Sotheby’s has announced that it will use a Dutch auction format for the first time in its 300-year history for a digital sale honoring famed artist Vera Molnár, according to information now provided to nft. The sale marks the launch of the legacy auction house’s Gen Art program, powered by Art Blocks’ Art Blocks Engine – the Web3 company’s generative art solutions platform that provides technical infrastructure support to brands looking to expand their generative coin capabilities .
The sale, which marks the artist’s largest on-chain generative art project to date, is titled Themes and Variations and will take place fully on-chain via Sotheby’s Metaverse on July 26. It will feature an exclusive series of 500 unique artworks that builds on Molnár’s early forays into algorithmic art, which began in the 1960s. The artist’s work is characterized by the integration of letters as pure abstract forms fused with an appreciation for disorder. Molnár teamed up with acclaimed generative artist and creative programmer Martin Grasser to realize her vision.
A first for Sotheby’s
The integration of the Art Blocks Engine is a first for both the platform and an auction house. It also marks the launch of Sotheby’s Gen Art Program, a new avenue for generative artists to offer works for sale in the primary market. The Gen Art program will highlight two to three artists annually with exclusive sales of long-form generative art. All bids and payments associated with the sale of the Gen Art Program are conducted in ETH.
Michael Bouhanna, Sotheby’s Head of Digital Art & NFTs, praised Molnár’s contributions to the field in a press release announcing the development, saying: “Molnár is one of the undisputed legends of generative art, whose decades of experimentation with form have paved the way for paved the way for what we know today as algorithm-based digital art.” He added that the collaboration with Art Blocks is a “landmark moment that will cement her place as the definitive generative artist who laid the foundations for future generations of artists.”
With the announcement, Sotheby’s also introduces a new auction format: Dutch auctions. This method, used by Art Blocks since its inception in 2021, starts with a fixed initial price and decreases in fixed steps until the first bid is made. The cap price for themes and variations is set at 20 ETH, and the format adds a new dimension to the traditional auction process, encouraging bidders and establishing a new price discovery model.
Sotheby’s is no stranger to the world of NFTs, even hosting digital art sales as far back as April 2021 with artist Pak’s iconic $17 million sale of The Fungible. Later that year, the company partnered with Art Blocks for Natively Digital, the first curated NFT auction.
Erick Calderon, founder of Art Blocks, was proud to host Molnár’s work on their platform for the auction, calling it a “truly humbling experience.” Similarly, Grasser, the artist who collaborated with Molnár on this project, described the experience as a “true privilege” and praised Molnár’s work as “decades ahead of its time”.
In 2022, Molnár entered the world of NFTs with her project 2% of disorder in co-operation, the first edition of which was sold at Sotheby’s during the Natively Digital 1.3: Generative Art sale.
Each artwork in Themes and Variations represents a dialogue between letterforms pre-designed by Molnár and the “machine Imaginaire,” the artist’s term for the algorithm or computer imagination. The series is an extension of Molnár’s 2% of disorder in collaboration generative protocol that explores the power of the grid and the randomness of color. Molnár further developed the system by incorporating the appearance of letters (in this case N, F and T), a theme that has been present in her work for decades.
Looking back on her work, Molnár said: “All these variations around letters resonate in me as music. That is why I have titled Theme and Variations to the latest project with the letters N, F and T I am working on for my first and only generative long form art project.”
Embrace Web3 as an auction house
Several Web3 platforms have experimented with the Dutch auction format. Recently, the NFT Marketplace Foundation announced a dynamic pricing feature for NFTs that uses the methodology to better reflect market sentiment and take the guesswork out of an artist’s pricing for their pieces.
Despite being a traditional auction house, Sotheby’s has gained a foothold in recent years and embraced Web3 trends and technologies. Despite the challenging digital collectibles market, it shows no signs of slowing down. In May, the company even launched its own secondary marketplace for fine art NFTs.
Editor’s Note: This article was written by an nft now contributor in collaboration with OpenAI’s GPT-4.