4 Oct 2023/49 min/Arthemort
MLow X Arthemort
A curator to curator conversation with Brian Beccafico, formerly of Sotheby's Paris, on single artist auctions, the economics of curation, and why you should never work for free.
This never published Google Meet session is the closest thing the archive has to a peer consultation. MLow opens by saying plainly that he looks up to Arthemort's curation, and lays out his own mission statement: his undergraduate thesis interviewing impact investing professionals taught him how much interviews reveal, and he runs this series because PFP communities get pushed to the forefront while the larger art communities are forgotten. Beccafico, doxxed when a Sotheby's press release printed his real name next to his pseudonym, answers with the most detailed inside account of auction house NFT work in the whole corpus.
He walks through landing the Sotheby's job in a bear market (12 interviews, a six month recruiting process, roughly 800 LinkedIn applicants), then the projects: the early 2023 single artist auction for the anonymous monster painter Des Lucrece, built to break the roughly 10 ETH glass ceiling and which roughly doubled its 300,000 dollar high estimate; the Oddly Satisfying 3D art sale he created; and the Grails auctions of the Three Arrows Capital liquidation, where Sotheby's beat Christie's to a portfolio largely assembled by Starry Night Capital. Along the way he explains the machinery: minimum consignment prices that rose from 2,000 to five or six thousand dollars, why auction is a trial by fire with no safety net, and why generative art dominates because it carries the volume, the buyers, and the data.
The second half is a masterclass in the unglamorous craft. He collects the pioneers (a 1970s Vera Molnar edition, Manfred Mohr) but reserves his real passion for art that could not exist without the blockchain. He dissects why women artists sell for less in crypto while outperforming men in the traditional emerging market, tells artists to stop undervaluing themselves, and recounts the Metaverse Summit fiasco that taught him to never again work unpaid. His dream project closes the conversation: a retrospective for the late Alotta Money, an idea he gives away freely because execution, not the idea, is everything.
What this episode teaches
- Ask what their ambition is
Before working with any artist, Beccafico asks one question: what is your ambition? His own is a long lasting impact on art history, and when an artist just wants to make a living, that is fine, but the mismatch means the collaboration makes no sense.
- Auction is a trial by fire
Beyond a reserve price there is no safety net at auction; the market decides. He advised artists with strong prices but no recent mints to stay away, because without fresh demand data a public failure is permanent. Sotheby's minimum consignment rose from 2,000 dollars to five or six thousand while he was there.
- One artist beats fifty
The Des Lucrece sale worked partly because everything scaled by one instead of fifty: one relationship, one trust process, one shared ambition. When he curated a 50 artist auction, every task took fifty times the management.
- Never start unpaid
Whenever a project begins with we cannot pay you, problems follow: broken promises, shrinking scope, no recourse. Good professional people always pay. He tells artists to refuse visibility deals, and admits he learned it by breaking his own rule.
- Price yourself up
His standing advice to women artists who price low to be nice to their collector base: do not undervalue yourself, price the work as expensive as you think it should be. If artists and collectors do not move prices up, the gender discrepancy stays exactly where it is.
- An art advisor is not a financial advisor
He refuses collection management clients whose stated objective is ROI. He can promise that an artist is talented and likely to have a great career, never a return; no one has built a working mathematical model for art prices because too much of the value is not statistical.
- The curator compensates the market's biases
Price gaps track nationality, age, and gender more than talent. He sees the curator's main role as compensating those socioeconomic disparities so talented artists get the recognition they deserve, scouting through artist recommendations because artists always know who is underrated.
- Display is a skill set, not a screen
He works with a technician with 40 years in new media installation, a veteran of Nam June Paik restoration, rather than Wi-Fi dependent NFT display providers. Even top galleries get it wrong: he saw Refik Anadol works in Berlin with the player bar popping up every ten seconds, killing the contemplation the work is about.
- Give the idea away, keep the execution
He shares his dream Alotta Money retrospective openly because nobody steals ideas, they lack the time and perspective to execute them. MLow agrees: it is hard enough to execute on the hundred ideas he already has himself.
The conversation, topic by topic
Doxxed by a press release
The conversation opens mid story: when Sotheby's announced its move into web3, a press release printed Beccafico's real name next to his pseudonym Arthemort. He could not control it, and the anonymity was gone.
