wow. that story reminds me of the auction of Damian Hirst's For the Love of God in 2007 (the diamond skull). it sold for something staggering like $100 million to a private collector, but the collector was later revealed to be an investment consortium consisting of Hirst, his dealer Jay Joplin and a third unnamed party.
On Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 6:23 PM Felix Stalder <fe...@openflows.com> wrote: > > > On 14.03.21 14:25, Rachel O' Dwyer wrote: > > The article includes a discussion of economic *'signalling' *that was > > prompted by conversations with Ruth Catlow which chimes with Felix's > > questions about what the digital art purchase 'says'. > > > Doma alerted me to this analysis, and if it's correct, then this is > basically a "pump-and-dump" scheme. > > > https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beeple-art-buyer-and-his-nft-defi-scheme > > I suspect there is more to it, more layers of scamminess, but so far the > story goes like this: > > The buyer, MetaKovan, and the seller, Metapurse, are entities > controlled by the same person, Vignesh Sundaresan. > > Metapurse is a fund which owns digital art works. It's mission is to > "democratize access and ownership to artwork." Quite a statement to make > in relation to digital art, but the entire story is full of scammy > rhetoric. > > You can buy into this fund, called B20, then you own a tiny portion of > its art works. You do this by buying special B.20 tokens. The value of > these tokens reflects some speculative position on the underlying value > of the art works held by the funds or profits to be made from selling > these works. > > There are 10 million tokens minted. 56% of these are owned by > Metapurse/MetaKovan who thus controls the entire process in terms of > writing to the blockchain. 2% are owned by Beeple himself (oh!). In > December, Metapurse bought Beeple's art work for 2.2 million. On January > 23, Metapurse sold 1.6 million tokens at $0.36 a pop. > > After the sale, which greatly inflated the value of the "assets" held by > the fund, the value of the tokens rose to 23.00 and then fell back to > 16.00. Given that buyer and seller are controlled by the same person, > the actual costs for the purchase are only the feeds to be paid to > Christie's, some 9 million. > > You can do he math yourself, but the profit margins are staggering, if > Sundaresan manages to to get cash out his own tokens while it lasts. > > What I find remarkable is the role of Christie's in generating the > narrative. Auction houses seem to have specialized in this lately, > perhaps they always have. But, remember Sotheby's sold a Banksy work > that shredded itself (Oct 2018). Well, almost shredded. The story went > around the world, greatly enhancing the value of the work. It's hard to > phantom that Sotheby's did not examine the art work before hence > realized that there was something hidden in the frame. Or, when > Christie's auctioned off the "Portrait of Edmond de Belamy" in December > 2018. The value is really generated by the story, told by a blue-chip > auction house. > > The fact that all of this is so scammy doesn't seem to matter, because > it's the money that makes it real, the sheer scale is self-validating, > even if the money itself is barely real to begin with. > > > > > > > -- > | |||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com | > | Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt | > > # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission > # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: -- http://www.rachelodwyer.com/ +353 (85) 7023779
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