PAK ATTACK
On December 4, 2021, it was reported that the record for the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist, set by Jeff Koons’s Rabbit in 2019 at US$91.1 million, had been broken. The new record-holding piece, Merge (2021), had achieved US$91.8 million. But this sale was just the beginning of a controversy.
The “artwork” was in fact made up of 266,455 NFTs, each comprising a single dot known as a “mass”. These variously sized and priced dots were purchased, in varying numbers, by approximately 26,000 buyers within a 48-hour window on the platform Nifty Gateway. Every time a collector bought a new mass, it would merge with those they already owned; further, collectors could sell their mass on to other buyers—leading, potentially,
