Last month, Sotheby’s announced plans to collaborate with the anonymous digital artist Pak for its first NFT sale. ‘The Fungible’ collection will go live on Nifty Gateway at 12pm EST today until April 14. The multi-day action will no doubt be closely watched, given the historic success of Christie's first NFT auction and the mystique surrounding Pak.
The elusive artist has been referred to as “Satoshi of crypto art” in reference to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous person or people who developed Bitcoin. Whether Pak is a real person, an AI construction, or a team of engineers, they have gained a growing following in the digital art space for creating Archillect, ”an AI created to discover and share stimulating visual content.” Millions of people, including Elon Musk, interact with Archillect's social media accounts, which use AI technology to scrape the internet for visuals.
Pak is one of the rarer digital artists who are looking critically and self-referentially at the crypto art and meaningfully interrogating the bounds of the medium. In 'The Title,' for example, Pak pushes past the standard drop format to question the value of an artwork and if it is a simple “the file” or something else. Max Moore, Co-Head of Sotheby's Contemporary Art Day Sales in New York said, “It was important that our first collaboration with an NFT artist was with a digital and crypto native creator who is known for bringing ingenuity and technological sophistication to the emergent artform.”
Speaking of the partnership with a major auction house Pak explained: “With this kind of a scale, I expect it to play a major cultural role in telling the narrative of the digital world to the traditional world in terms of the medium definition and value creation.” The Fungible Collection sale, which is set to take place over the course of three days, will include open editions, wherein multiple buyers can purchase minted tokens for the same work at a fixed price of $500.
A core component of The Fungible Collection by Pak is the Open Editions. These Editions enable collectors to purchase as many fungible cubes as they wish during the sale period for a fixed price. These fungible cubes can be purchased individually or many at a time, and will deliver its collector a different set of NFTs based on the total cubes they own.
Fungible Open Editions will enable collectors to purchase as many fungible cubes as they wish during the sale period for a fixed price. These fungible cubes can be purchased individually or many at a time, and will deliver its collector a different set of NFTs based on the total cubes they own. The individual NFTs are: A Cube (1), Five Cubes (5), Ten Cubes (10), Twenty Cubes (20), Fifty Cubes (50), Hundred Cubes (100), Five Hundred Cubes (500), Thousand Cubes (1,000).
Head to Niftygateway to register.
