Art market
It had to happen: ‘virtual’ art owning is here, through Non Fungible Tokens, and phantom bids create a stir at a conventional auction
ON your behalf, I am making heroic efforts to understand Non Fungible Tokens (NFTS) and their place in the art market, but with little hope of success. Fungible, as any lawyer would tell you if you could afford the fees, means mutually interchangeable; it defines an item that can be replaced by, or swapped for, another identical item—in art-world terms, perhaps, an unblemished Andy Warhol print. A Rembrandt painting is non fungible, because, even if one exchanged it for something of equivalent value, the two could not be identical.
The ‘token’ here is the point. It is a virtual receipt, the evidence of a transaction that is a link in a blockchain, or encrypted ledger, recording the complete history of a digital asset. Dealings in fungible cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, are traded using blockchain technologies. The ‘art’ that has recently been auctioned for millions in New York is digitally created and can be downloaded or shared by anyone, so the new ‘owner’ does not acquire reproduction rights.
The benefit to creators is that they can register their right to droit de suite and take a cut on further sales of the token, as logged on the blockchain. Shares and downloads are also recorded, and these are deemed to increase the token’s value. In essence (I think, but I may be wrong), what is actually being sold is the abstract concept of ownership together with monetisable ‘likes’.
The Christie’s New York sale offered a digital creation by Beeple, also known as Mike Winkelmann (b. 1981), who had certainly put a lot of work into it (Figs 1 and 2). Christie’s had to invent a new form of cataloguing: ‘EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS token ID: 40913 wallet address: 0xc60562605d35ee710138402b878ffe6F2E23807 smart contract address: 0x2a46f2ffd99e19a89476e2f62270e0a35bbf0756non-fungible token (jpg) 21,069 x 21,069 pixels (319,168,313 bytes) Minted on 16 February 2021. This work is unique.’
Payment was by a digital wallet transfer in the cryptocurrency ether. The auctioneers offered further elucidation; presumably, those who could understand it were unworried by the unhappy grammar: ‘In May 2007, the digital artist known as Beeple set out to create and post a new work of art online every day. He hasn’t missed a day since, creating a new digital picture every day for 5,000 days straight. Individually known as EVERYDAYS, collectively, the pieces form the core of EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, one of the most unique bodies of work to emerge in the history of digital art.’
The opening bid was $100. Two weeks later, after a burst of 180 bids in the final hour, it sold for the equivalent of $69,346,250 (£50.3 million). The buyer was the pseudonymous owner of Metapurse, a Singapore-based NFT production studio and crypto fund, which claims to have ingenious ways of turning it to profit.
The point is that anything, or indeed nothing, can be art if enough people believe that it is. However, with fashion’s revolution, nothing is what they may be left with. NFT art could turn out to be a tulipmania bubble. One thing that seems certain is that creation of, and trades in, NFTS consume inordinate amounts of electricity, with serious effects on the health of the planet. This has been noted by an internet versifier specialising in the Arts, who goes by the tag ‘Limericking’:
The NFT market has grown, As eight-figure auctions have shown. The overall price is A worse climate crisis For art you pretend that you own.
Give that bard a laurel! I hope that, rather than NFT, the acronym Ena—emperor’s New Art—may not turn out to be apposite.
After a little lie down, I return to a simpler, more familiar world. Sotheby’s latest intercontinental online sale was concerned with tangible art, but appears to have been bedevilled by a phantom bidder. This time there were four linked salerooms—paris, London, New York and Hong Kong—with most of the bidders represented by Sotheby’s staff on phones.
The first half was conducted from Paris in euros and the second in sterling from London.
The problem was, seemingly, slight delays in online bids, meaning that several lots had to be re-started after the hammer, including, most embarrassingly, van Gogh’s 18in by 24in Scène de rue à Montmartre (Impasse des Deux Frères et le Moulin à Poivre) (Fig 5), which had been hammered at €16,251,000 after what seemed to be a very late online bid. Soon after, it was announced that this would be re-offered; when it was, it reached only €13,091,250 (£11.16 million). The work, which had been out of sight for a century, was sold in conjunction with the Parisian auction house Mirabaud Mercier.
Edvard Munch’s 1926 Selfportrait with Palette sold under-estimate at £4,334,400; facially, he might have been Ian Fleming’s twin. Could one imagine a blend of their most famous creations? Munch’s enigmatic 35¾in by 76¾in Summer Day (Fig 3) reached a well overestimate £16,284,000. Another striking price, at six times the estimate, was £2,041,750 for Frank Dobson’s sandstone Female Torso (Fig 4), carved also in 1926.
Damien Hirst has announced that he will produce NFTS, perhaps another prompt for caution. His pickled memento mori are not long-term assets: Impossible Journey (Fig 6), a zebra in formaldehyde, sold for £570,000 here. In his 2008 auction, it had reached £1,105,250.
Next week New times, new names