Hosted directly through Sotheby's online auction platform, Natively Digital will showcase some of the most sought-after works created during the medium's seven-year history; the curated auction will be highlighted by Kevin McCoy's Quantum, the first NFT ever minted, the only existing masked Cryptopunk “Alien” by Larva Labs, and The Shell Record by leading generative artist, Anna Ridler.
Natively Digital marks second dedicated sale of NFTs from Sotheby's, following 'The Fungible' collection with digital artist Pak, which totaled nearly $17 million in a multi-day sale event that attracted more than 3.000 unique buyers. Following the announcement earlier this week that Sotheby's will accept cryptocurrency through Coinbase as a form of payment for Banksy's Love is in the Air, buyers will have the option to pay with fiat or cryptocurrency (Bitcoin or Ether). Bidding for all works in Natively Digital will start at $100, highlighting the spirit of openness central to the crypto community. Co-curated by Sotheby's and Robert Alice, Natively Digital presents a stunning collection of early genre-defining artworks alongside the latest conceptual and aesthetic developments in space. In a first for Sotheby's, the sale will feature an artist nominated by the cryptocurrency and digital art communities, to showcase their work on the global stage. More information on the community-driven portion of Natively Digital will be revealed in the weeks leading up to the sale.
Sotheby's will donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale to the Sevens Foundation, a non-profit focused on evangelizing digital artists and empowering young talent to create in new mediums paradigm shifters, such as NFTs. Alongside Sotheby's efforts, Natively Digital artists will donate a portion of their profits to charitable organizations that benefit crypto artists, such as the Mint Fund, a resource for crypto artists outside the US and EU to compensate for costs associated with creating NFT art. Sotheby's will also engage in a carbon offsetting study with Regen Network, a blockchain-based carbon offsetting platform, to accurately offset the mint and transaction costs of the sale.
KEVIN MCCOY, QUANTUM, 2014
Leading the sale is one of the NFT movement's most historically significant artworks, Quantum, which was created by Kevin McCoy – one of the leading new media artists of his generation. Universally regarded as the first NFT ever created, the animated Quantum is timestamped 05-03-2014 09:27:34. Reflecting the immutability of the blockchain timestamp, Quantum offers an unparalleled opportunity to capture the very genesis of the NFT space. In 2014, during a Rhizome conference, McCoy created what he and his collaborator, Anil Dash, called at the time 'monetized graphics' – or monegraphs – by encoding provenance into an original digital work using blockchain technology. Quantum was the first work minted in this way. Generatively built entirely from code, Quantum foreshadows the explosion of digital creativity through NFT and will be available as a seminal work in Natively Digital. Kevin McCoy's work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally, including the Pompidou Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work can be seen in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the 21C Museum and the Speed Museum.
LARVA LABS, CRYPTOPUNK #7523, 2017
Natively Digital will include a rare item from CryptoPunks, a collection of 10.000 unique collectible characters that are considered some of the most iconic NFTs ever created. CryptoPunks is an early crypto art project loved by artists and digital collectors and is considered one of the leading bodies of work in the modern NFT movement. No two CryptoPunks are exactly alike, and these viral cryptocurrency items sold for over $8 million dollars at auction. Natively Digital will feature CryptoPunk #7523, one of nine “Alien” punks and the only one of those nine with a medical mask. CryptoPunk #7523 was created in 2017 by art studio Larva Labs who unknowingly accessorized this CryptoPunk with what would become the ubiquitous symbol of the COVID-19 era, making #7523 one of the most desirable items in the collection. The current owner and seller of CryptoPunks #7523 is Sillytuna, a pseudonymous crypto evangelist and NFT collector. Sillytuna will donate 5% of proceeds from the sale to development projects that support Larva Labs' efforts to expand CryptoPunks and Meebits, two of their community-driven arts initiatives. Additionally, another 5% of proceeds will be donated to organizations involved in ongoing COVID relief around the world.
ANNA RIDLER, THE SHELL RECORD, 2021
The auction will also feature digital artist Anna Ridler, a leading figure in the world of generative art and artificial intelligence who is renowned for her use of data sets to create new and unusual digital artworks. Her most important encrypted works of hers were Bloemenveiling, online
auction of short tulip videos generated by machine learning that used smart contracts on the Ethereum network to sell the work and bots to help drive speculative prices. For Natively Digital, he presents The Shell Record, a continuation of his exploration of this technology, focusing his attention on the history of bartering and trading through one of his earliest mediums: shells. The Shell Record features a series of images of different shells collected from the bank of the River Thames which are part of a dataset for a moving image work created using Generative Adversary Networks (GANs), a recent innovation in machine learning. His work has been exhibited in cultural institutions around the world, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Barbican Center and the Center Pompidou.
