The Sotheby's auction house has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by investors who regret buying Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that sold for highly inflated prices during the NFT craze in 2021. A Sotheby's auction duped investors by giving the Bored Ape NFTs "an air of legitimacy... to generate investors' interest and hype around the Bored Ape brand," the class-action lawsuit claims.

The boost to Bored Ape NFT prices provided by the auction "was rooted in deception," said the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Central District of California. It wasn't revealed at the time of the auction that the buyer was the now-disgraced FTX, the lawsuit said.

"Sotheby's representations that the undisclosed buyer was a 'traditional' collector had misleadingly created the impression that the market for BAYC NFTs had crossed over to a mainstream audience," the lawsuit claimed. Lawsuit plaintiffs say that harmed investors bought the NFTs "with a reasonable expectation of profit from owning them."

one of the funniest things about pompidou receiving a cryptopunk donation is that the punk is still in the yuga labs wallet. in other words, pompidou’s ownership is not recorded on the blockchain, but on good old fashioned paper lol

It’s the apotheosis of capitalism where the market now provides a financial token game for every meme, every celebrity, every political movement, and every bit of art and culture—with each tribe competing against each other in a war of all against all for the hyperfinancialization of all human existence. Is that the world we want to live in?

Web3 is a deeply polarizing topic for technologists because it’s designed to be that way. It’s a rhetorical trick to set up a false dichotomy between the legacy internet world of popup ads and Zuckerbergs—which legitimately does suck—and a fantasy world built on technologically incoherent pipe dreams and phoney crypto-populism.

Last month, Tom Kuennen, a property manager from Ontario, coughed up $500 worth of cryptocurrency for a JPEG of an Elon Musk-themed “Moon Ticket” from DarpaLabs, an anonymous digital art collective. He purchased it through the marketplace OpenSea, one of the largest vendors of so-called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, in the hopes of reselling it for a profit.

Seeing a lot of NFT folks building a straw man version of the traditional art world that describes it as solely a provider of financial investments for rich collectors. This is profoundly wrong and feels defensive and self-justifying. A thread.

Since at least the 60s a lot of artists have explored various approaches to making work that resist or question the commodity value of art objects. Conceptual art, land art, installation art, and performance art all produced work that had no obvious way of being sold at the time.

More recent generations have taken these ideas even further with social practice, relational aesthetics, net art, and various threads of contemporary feminist art amongst other movements that exist in parallel to the exploding art market.

These types of artists tend to have a complex and evolving relationship to the art market — sometimes explicitly resisting it, sometimes adapting to it and manipulating it to their own ends, sometimes being exploited by it or selling out to it.

And while there has definitely been a huge influx of investment cash into the art market in the last few decades a number of other institutions that are less completely commercial have also arisen: contemporary museums, the biennial system, residencies, artist collectives, etc

Ironically this type of art gets attacked and dismissed as “elitist” by the general public much more than the work that is actually being sold for millions and treated as investments by financial elites, which is primarily traditional painting and sculpture.

Like a lot of “anti-elitist” rhetoric, many NFT proponents’ attacks on the art world are not truly populist but instead fighting against one elite (the art world) on behalf of another elite (the tech world).

So far NFTs don’t provide anything other than new tools for treating art as commodities. They don’t do anything for improving access or creating context for critical or reflective work — though I’m hopeful we’ll see more moves in these directions in the future.

But, until then, I think the whole NFT scene would benefit from a big dose of humility in relationship to the traditional art world. There are deep cultural traditions and knowledge there. Dismissing that is reactionary and culturally destructive not creative and forward looking.