Sotheby’s will hold Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale, an online auction open for bidding from 3 to 10 June 2021 and described as the first time a major auction house brings together a group survey of leading NFT artists. Hosted through Sotheby’s online platform, the sale features works made across the seven-year history of the medium.
The auction is led by Kevin Mc Coy’s Quantum, widely regarded as the first NFT ever minted and timestamped 3 May 2014. In 2014, during a Rhizome conference, Mc Coy and his collaborator Anil Dash created what they then called “monetized graphics,” or monegraphs, by codifying provenance into an original digital work using blockchain. Mc Coy’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and others.
The sale is Sotheby’s second dedicated NFT auction, following The Fungible collection with the digital artist Pak, which achieved a total of nearly $17 million across a multi-day event that drew more than 3,000 unique buyers. Bidding for all works in Natively Digital begins at $100, and buyers may pay with fiat currency or cryptocurrency, Bitcoin or Ether, via Coinbase.
Among the highlights is Crypto Punk #7523 by Larva Labs, one of the collection of 10,000 characters created in 2017. It is one of nine “ Alien” punks and the only one wearing a medical mask, a detail added before the mask became associated with the COVID-19 era. Individual Crypto Punks have sold at auction for upwards of $8 million. The seller, a pseudonymous collector known as Sillytuna, will donate 5 percent of the proceeds to projects supporting Larva Labs’ Crypto Punks and Meebits initiatives, and a further 5 percent to COVID relief organizations.
The sale also features The Shell Record by Anna Ridler, a leading figure in generative art and AI known for using datasets to create digital works. The Shell Record continues her exploration of the history of barter and exchange through shells gathered from the foreshore of the river Thames, forming a dataset for a moving-image work created using generative adversarial networks. Her work has been shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Barbican Centre and the Centre Pompidou.
The sale is co-curated by Sotheby’s and the London-based artist Robert Alice, known for Portraits of a Mind, and will include one artist nominated by the crypto and digital art communities. Sotheby’s will donate a portion of the proceeds to the Sevens Foundation, and the participating artists will give a portion of their profits to charitable organizations supporting crypto artists. The pre-sale exhibition will be shown at Sotheby’s galleries in London, New York and Hong Kong, and across the metaverse.
(Press Release)
