THIS NEW HOUSE
“Sotheby’s is definitely trying to be our best friend. Their philosophy is, basically, that they’ll do whatever they can to be the frontrunner.”
IN THE FALL OF 2020, a young staffer in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art department made a bold pitch to explore a new asset class, hoping to score points with Charles Stewart, the company’s new CEO. Stewart hadn’t heard of NFTs — non fungible tokens, now famous for birthing Bored Apes and CryptoPunks — but he was intrigued. Maybe there was something in it for the venerable auction house founded in 1744.
“I certainly didn’t anticipate what was going to happen over the next 12 months,” says Stewart, 52.
Indeed, few could have predicted that within a year NFTs would become as coveted as a Picasso or a Porsche to a new generation of young, crypto obsessed collectors.
