. And, just as the Punks themselves belong to a movement, so too do those who collect them. The appeal of Crypto Punks has transcended beyond the world of crypto-enthusiasts, to 'traditional' art lovers too. Here, in this sale, we have a group of unique Punks, each defined by their own eccentric characteristics, made even more special by their accompanying prints. This is where the digital artworld meets the traditional."
All five Punks to be offered later this month have been carefully selected from private collections by Swiss curator and digital art expert Georg Bak, two of them originally shown at Larva Labs' first ever exhibition. Bak was the first to exhibit a collection of nine Crypto Punk print editions as part of the group show Perfect & Priceless: Value Systems on the Blockchain at Kate Vass Galerie in 2018.
Speaking to the Crypto Punk movement, Georg Bak said: "When I first met John and Matt, they modestly shied away from being called 'artists,' totally charmed to have been invited to debut their physical Punks as part of the Perfect and Priceless exhibition. Yet though they didn't perceive themselves as artists at the time, for me, their bold experimentation in this medium immediately drew parallels with past movements, which saw provocative artists revolutionizing the artworld. Take, for instance, Marcel Duchamp, whose infamously rejected Fountain by the Salon of Independent Artists in 1917 simultaneously came to symbolize one of the most shocking moments in art history yet at the same time the birth of Conceptual Art. Just as revolutionary as Duchamp's urinal was over 100 years ago, the Crypto Punks have propelled the NFT onto a global stage, which continues to shake the art world today."
(Press Release)
