Crypto artist Pak sells $91.8 million work: is he the most expensive artist ever?

A record and already much discussed sale was the one that the mysterious digital artist Murat Pak (or, more simply, Pak) managed to score last week on the digital marketplace Nifty Gateway, a well-known platform for buying and selling digital artworks in NFT format. Some thirty thousand collectors (28,983 to be precise) in fact bought 266,445 shares of his work The Merge, for a total sum that touched $91.8 million. The sale of shares in the work began last December 2 when collectors were invited to purchase individual units of the work starting at a price of $299, all initially reserved for buyers who already owned works by Pak. Later, when the sale was opened to the entire public, units reached prices as low as $575, marking increases of $25 per hour. This was all over a 48-hour period, until December 4.

When the sale was over, NFTs corresponding to the total number of shares purchased by individual buyers were minted (if a collector purchased multiple shares of The Merge, he or she got only one NFT of corresponding value). Is this therefore the most expensive sale for a single work of art? Not really, because The Merge has been reduced into several NFTs, in a kind of open edition: however, if a collector decides to sell his share to another collector who already has another share, the first buyer’s NFT will be destroyed as the share will join the second collector’s NFT going to increase the value of the work. Thus, in theory, if all 266,445 units were combined into a single work, that final single NFT would become the most expensive work in history for a living artist, surpassing Jeff Koons’ 1986 Rabbit, which sold in 2019 at a Christie’s auction in New York for the sum of $91.1 million.

In essence, The Merge sits somewhere between an edition (moreover, as mentioned, open and unrestricted) and a single work, and defies conventional art market norms precisely because of its mechanism for combining the various multiples, a concept that does not exist in the “physical” art market: the set of multiples can potentially lead to a single work of art, the value of which would exceed that of the most expensive work ever sold for a living artist.

In short, not bad for an artist whose identity is not even known: indeed, it is not even known whether he is an individual or a collective of artists. Pak is, however, one of the names at the forefront of the digital art world, an environment he has been frequenting for the past two decades, and well known to enthusiasts also for having created in 2014 the artificial intelligence Archillect, an algorithm that is able to record people’s tastes by analyzing shares and likes on social networks and thus proposing images to the individual user accordingly.

“This is the first time ever that we’ve come up with something like this,” Pak commented, “and what’s more, not through a third-party run auction house, but through a Web 3 technology company.” “This,” Duncan Cock Foster, co-founder of Nifty Gateway, echoed him, “is further validation for NFTs as a medium for art and innovation, which could only be integrated through blockchain technology.”

Pictured: Pak, The Merge

Crypto artist Pak sells $91.8 million work: is he the most expensive artist ever?

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