Sotheby’s is the first to recognize payment for a work of art in cryptocurrency

The work of Yves Klein Immaterial pictorial sensibility zone Series n ° 1, Zone n ° 02 (quote on Jacques Kugel) Created in 1959, it sold at auction this Wednesday, with a starting price of € 280,000 and an estimated sale price of between € 500,000. The winning bid was € 850,000 and the final sale price was € 1,063,500. The peculiarity is that Sotheby’s first recognized bid payment in cryptocurrency. It is unknown whether the buyer will deposit money in euros or cryptocurrencies. At today’s rate, it will be 360.5 Ethereum or 26.49 Bitcoin.

The choice of this work as a work that can be purchased in cryptocurrency is not accidental, as it is related to the origin of a peculiar work, which is actually a receipt that has become a work of art and can be considered a precursor to NFTs. . On April 28, 1958, the exhibition opened at the Gallery de Paris. Vacuum. The exhibition, so to speak, was the complete emptying of the gallery space of Iris Clert. But, in Klein’s words, the gallery was not empty, but saturated with “pure pictorial sensibility.” A few months later, several “rituals” were performed that “went beyond” the “intangible painting sensibility”, as its title implies, in the material object: purchase receipts – in gold, so that collectors could become the owners of the vacuum. Zone.

But in order for the purchase to be fully completed, the artist invented that the receipt had to be burned in a ritual in front of witnesses chosen by the artist, while he threw the gold into the Seine River. Three of the show’s ceremonies were performed and documented, and the work that Sotheby’s put up for auction today ranks second. The art auction house linked these performative acts to the crypto art world, the work is a proto-NFT, and the record Klein kept for the owners of the “zones” may have had a resemblance to the blockchain, although in the case of Yves Klein, the registry was not decentralized. The certificate of authenticity created by conceptualists such as Sol Levitt in the 1960s is reflected today in the Second Authentication Revolution, which is Blockchain.

The first owner of one such work was the Italian writer Dino Buzati, who did as Klein asked and burned a receipt on the banks of the Seine. The second owner of the area was the famous antiquarian Jacques Kugel, who bought it on December 7, 1959. As a collector, he did not perform the ritual, but kept the receipt and put it in a frame. It came in 1984 in the hands of its last owner, Loic Malel, who has now sold it. Male explained a few weeks ago that “nothing” was for sale, and therefore it was a work that spoke of “nothing” but “perfection.” As for the original work, he explained that “it’s not just art, it also includes the art market,” a conceptual art line that starts in Duchamp and also runs through landscape artists and other disciplines who did not want their work to be. In a museum or cabin. At the same audition, Sotheby’s sold other works from the Loïc Malle collection that relate to the act of experience.