Is Pak the future of art? The question continues to puzzle the art establishment after the enigmatic digital artist who goes by a single moniker was ushered into the art world’s upper echelons last week through a high-profile, three-day online auction at Sotheby’s that totaled $17 million.
The sale, which offered both one-of-a-kind images featuring floating, geometrical shapes and tens of thousands of matching cubes that can be traded like crypto coins, was the auction house’s first foray into the new marketplace for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. The sale also stood out to art-market insiders because the creator behind it all isn’t well known to galleries or museums.
The fact that Sotheby’s elevated the artist with a solo sale anyway is the latest sign of Pak’s ascendance as the Pied Piper of virtual art—a creator long hailed by a new generation of digital artists and crypto investors whose purchasing power could ultimately affect art values overall.
Everything about Pak is deliberately opaque—much like the cryptocurrency markets that propelled the artist’s career. Pak is a pseudonym for an anonymous artist or possibly a team of creators. The artist, who the auction house says prefers the pronouns they/them, won’t say—and the artist’s online fans don’t appear to care. Some digital-art websites such as Behance have listed Pak as hailing from Istanbul. Others on Twitter claim Pak is Pakistani without offering evidence, while digital sleuths in lengthy Reddit debates have tracked Pak’s sites’ IP addresses to Istanbul and Amsterdam. Pak’s social-media avatar is a zero, and the artist’s nickname is “The Nothing.”
Thousands of people, like Manila-based crypto investor Colin Goltra, logged on throughout the sale just to see if Pak added unexpected twists to the auction. “I’m sure art purists will be put off by the artist since the market is part of his performance,” Mr. Goltra, referring to the artist in male terms, adding, “But we see him as one of us.”
best part:
Pak agreed to speak with the Journal by phone using a voice distorting mechanism the day before the Sotheby’s sale and maintain regular contact via a messaging app arranged by the auction house throughout the course of the event
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The artist often replied to questions with gif images of smiling children, cheering crowds or animated emojis.
lmao
Anonymity, Pak said, has proven a useful way to deflect attention from the artist to the art. On the other hand, the artist knows that same anonymity appeals to their core admirers, who often use avatars themselves.
“When I see a name of an artist, I see a face, not the work—so I’m trying to separate the two,” Pak said during the call set up by Sotheby’s before the sale. “I like being gray.”
Pak is best known for creating the Archillect, an artificial-intelligence algorithm the artist launched in late 2014 that acts as a virtual curator. The AI culls social-media feeds and posts images it deems popular every 10 minutes or so on its own feed.
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Mike Winkelmann, a South Carolina graphic designer who goes by Beeple, may have caused a stir last month by selling his digital collage at Christie’s for $69 million (original estimate: $100). But Mr. Winkelmann’s backstory is comparatively straightforward, and the piece he put up for sale could conceivably be printed and hung on a wall.
Not so with Pak. The artist, who said they privately trade in cryptocurrencies, approached the Sotheby’s sale like a gamemaster seeking to demonstrate several technological intricacies offered by NFT smart contracts that might confound traditional art lovers but were designed to appeal to Pak’s fans. Some digital pieces in the artist’s “Fungible” series can be rendered useless or altered by their owners, a digital feat not usually touted by sellers of paintings or sculptures.
Other pieces contained hidden messages such as “I am the medium” in their coding or were given away by the artist to participants who correctly solved a layered cryptography puzzle or guessed the overall sale total beforehand.
“I like creating things that are hard to consume,” the artist said.
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“Now, I feel like we’re almost mainstream, and everyone is taking positions,” Pak said. Rather than take a social-media break, the artist said, “I feel like the main game is just starting now.”
