Forbes India – Crptyocurrency, Mwc 2022: Sotheby’s Sees Double Benefit To NFT, Crypto Wave

Sotheby’s Chief Executive Officer Charles Stewart attends a keynote on FinTech and Metaverse at the MWC (Mobile World Congress) in Barcelona on March 2, 2022. – The Mobile World Congress, where smartphone and telecoms companies show off their latest products and reveal their strategic visions, is expected to welcome more than 40,000 guests over its four-day run. (Photo by Josep LAGO / AFP)

Barcelona, Spain: Sotheby’s auction house is almost three centuries old but its top brass want to embrace the cutting edge of technology and all of its buzzwords — metaverse, NFT and crypto among them.

“The reason Sotheby’s has existed for 277 years is because we have a history of embracing innovation and so NFTs is no different,” Charles Stewart, the firm’s American chief executive, tells AFP in an interview.

And even better for Stewart’s business, he says there is plenty of cross-pollination between the old and new art worlds.

“The same is true the other way around. (For) a lot of young technology investors — in particular founders, entrepreneurs — NFTs has been a gateway into the broader art market.”

Over at rival auction house Christie’s, a collector paid a similar amount for an NFT by a US artist known as Beeple.

‘Explosion of interest’

Opinions on the merits of NFT art vary wildly.

They are often pilloried for blocky graphics or tacky animation style.

Also, those who buy NFTs do not get a physical product, rather they receive a verified entry on a blockchain — essentially a piece of computer code.

The value comes from the supposed rarity or fame of the object, often driven by celebrity endorsements.

Stewart is unruffled by such criticisms — Sotheby’s has sold both CryptoPunks and Bored Apes for millions of dollars — and he expects the market to continue to boom.

“This year we’re seeing the overall NFT market could be $40 or $50 billion,” he says.

For comparison, the traditional art market raised around $50 billion in total last year.

“It was only a year ago that NFTs burst onto our collective awareness and consciousness, and you’ve seen an explosion in interest since then,” he says.

But Stewart says there is more to the NFT trade than hard cash.

“We’re not looking at it so much as a specific dollar or euro amount as we are just the engagement of an audience,” he says.

© Agence France-Presse