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Why Wendi Murdoch and Christie’s vice-chairman are selling NFT art
- The deputy chairman of Christie’s, Xin Li-Cohen, and Murdoch are investors in a Hong Kong-registered company that will hold an NFT art auction in September
- TR Lab will sell 99 copies of a digital version of a recent painting by Chinese artist Cai Guo-qiang for US$999 each – payable in cryptocurrency
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In many ways, the burgeoning market for non-fungible token (NFT) art is an enemy in the making for the traditional art market. The underlying technology, that same blockchain protocol behind bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, can do away with the need for third-party authentication, cut out agents and give artists residual rights to sold works.
It is pretty much the opposite of how art is sold at established auction houses.
Yet Xin Li-Cohen, deputy chairman of Christie’s, is doubling up as the head of a new NFT art business that her good friend Wendi Murdoch has also invested in, just as the auction house itself is about to hold an online NFT art sale in Hong Kong for small, machine-generated cartoon profile pictures such as Cryptopunks, which are fetching millions of US dollars each and completely upsetting the way art is valued.
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Rival houses Sotheby’s and Phillips, too, have been enthusiastically marketing their own NFT auctions.
Li-Cohen, a China-born former professional basketball player and Paris catwalk model who has worked at Christie’s for over a decade, says she sees the old and the new existing in parallel worlds.
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