Cornering The Market #93 - Feb 14, 2024
RIP Rutherford Chang, Christie's AI art sale pushback, and more | Cornering The Market #93
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Market Recap
It's not market news, but it felt appropriate to start with the sad passing of Rutherford Chang, a wonderful artist who was only 45 years old.
We know Rutherford best for his Ordinals collection CENTS which cataloged the penny onto the bitcoin blockchain, but he was a well known artist beyond web3 and will be greatly missed
Overall market sentiment is up from last week and it's not 100% clear why.
Even before Sam Spratt's huge sale (more on that below) there seemed to be more optimism and people buying.
They can't hold us down for too long! No major changes in the places people are buying (we see you Winds of Yawanawa), but we surely aren't complianing
Read on below for the top news, upcoming releases, and more!
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News & Events
Speaking of complaining...over 6,000 human artists have signed a petiton against the Christie's upcoming auction "Augmented Intelligence" featuring all AI artworks, which is mostly a who's who of web3 AI artists (and will accept crypto, though that didn't make the headlines).
The petitioners are lamenting the use of models that learned on copywrighted works, which miss the incredible amount of skill and time it takes to actually wield these tools. Regardless of where one stands on the issue, any press is good press and I suspect the petition will only bolster the sales.
The auction will run Feb 20-March 5 and the lots are up for viewing
We have a double dose of AI art news stories today, this time with 2 firsts - Botto is releasing it's first generative art works - the AI was trained on Javascript, creating hundreds of models with code, and the top 23 algos were voted on by the Botto community.
Keke is an autonomous AI artist created by some big brains from MIT that has full control and decision making on the art, a first of it's kind we believe.
We mentioned a huge Sam Spratt sale right? But we didn't say how big - a whopping $3m was spent on "X. Masquerade" by the recent-on-the-scene big pocketed collector Kanbas.
Wow! I am very curious to hear how much this sells for down the road, and check out Roger Dickerman's excellent reporting on the sale
Another Lost Robbie sold, this one for ~$585,000, to a relatively new collector who explained their rationale - love to see it!
Speaking of sales, we'll just highlight one - gmstudio saw sweeps across almost all of their collections to a single collector.
We love to see the interest in the grass roots collector community and art studio.
OK one more, this awesome hoodie cryptopunk sold for 125E - oh what a time to be liquid!
Great art, great prices - beautiful art for ~$500 or less
Plasticity by P4stoboy - 0.16E
Empire by Sheldrick - 0.062E
BITFRAMES by Matt DesLauriers - 0.023E
Koripo by Rich Poole - 0.037E
Exciting upcoming drops
2/18 - Geometric fluidity by Botto (Verse) - the 1/1/1000 genesis code based art from Botto launches as a standalone collection for 0.1E each.
Check out the website for the 3 minting phases, details, and an AL to see if you made the snapshot (prior holders of Botto and Verse works were eligible)
2/20 - Exit Vectors by Keke (Fellowship) - A 1/1/500 piece collection with 300 reserved for the top 300 $KEKE token holders (for 0.1E each), 99 going to individual auctions with a resting price of 0.1E, 1 going to the Christie's AI auction, and 100 to be placed privately by Fellowship
Art to highlight
Strands of Solitude by William Mapan - We love Mapan and think he's the best generative artist out there. Strands recently saw 8 sales to forcethehabit, a great collector, so we felt it's worth highlighting.
Mapan mentioned the work emerged out of his emotions that came during Covid, reflected in the metadata with palettes such as blues, creativity, despair, and freedom.
It's an evolution on his best known Anticyclone and was released on the now quiet / potentially defunct Tonic platform, which may be why it's a bit under the radar.
But it's beautiful work and for many collectors their favorite collection from the artist who seems to have unlimited range.
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