Bidding began at $50, quickly leapt from $100 to $10,000 to $100,000, and soon landed at $1,444,444, which became the winning bid. For the remaining two days of the auction, no one else stepped in.
The second stand-alone work is called The Pixel, and consists of a single, gray pixel. The explanation provided by the website is that “it is a token that signs the most basic unit of a digital image in a traditional global auction house. It is a tiny mark to carry digitally native art to a potential future history.”
Bidding was very different for The Pixel. It, too, started at $50, then moved to $5,555, then hopped up to $25,000. It made its way on the first day to $1,111,333, where it languished for the second day.
With less than a minute left in the auction, a bidding war erupted between the collector Eric Young and someone with the username 33. For more than an hour, as successful bids reset the auction countdown to five minutes, the price crept up in small increments until Young placed the winning bid, for $1,355,555. “One. Single. Pixel.” tweeted Pak after the sale.
Pak’s Biggest Booster Is Pak
Through the sale, Pak was commenting on the bidding almost like a sportscaster, using various collectors’ usernames to create a horse race-like atmosphere. One tweet read “And @pablorfraile comes in defending the tiny pixel.” This was followed soon after by another: “In the meantime @illestrater_ takes position for The Switch and @etyoung shows his blade for The Pixel.”
Pak also aggressively hyped the sale, retweeting fan testimonials (“@muratpak is Digital Da Vinci” and “What @muratpak is doing is historic and goes beyond NFTs” are representative samples) and a YouTube video in which the speaker implores viewers: “Please, do yourself and the NFT community a favor and get yourself a Cube.” Even Paris Hilton chimed in, using the #PakWasHere hashtag in a presumable attempt to win the “Influencer” NFT.
This was not, in other words, a traditional auction in which the artist stays above the fray. But then again, digital art attached to NFTs is not typical art.
For starters, Pak consigned the work to Sotheby’s and Nifty Gateway, meaning the artist would directly reap the proceeds of the sale. And then there’s the fact that NFTs are designed to give the artist a kickback every time the work sells on the secondary market, making the sale’s incentives—most notably, the one where whoever spends the most on the secondary market gets a “free” NFT—gifts that keep on giving.
That is, at least, partially what makes NFTs so unique. It doesn’t matter if you're giving or getting; as long as the market rises, everyone wins.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.