Last week, a poem by Ana Maria Caballero sold at Sotheby’s for 0.28 Bitcoin or $11,430. Caballero’s poem, ‘Cords’, was featured in an online auction of Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions called Natively Digital.
The Natively Digital collection was designed as a deep dive into the world of NFT-like Ordinals on Bitcoin, and featured notable early inscriptions. In addition to the inscription, the buyer of “Cord” also receives a signed print of the poem.
Michael Bouhanna, VP and head of digital arts at Sotheby’s, tweeted this week that “Cord” is the first-ever individual poem to be sold by the 280-year-old auction house, excluding manuscripts and books.
The importance of the Sotheby’s auction for “Cord” was not lost on Caballero, who called it an opportunity to affirm the inherent value of written poetry.
#AuctionUpdate: ‘Cord’ by @CaballeroAnaMa reaches $11,430 (0.28 BTC).
With the digital piece, the collector of ‘Cord’ also receives a signed print of the poem. pic.twitter.com/UdltWiQfoK— Sotheby’s Metaverse (@Sothebysverse) January 22, 2024
“It’s an incredible opportunity to make a statement where words, language and poetry have value [their] own,” Caballero said Declutter after the sale. “Not with anything else attached to it, not with images, not with sound, not with any other form of experience. Only the language of the poem, only its text, is what was sold.”
“Cords” will be featured in Caballero’s upcoming book Mammal. Other artists in the Natively Digital auction included FAR, XCPinata, Nullish, Rudxane, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Popoki, Shroomtoshi, Des Lucréce and Claudia Hart. One inscription linked to the ‘Quantum Cats’ collection sold for more than $250,000.
“I was in contact with Michael Bouhanna from Sotheby’s because he wanted to organize a sale for Ordinals. I thought the curatorial theme should be about archeology in the blockchain,” shared FAR Declutter on Twitter. “So I thought it would be interesting to have a poem, and I invited Ana.”
In her writing career, Caballero has won several awards, including the Beverly International and José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prizes. Together with Kalen Iwamoto and Sasha Stiles, Caballero launched the digital poetry and NFT gallery theVerseverse in 2021.
In August, theVerseverse collaborated with Los Angeles’ Fahey/Klein Gallery to create an exhibition that combined Ginsberg’s photo with AI-generated poetry. Although “Muses & Self: Photographs by Allen Ginsberg” mimicked the style of the Beat Generation icon, the exhibition drew mixed reactions from the poetry community.
Congratulations to Ana whose work is incredibly well received!
The first poem ever sold @Sothebys ❣️https://t.co/QEj4rU1orF https://t.co/CaqtDG1Nap
— Michael Bouhanna (@michaelbouhanna) January 22, 2024
“Ana explores the influence of biology on social and cultural rituals,” Sotheby’s wrote on Twitter. “Her work reveals the reality behind romanticized motherhood and challenges the narrative of sacrifice as virtue.”
As Caballero explained, “Cords” is written in a style of poetry called villanelle. A villanelle is a poem with 19 lines and five stanzas, comparable to a paragraph with three lines each and one stanza with four lines. A villanelle uses two repeated rhymes and two lines used multiple times.
“I love that statement of value for poetry, and for verse, especially because this is a poem about motherhood; it is about pregnancy, about the body, about embodiment,” Caballero said. “So it’s even more meaningful in a market that is often male-dominated,” she said, adding that the auction for “Cords” received more than 40 bids.
Caballero said she chose to participate in the project using a centuries-old poetic form to “pay tribute to the technically complex chain that is Bitcoin, you know, that launched it all.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward