Sotheby’s goes cutting edge

LATEST CRAZE: AUCTION HOUSE ALREADY SELLING DIGITAL NON-FUNGIBLE TOKENS

Cross-pollination between the old and new art worlds is good news.

Sotheby’s auction house is almost three centuries old but its top brass want to embrace the cutting edge of technology and all of its buzzwords – metaverse, NFT and crypto among them.

“The reason Sotheby’s has existed for 277 years is because we have a history of embracing innovation and so NFTs is no different,” Charles Stewart, the firm’s American chief executive, tells AFP in an interview.

He is talking about non-fungible tokens, the ubiquitous digital objects that are linked to pieces of art or other items, some of which the ancient auction house has sold for millions of dollars over the past year.

And even better for Stewart’s

business, he says there is plenty of cross-pollination between the old and new art worlds.

“The traditional art world is hearing a lot about NFTs. Many don’t understand it. Some have

embraced it. But there’s absolutely a curiosity,” he says on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress

in Barcelona.

“The same is true the other way around. For a lot of young technology investors – in particular founders, entrepreneurs – NFTs has been a gateway into the broader art market.”

By way of example, crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun shelled out more than $70 million at Sotheby’s for a work by Swiss-born 20th -century artist Alberto Giacometti last year.

Over at rival auction house Christie’s, a collector paid a similar amount for a NFT by a US artist known as Beeple.

Opinions on the merits of NFT art vary wildly.

The most famous collections – Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks – feature cartoon images replicated 10 000 times with algorithm-generated variations.

Also, those who buy NFTs do not get a physical product, rather they receive a verified entry on a blockchain – essentially a piece of computer code.

The value comes from the supposed rarity or fame of the object, often driven by celebrity endorsements.