Sotheby’s 2023: Digital Art Sales Soar to $35 Million

Sotheby’s, a prestigious auction house for fine arts, reported that digital art sales brought in “close to $35 million” this year. Michael Bouhanna, the vice president of the corporation and the head of digital art for the organization, provided these figures.

Bouhanna described the year 2023 as “one of the most exciting years for digital art.” Bouhanna concluded Sotheby’s year results about digital art on X (which was formerly known as Twitter) on December 23. Sotheby’s held its very first live digital art auction in 2023, attracting 300 attendees and generating $12 million in sales.

Furthermore, a nonfungible token (NFT) titled “Ringers #879,” created by digital artist Dmitri Cherniak, was sold for a record-breaking $6.2 million, making it the highest price ever paid for digital artwork. Throughout its existence, the auction house has held more than twenty-five auctions, during which it has either solely focused on digital art or included it in contemporary art sales.

In addition, the company has introduced its very own on-chain marketplace, which is known as Sotheby’s Metaverse, for the secondary trade of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). During the following year, Sotheby’s will reportedly place an emphasis on “supporting creators and enhancing their primary market strategies,” as stated by Bouhanna.

It was in April 2021 that the British-American clearing house, which had been around for 279 years, made its debut on the NFT scene. At that time, it auctioned off the work of a digital artist who went by the nickname Pak.

In the time since then, Sotheby’s has completed several digital art sales that have broken records. The non-fungible token (NFT) industry has undergone a rebound as a result of the recent bull run in Bitcoin, with the whole trade volume coming close to one billion dollars in November.

During that month, the average value of non-fungible token (NFT) transactions increased by 114%, moving from $126 to $270. This indicates that users are more eager to engage in higher-value trades than they were in the months prior.