Earlier this week a rumor started spreading through the Bored Ape Yacht Club community, today that rumor was verified – Bored Apes will be hitting the auction block at Christie’s in September. This is a significant milestone for Bored Ape Yacht Club and for NFTs in general, and I want to get into this more, but first – here’s the official release from Christie’s:
Christie’s presents No Time Like Present, featuring the very first NFT sale in Asia offered by an international auction house. Key highlights of the sale will include a group of exceptionally rare CryptoPunks created by Larva Labs, as well as Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Larva Labs’ latest creation Meebits. This auction also marks the first time BAYC and Meebits will be offered outside of any NFT-trading platform. This sale is poised to set another milestone in the history of Crypto Art.(Source – Christies.com)
Okay, now let’s chat about why this is a big deal, not just for Bored Ape Yacht Club but for NFTs and the whole market moving forward. First, let’s talk about the elephant in the room – we’ve become divided into two camps, people who bought NFTs a few months ago and are riding one heck of a wave, and those who didn’t and tend to just write comments on blogs like mine about how this is a big bubble and doesn’t make any sense.
First, know that I love you all, even if you don’t get this whole “NFT craze” or think it’s a bubble. What I can tell you is what I think because well, this is my personal blog so you end up hearing my point of view 🕺 I don’t think there’s any craze or bubble, just like cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are challenging the status quo in the financial world, NFTs are challenging the status quo in the art world.
When companies like JPMorgan started getting into Bitcoin, traditional investors began to accept it more. NFTs have been around for a long time but once Christie’s held an auction for Cryptopunks, the art world started taking them a lot more seriously. The big question was – is Cryptopunks the one NFT that would reach the traditional art world, or would others break through. Now we know the answer to that question.
Seeing Bored Ape Yacht Club in a Christie’s auction is a bit surreal, I’ll be honest. I’ve gone through an incredible journey with these wonderful apes, and taking a lot of shit for it, from everyone. It reminds me a lot of when I first got into domain investing. I remember telling my friends and family what I was doing and they all said the same thing, “What?!?! Who would pay a lot of money for a simple domain name?” It just didn’t make sense to anyone.
When I bought my first ape, the fine gentleman I call “Captain Morgan” who now proudly sits at the top of my blog, people thought it was crazy to spend any money on a JPG. At that time maybe it was a little crazy, but now I can tell you, this is art, and Bored Ape Yacht Club is what inspired me to get more interested in and begin collecting art. Now I have four apes, and I love them, love displaying them, building personas around them, heck – one of them, Frankie Four Trait has his own Twitter account. Just look at these beautiful apes – this is art.
I’ve heard people say, “well it’s just not the same as original art that you hang in your house.” But what I think people are missing is that people like me never had any interest in buying art for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and hanging it in my living room. NFTs are more relevant to me, and honestly feel a lot more permanent. I’m used to buying digital things, never cared much for physical things, so if I was going to get into art, it was going to be digital art, and yes – NFTs fit the bill because it is meaningful to me, and many others, to be the exclusive 1/1 owner of a piece of digital art.
Christie’s giving Bored Ape Yacht Club its stamp of approval changes the game in many ways for a lot of us. These NFTs are real investments, they’re not just silly JPEGs, they’re valuable, we love them, and it’s inspired a love for art that I really never knew I had. Now I’m talking with artists on Twitter, commissioning original works, joining interesting conversations about art, it’s a blast. As for hanging the art on my wall and looking at it – I’ll be honest, I like having it here on my blog, on Twitter, and in my OpenSea account a lot, hanging it on the wall is something I know traditional art lovers care a lot about, but for me, having it as a part of my digital identity and displaying it online is just as satisfying.
The world is changing and I don’t think NFTs are a fad that are going away. Heck, Christie’s started in 1766 and up until this year art has been sold in the exact same as it did when they started – did you really think it would stay the same forever? I see NFTs as a foundational shift, a move that’s made art more relevant for people like me, and it’s creating new communities, and connecting people in such a positive and meaningful way. I couldn’t be more excited about the adventure ahead, these are the early days and if you’ve been a naysayer so far, maybe you can take a step back and think how you’d like to remember where you were and what you did when the art world went digital…
