One of the world's oldest auction houses, Sotheby's, will hold an auction on July 26 as part of its Gen Art Programme campaign, in which works by Gen artists will be sold using blockchain technology.
The first artist to take part in this endeavour will be Vera Molnar. The 500 generated images will be offered for sale on Sotheby's Metaverse platform. Bidding will start at 20 ETH, and the company has called the initiative a "reverence for cryptocurrency collectors".
The project uses the Art Blocks Engine as the infrastructure solution for generative image-based, non-fungible tokens.
Sotheby's Gen Art is launching a scheme to promote some of the world's most famous artists. It will be run appropriately: up to three artists per year will be chosen to exhibit their generative work in unfolding form as a new medium.
The auction house has hired Brian Beccafico as an NFT expert in its digital art division in 2022.
In May this year, Sotheby's began auctioning off non-fungible tokens from the defunct hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. Their collection includes CryptoPunk #6649 in zombie style, Ringers #879 by Dmitry Chernyak and Fidenza #216 by Tyler Hobbs.
In addition, Sotheby's had previously auctioned the manuscript Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which is believed to be the first time the term 'meta-universe' was used.
