Sotheby’s blockchain Gen Art program shows tech taking a back seat to art

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Sotheby’s are making moves. The same art auction house that recently held several major non-fungible token (NFT) sales, based in the former Madison Avenue building of The Met Breuer, launched its on-chain Gen Art program on July 26, powered by generative art platform Art Blocks.

The sale of NFTs by early algorithmic art maker Vera Molnar gave the program its name. She collaborated with her artist and programmer Martin Grasser to create Themes and Variations, a selling series of 500 unique generative artworks. Overall, it “represents a seamless integration of letters as a pure abstract form,” says the release. “Also Molnar’s affinity for accepting disorder”.

“Sotheby’s Gen Art Program leverages the Art Blocks Engine,” Eric Calderon, founder and CEO of Art Blocks, told Cointelegraph.

“All Generations Art Program sales will be fully on-chain and ETH only,” Sotheby’s Head of Digital Arts and NFTs Michael Bohana told Cointelegraph. “With the integration of the Art Blocks Engine, the Gen Art program will be the first digital art auction to be held exclusively on ETH. After moving Sotheby’s metaverse fully on-chain in May when we announced our new secondary market, it felt like a natural progression to start exploring more selling options that could be fully on-chain,” he added. Last week’s announcement also came just days before his Web3 summit at Christie’s.

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Art Blocks has previously partnered with traditional art heavyweights like New York City’s Pace gallery. The platform partnered with Sotheby’s last fall, but “they didn’t immediately have the project in mind,” Calderon said. “It turned out that [Art Blocks] the engine is perfect for their build [Sotheby’s] He founded the Generative Art Platform after committing to work with Vera Molnar earlier this year. ”

Sotheby’s will conduct this inaugural sale as a Dutch auction for the first time in Sotheby’s 300-year history. Art Blocks has used that model throughout its platform so far. Unlike traditional auctions, where prices start low and go up, prices in Dutch auctions start high and go down. No dramatic bidding wars here as the first offer wins the most. According to Sotheby’s, the model introduces a new psychology. This week’s Molnár sale has a maximum price of 20 Ether (ETH).

Art Blocks has built a business strong enough to withstand the remarkable volatility of NFTs through high-profile strategic partnerships. Sotheby’s, meanwhile, turned the downfall of one of the biggest cryptocurrency institutions into a huge profit. This spring, the company beat expectations by hosting a series of sales competing for Three Arrows Capital’s legendary collection of premium chip NFTs.

Most notably, Dimitri Cerniak’s Ringers #879, “The Goose,” made its auction debut at Phillips last summer, selling for $6.2 million despite a high asking price of $3 million. While many take these estimates with justifiable skepticism, Czerniak’s work turned out to be the second most expensive piece of digital art ever sold. “Editions of the same series sold for less than his $200,000 each just moments later.” forbes It pointed out.

Bouhana said this spring’s financial success indicates that now is the time to launch the Gen Art Program. “We held our first auction dedicated to generative art in April 2022, and given the strong results at that sale, it was clear that collectors would be able to understand the art-historical lineage of generative art and why it is so important to contemporary art as well as digital art.”

“The Gen Art program opens up a lot of new opportunities for us, meaning we will be able to work directly with leading artists for exclusive new sales,” he continued.

The initiative also expands the company’s growing Web3 presence. Specifically, the program will focus on enhancing feature-length generative art, a large-scale series of works by central algorithms.

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Calderón sees a rapid rise in respect for the medium throughout the art world. “One of the reasons is that blockchain technology itself has lagged behind the content being created.” […] There will be less and less talk about the technology behind generative art, and more about the art itself. ”

“After decades of researching how systems and computers can produce works of art, we see this collaboration between Sotheby’s and Art Blocks as the culmination of those efforts,” Molnar said himself. “It offers a new way to generate unique, never-before-seen abstract forms defined by the controlled randomness of machine programming that is the essence of algorithms.”