Yesterday, storied auction house Sotheby’s announced that it will hold an auction of seven Autoglyphs from the collection of Seedphrase, a famed digital art collector. The auction will take place between October 7th and 10th and is sealed, meaning participants will submit their bids without knowing the bids of the other participants.
“Autoglyphs are not just artworks; they represent a monumental leap in the evolution of digital art,” Michael Bouhanna, Sotheby’s Head of Digital Art, said in a statement. “As the first fully on-chain generative artworks, they embody the intersection of creativity, technology, and permanence. The opportunity to acquire a set of seven Autoglyphs is an extraordinary event, as such collections are incredibly rare in the market.”
The seven Autoglyphs are expected to fetch over $3.5 million. Larva Labs launched the collection in 2019 and did so in unusual fashion, inscribing not just the art but the code used to create the art on the Ethereum blockchain. According to a press release shared with Rarity Sniper, the collection invites the viewer to explore the relationship between the code, the machine, and the creator. Autoglyphs marries traditional art and blockchain technology, drawing influences from Sol LeWitt and Francois Morellet.
Currently, the Autoglyphs collection has a floor price of 99 ETH ($230,670) on OpenSea. There are just 512, and those have done 22,923 ($53.4 million) in trading volume across the lifetime of the collection. Of those 512 Autoglyphs, just six are listed for sale on the marketplace.
Although many people in Web3 know Seedphrase from his seven-trait CryptoPunk, he said in an interview that his complete set of Autoglyphs is his favorite, as they were his gateway into onchain generative art. He remarked to nftnow that this auction is a “rare opportunity” to “acquire historical digital artifacts” otherwise unobtainable in today’s market.
Sotheby’s Takes to Web3
There are many use cases for non-fungible tokens, and one of the most prominent is art. Sotheby’s, an auction house founded in 1744 in the United Kingdom, has taken notice of that and responded with enthusiasm to this newfound way of showing, creating, and storing art. In various stories over the past two years, Sotheby’s has:
- Auctioned the art pieces from 3AC’s GRAILS collection
- Facilitated the $6.2 million sale of “The Goose” by Dmitri Cherniak
- Dipped into art on the Bitcoin blockchain with auctions of BitcoinShrooms and others
- Included Grant Yun’s “The Last Supper” NFT in the auction’s house annual auction
- Auctioned rare CryptoPunk and Beeple NFTs
- And facilitated the sale of French artist Bernar Venet’s first digital art collection
It’s easy to see why Sotheby’s has taken to NFT art so much: The method of using NFT technology to store art renders the pieces immutable and tamper-proof. There is also clear provenance and trackability, which helps eliminate fraud. Then there is the merge between code, art, and technology, which leads to new forms of creativity and expression.
While we’ll have to wait for the amount of the winning bid for the seven Autoglyphs, there is no doubt that the auction will drum up some excitement in the NFT market. And excitement, in the crypto world, can be a good thing.