How Deep-Pocketed Crypto-Collectors Are Rushing Into an Old Art-Market Trap

This week, drawing unsettling parallels to art-market history…

DOUBLE TROUBLE?

In a benefit auction last Monday night, avowed crypto-entrepreneur Andre Abdoune submitted a winning bid of $62 million for artist Sacha Jafri’s 17,000 square-foot canvas The Journey of Humanity. The towering price became the fourth-highest paid at auction for a work by a living artist, just two weeks after another blockchain baron launched Beeple into third place on the same list by paying $69.3 million for his digital-collage-and-NFT combo Everydays: The First 5,000 Days. 

But while these fast-arriving results have rewritten the auction sector’s record books, they also bear eerie similarities to the bombastic buying that immediately preceded the art-market crash of the early 1990s. Teasing out the parallels between the two eras adds valuable specificity to the debate about whether speculative buying is once again nearing an unsustainable level.

Jafri’s behemoth painting set the Guinness World Record for “Largest Art Canvas” when he completed it in September 2020. He created the piece—a free-form composition of richly colored gestural abstractions inspired by drawings from children around the world—without assistants over eight grueling months spent holed up in the ballroom of Dubai’s otherwise-shuttered Palm Atlantis hotel. After opening an exhibition of 40 of the work’s 70 sections at Leila Heller Gallery’s Dubai space this February, Jafri offered it in a sale benefiting a consortium of nonprofits (including Dubai Cares, the Global Gift Foundation, UNESCO, and Unicef), with the hope of raising at least $30 million. 

His aspiration seemed far too ambitious to many observers at the time, including me. My colleague Sarah Cascone noted that Jafri’s previous auction peak was just TWD $2.16 million (USD $70,745), paid for a modestly sized painting called The Dance of the Samurai in a 2019 auction at Ravenel in Taiwan. A $30 million price tag for The Journey of Humanity would have meant an increase of nearly 42,500 percent over his personal record under the hammer—an even more breathtaking leap given that the benefit sale only represented Jafri’s seventh appearance at auction... and, if successful, only the fourth time the work in question would have actually found a buyer, per the Artnet Price Database. 

In the end, Abdoune more than doubled up on Jafri’s price aspirations. At $62 million, the “World’s Largest Art Canvas” jumped over the artist’s prior auction apex by 87,639 percent. That number is large enough to dissolve into meaningless abstraction without some kind of real-world anchor, so think about it this way: it’s about the same price difference that separates a Tesla Model S sedan (about $81,190) from a top-of-the line Gulfstream G650 private jet (about $66.5 million).

Yet the story of Beeple (AKA Mike Winkelmann) is even more extreme. When Christie’s put Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, a digital collage comprising roughly 13.5 years of the artist’s ongoing series of once-daily pieces, and its NFT on the block, it was the first Beeple work offered at auction by a traditional house. Two weeks later, Vignesh Sundaresan, aka Metakovan, purchased the package for $69.3 million, instantly transforming Beeple from an auction unknown into the third most expensive living artist in the public art market. 

The Jafri and Beeple records would have raised my eyebrows even if they had simply been set within the same year. That they happened within 12 days of one another practically turned me into a cartoon character, especially since both buyers’ wealth purportedly came from the same source. 

But it wasn’t because these propulsive results were unprecedented. On the contrary, it was because, to some degree, we’ve been here before… and it didn’t end well.