If you like art, fashion and design auctions or if you follow the monthly events organised by the best auction houses around the world, you will easily realise that some of them have been trying to become more open and relevant to new generations. Until a few decades ago, fashion auctions were for example rare or only featured pieces from private collections maybe owned by wealthy socialites or late designers; nowadays you can instead easily stumble upon multiple auctions of rare sneakers and luxury bags every month.
Besides, houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's are currently engaged in a non-fungible token (NFT) rivalry that is shaping and reshaping the art world and that may prove inspiring also for museums. It seems years, but it is instead just months since Christie's sale of Beeple's purely digital work with a unique NFT set a record in March, selling at $69,346,250 USD.
Since then, artworks, music and internet memes NFTs have multiplied, proliferating like mushrooms: it is not unlikely to find more than just one NFT auction every month at a major auction house that proves there's definitely a wealthy crypto generation rising.
In May Christie's organised two new NFT sales - "Andy Warhol: Machine Made" and "Proof of Sovereignty"; after launching in April an auction of digital art - "The Fungible Collection by Pak" - last month Sotheby's went for a curated NFT sale entitled "Natively Digital".
Christie's then celebrated Pride month with an auction featuring 5 NFTs, along with 5 physical paintings and never-before-seen drawings, by 18-year-old transgender digital artist FEWOCiOUS, an imaginative creative force also known to fans as Fewo. The five lots fetched $2.16 million.
While that auction was coming to an end, Sotheby's was selling the NFT of the world wide web source code by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee.
Created in 2021 and sold for $5.4m, this sale featured NFTs representing about 9,555 lines of code (Download Source Code for the WWW) written in 1990-1991 (it is worth highlighting that Barners-Lee didn't sell the actual code, but a picture of the code created with a Pythom programme he wrote), a 30-minute animated visualisation of the code, a digital poster of the code and a digital letter written by Berners-Lee in June 2021, about his invention.
The last few days have actually been very successful for Sotheby's in terms of NFTs sales: yesterday the auction house closed the "Sealed CryptoPunks: Five Punks on Paper" online auction. Originally launched in 2017 by Larva Labs, the Crypto Punks are a collection of misfits and non-conformists inspired by the 1970s London punk scene. For this occasion, creative technologists John Watkinson and Matt Hall turned 5 of their 10,000 original CryptoPunks into physical unique lithographs.
Each of the physical CryptoPunks was accompanied by a sealed envelope containing the private keys also called "paper wallet" that, when unsealed and accessed, would endow ownership of the CryptoPunk asset. Some of the CryptoPunks, available to be acquired by buyers with an ETH wallet, were sold for £151,000, while one of them (#770) went for £226,800. The CryptoPunk bestseller proved to be #7523 that sold in another auction in June for a record $11,754,000.
The latest round of Sotheby's successful NFT auctions closed today with a special single-lot auction of the animated digital one-of-one NFT by multi-disciplinary New York-based artist Derrick Adams.
The artwork celebrated the 25th anniversary of JAY-Z's landmark debut album "Reasonable Doubt" originally released on 25th June 1996 (this was the only official event authorized by JAY-Z to commemorate the anniversary). Titled "Heir to the Throne" (the original title of the album), the NFT had a starting price of $1,000 and sold for $138,600.
Now, we have seen in a previous post what kind of lessons NFTs may teach to artists, but all these auctions have further lessons for the art market and for galleries and museums as well.
For example, NFTs bidding price starts at a certain price, but traditional art experts are unable to say for how much these digital works may sell for. Art specialist may indeed be able to value a painting by Van Gogh, Picasso or Matisse, but in the cases of NFTs, the wealthiest crypto collectors will have the final word. In this way the art market is mutating in fast and unexpected ways and this is something that museums should also take into consideration.
Museums have been struggling to attract generations of younger visitors with visually striking events featuring installations and artworks that look Instagrammable enough to convince young people to visit, but many of them lost touch with visitors during Covid-19 lockdowns. Now, as NFTs are becoming more popular and the figure of a new, younger and more hip collector is rising, it may become even difficult for museums (especially for those ones ignoring the power of NFTs...) to attract younger visitors.
What should such institutions do? Well, following closely what some of these auctions houses are doing may not be a bad idea. Sure, an auction house is not a museum, but at the moment Sotheby's and Christie's have proved they have the finger on the pulse of the art world.
Another idea for museum institutions may be to create digital spaces that could be accessed online: digital artworks sold at Sotheby's are on view in its physical spaces, but also in its metagallery, a virtual space in the Voltaire Art District in Decentraland. Here visitors and collectors will find a replica of the auction house's New Bond Street Galleries in London with all five ground level gallery spaces. Museums had better start considering the metaverse as a new way to display their digital artworks or as extra buildings where they could display items that are usually preserved in their archives and are therefore not on view in their physical spaces.
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