Sotheby’s joins the nonfungible token crack through a collaboration with digital artist Pak.
“We’ve been following NFT’s place for a while,” Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart said Tuesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” where he announced the auction house’s partnership with Pak. The upcoming sale is expected to launch next month.
“This is new to us all,” said Stuart. “But there’s a lot here that’s very interesting and we think he still has power. “
Pak has been making digital art for decades, but the identity of the artist is unknown.
“The artist prefers to remain anonymous, partly because the artist wants to be about the art, which is not necessarily something new in the world of art,” he said. Stewart. “But this is one of the many new things about the art of crypto, in particular, that I think is different and that can be a little confusing, certainly when you compare between it and the world of traditional art. “
Sotheby’s decision – founded in 1744 and famous for selling multi-million-dollar paintings and other luxury items – to adopt NFTs represents the latest milestone for the art form growing digital. It comes after Christie last week sold at NFT collage auction for $ 69 million, elevating its creator, Beeple, by the real name Mike Winkelmann, to a place among the the three most valuable major live artists.
NFTs are blockchain-based assets that are unique in design, a scarcity that supporters say underpins their value. Ownership of a particular NFT is registered on a blockchain network, the distributed digital ledgers that support cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.
In addition to digital art pieces, there is a huge demand to buy basketball items called NBA Top Shots as NFTs. Earlier this month, rock band Kings of Leon released their latest album in NFT format.
Some have eliminated NFTs as long as their values fall over time. Skeptics also note that the rise of NFTs has coincided with a massive accumulation in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, notorious for the volatility of ether, which runs on the Ethereum blockchain network. .
$ 69 million Nink buyer Winkelmann was the signature crypto investor Metakovan.
Winkelmann has said he sees various applications for the digital infrastructure that underpins NFTs. “I really think this is a technology that has so many use cases,” he told CNBC on Friday, adding that it is “a blank slate, even beyond digital art.” He said, “Whenever you want to prove ownership, I think there is a use case.”
But even for NFT-based digital art, it’s still “very early, needless to say,” according to Stuart Sotheby’s.
For its Pak partnership, New York-based Sotheby’s sells both one-to-one digital art pieces and “so-called ‘open editions” in the world of NFT, where many people can buy tokens for the same job, “Stewart explained.
NFTs bring a new interest and “new beauty” to art, Stewart said, arguing that there is the potential to “avoid many of the traditional gateways and exploration processes in the world of physical art.” He said, “That’s something that’s really exciting, and as it develops, we’re really curious to see where that takes us all.”
Benoit Pagotto – co-founder of RTFKT, which helped create a collection of recently sold NFT-based digital sneakers – told CNBC that he expects it will take some time for some people to catch up. the enthusiasm around crypto collectibles.
“Educating and speeding people up is something we have to do,” Pagotto said Tuesday on “Squawk Alley.” “But at the same time, we know that people will never understand [NFTs], just like today there are still people who do not understand why esports are so strong and movement so cultural. With those people, we don’t spend too much time explaining. “
– Jessica Bursztynsky from CNBC contributed to this report.