Nifty Gateway hosted a Pak NFT sale that makes them the most expensive living artist, knocking Jeff Koons off the top spot.
Or so says Nifty Gateway.
The curiously designed sale brought in $91.8 million with 28,000 people buying 266,445 units of a Pak artwork that can, in theory, be combined into a single NFT, owned by a single buyer.
The intricacies get more complicated as the sale—or “merge,” as Pak calls it—is broken down.
According to Artnet News,
The event began on December 2, when buyers were invited to buy stakes of the work that could later be accumulated into a greater “mass.” Prices started at $299 for buyers who already owned works by Pak. Later, after the sale was opened to anyone, the price jumped to $575 per share and increased by $25 an hour through the end of the auction.
Nifty Gateway offered price breaks for anyone buying in bulk: buy 10, get one free; buy 1,000, get 300 free. Sales were tracked on a leaderboard showing who had acquired the most “mass” until the sale ended on December 4.
The resulting NFTs were minted over the following days, each worth the total number of shares purchased by any single buyer. The NFT that ends up with the largest “mass” is the alpha, which could conceivably grow if its owner buys more shares from another collector on the secondary market.
Adding yet another twist, if any portion is resold to a buyer with other portions, the corresponding NFTs that are traded are then destroyed and “amassed” into the new, larger work, which conceivably grows in value.
The combined NFTs would make it pricier than Koons’s Rabbit (1986), which sold at Christie’s in 2019 for $91 million.
So, who is Pak?
The enigmatic digital artist was brought into the art world’s upper echelons in April of this year through a high-profile, three-day online auction at Sotheby’s that totaled $17 million.
According to The Wall Street Journal,
The sale also stood out to art-market insiders because the creator behind it all isn’t well known to galleries or museums.
The fact that Sotheby’s elevated the artist with a solo sale anyway is the latest sign of Pak’s ascendance as the Pied Piper of virtual art—a creator long hailed by a new generation of digital artists and crypto investors whose purchasing power could ultimately affect art values overall.
Everything about Pak is deliberately opaque—much like the cryptocurrency markets that propelled the artist’s career. Pak is a pseudonym for an anonymous artist or possibly a team of creators. The artist, who the auction house says prefers the pronouns they/them, won’t say—and the artist’s online fans don’t appear to care.
Some digital-art websites such as Behance have listed Pak as hailing from Istanbul. Others on Twitter claim Pak is Pakistani without offering evidence, while digital sleuths in lengthy Reddit debates have tracked Pak’s sites’ IP addresses to Istanbul and Amsterdam.
Pak’s social-media avatar is a zero, and the artist’s nickname is “The Nothing.”
(Photo, Nifty Gateway; via Artnet News)