That was exciting! We just witnessed a piece of digital art history.
Ringer #879 by Dmitry Cherniak, also known as ‘The Goose,’ just sold for $6.2M (including the premium, as the hammer price was $5.4M), eclipsing the $2M to $3M estimates. The auction was coordinated by Sotheby’s in NYC as part of the GRAILS collection.
Ringer #879 by Dmitry Cherniak.
The event was streamed online and was blazing fast, taking around 20 to 25 minutes to complete and having three bidders competing until the end. The winner was prominent collector 6529.
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The following chart shows the top 10 Ringers ever sold. Interestingly, ‘The Goose’ was already the second highest-sold Ringer (selling for 1,800 ETH or $2,997,306 at the time).
The 10 Most Expensive Ringers NFT Sales of All Time.
From the list, all but #879 and #377 are owned by the same wallet.
Despite the massive sale, the chart doesn’t change, as Ringer #109 was sold for $7.1M (2100 ETH) and maintains the top position. ‘The Goose’ sold for the equivalent of 3,700 ETH, becoming the highest sale in ETH terms.
Ringer #109 by Dmitri Cherniak sold for $7.1M.
It is an iconic collection because of its minimal and well-balanced compositions. One of the first Art Blocks Curated collections, Ringers exemplifies the power of generative art, where randomness is at the center stage.
There are an almost infinite number of ways to wrap a string around a set of pegs. On the surface it may seem like a simple concept but prepare to be surprised and delighted at the variety of combinations the algorithm can produce. Each output from 'Ringers' is derived from a unique transaction hash and generated in Javascript in the browser. Feature variations include peg count, sizing, layout, wrap orientation, and a few colorful flourishes for good measure.
Ringers by Dmitri Cherniak official description
The main reason why it has become trendy in the digital art world culture is because it resembles a goose. This might not be that impressive on the surface, but when you think about it, millions of possible Ringers could have been created, so the fact that the goose made it to the 1,000 pieces is a fantastic coincidence.
If we look at the traits, it has 10 pegs out of 55, the body is yellow only (5% of Ringers have this trait with a 75 ETH floor), and it is a Recursive Grid Peg Layout (only 14% of Ringers have this trait and the floor is 89.5 ETH).
I think these traits are interesting, but they don’t make it so valuable on their own. The goose resemblance and its virality (over 34,000 views on OpenSea), hundreds of memes, and derivatives make it stick in our minds.
The Golden Goose derivative by Beeple.
Although Ringer #879 was the main course of today’s Sotheby’s auctions, other fantastic pieces sold for impressive amounts, such as:
Chromie Squiggle #1780 (Perfect Spectrum) by snowfro sold for $635,000.
Archetype #397 by Kjetil Golid sold for $330,200.
The spiral Fidenza #216 by Tyler Hobbs sold for $609,600.
How much time should we wait to see another multi-million gen art sale?
We don’t know, but this will certainly put generative art and digital art on the map —once again.
Until next time,
- Kaloh
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