Vera Molnar, regarded as the first female digital artist, will be honored with the inaugural sale on July 26.
This summer, the art auction house Sotheby’s will introduce a generative art program that will spotlight artists working in the field of digital art through entirely on-chain transactions.
The Sotheby’s Gen Art Program will debut on July 26 and will feature two to three generative artists annually. Vera Molnar, a pioneer of generative art and widely regarded as the first female digital artist, will be honored with the inaugural sale. In the 1960s, Molnar started making computer art after beginning her career in the middle of the 1940s. Since then, she has amassed an outstanding body of work that is frequently acknowledged as an influence for contemporary generative artists like Dmitri Cherniak and Tyler Hobbs.
The popular generative art platform’s white-label generative minting infrastructure solution, the Art Blocks Engine, powers the software. For the first time in the 300-year history of the art auction house, sales made through the Gen Art Program will be entirely on-chain and sold in a Dutch auction style. 20 ETH will be the starting bid, and it will be gradually decreased until only one bid is needed to purchase the item.
Sotheby’s claims that the use of ETH for all prices is a gesture to its “crypto-native collectors.”
Sotheby’s has maintained its presence in the online art world by holding a recent string of lucrative non-fungible token (NFT) sales from its GRAILS collection, which is made up of priceless pieces of art acquired from the collapsed cryptocurrency hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC). It sold many NFT works in June, including Dimitri Cherniak’s “The Goose,” which fetched an astounding $6.2 million. The sale of GRAILS NFTs has generated around $11 million in revenue for the auction house overall.