Why MLow runs the show
MLow explains that his undergraduate thesis interviewing impact investing professionals was pivotal, and this series applies the same method to crypto art: meet artists, collectors, curators, and builders to understand the market, and elevate art communities that get forgotten while PFPs take the forefront.
Landing the Sotheby's job
Beccafico had worked in the space long before Sotheby's, including a stable DAO job through the bear market. The Sotheby's process ran 12 interviews over six months against roughly 800 LinkedIn applicants. He joined for impact, and because he was being priced out as a collector; as head of sales in Paris he had near total freedom over themes and selection.
The Des Lucrece auction
Sotheby's first auction dedicated to a single NFT artist, in early January 2023. Des Lucrece was averaging roughly 9 to 10 ETH and the explicit ambition was to break that glass ceiling, since almost no category exists between 10 ETH artists and the millions fetched by grails. Anonymity complicated marketing (no Twitter Spaces, since he never shows his voice), but mutual trust and a shared ambition carried it: against a high estimate around 300,000 dollars, the sale roughly reached half a million.
Building the primary market
His thesis inside Sotheby's: auction houses are built for secondary, but in NFTs they can work with artists directly on primary sales, which no one expected of them. His first move as head of sales was a partnership between NFT Asia and the Hong Kong office. He also created themed sales including the Oddly Satisfying 3D art auction in May and cites a New York glitch auction and PFP centered sales such as Chimpers material.
Grails and the 3AC liquidation
The Grail auctions were a consequence of the Three Arrows Capital liquidation: Sotheby's won the entire portfolio in hard negotiation against Christie's and other houses. The selection quality came from Starry Night Capital's original collecting, heavy in generative art, which fit the brand image Sotheby's wanted; Sotheby's mostly estimated and marketed a pot it received whole.
Why generative art dominates the houses
Asked why Sotheby's leans generative (Vera Molnar and its Gen Art program) while Christie's mixes one of ones, he answers without romance: generative is the best selling category, with the volume, the buyers, and large collections whose data lets a specialist gauge demand. One of ones from living NFT artists rarely fetch the millions that the Goose did.
What Arthemort collects
He calls himself an amateur rather than a true collector, buying spontaneously, almost uncontrollably. His test is conceptual: he most values crypto art that could not exist without the blockchain, since animation and illustration exist in the traditional market too. That is why he is not huge on generative art, which has existed for almost 70 years; instead he collects the pioneers, a 1970s Vera Molnar edition and works by Manfred Mohr.
Scouting emerging artists
He hunts artists whose obvious talent is not reflected in price, knowing the gap usually comes from geography, age, or gender rather than ability. Method: taste, word of mouth, and asking artists for recommendations, since artists in a field always know who is underrated. Every bet can still fail, which is why he turns away clients who want ROI.
The gender gap in numbers
He cites the 100 Women in NFT report: in the traditional market, emerging women artists aged roughly 20 to 35 actually outperform men at auction, while in crypto even OG women minting since 2018 mostly cannot go full time. Causes he names: a mostly male collector base drawn to male intimacy in art, women feeling less legitimate and leveraging their networks less, systematic underpricing to be kind to collectors, and caretaking time that men do not lose.
An ethnocentric market
The bias is not only gender. Roughly 80 percent of the top 100 artists by results are American; New York alone represents more than half the global art market while France sits around three to seven percent. A French or Asian artist simply sells for less than an American peer, and rising auction minimums price them out further.
Curation is unpaid work
Prompted by an article he wrote in an hour at a cafe terrace after someone asked him to curate five or six AI artists with no budget, he states it flatly: no curator in the space can make a living from the practice, while curators get painted as gatekeepers leeching off artists. Real curation means scenography, display, sizing, captions, artist logistics, and promotion, and free work produces the sloppy booths he sees at NFT conferences, where the best stands at NFT Paris were built by ex Sotheby's and Christie's staff.
The Metaverse Summit fiasco
He curated a show as a favor for an overworked friend: a huge projection space with 120 projectors that shrank week by week to ten, then four, then two, and four promised hours cut to one. The organizers refused to spend a few hundred dollars on a video editor for three hours of footage, less than half one ticket price. The lesson he draws: reputation is everything, disappoint people and you pay the price, so he now does fewer shows and guarantees the ones he does. A related 2021 sting: at the MENART fair, showing artists (some refugees in France who had used crypto to escape state censorship, some of whom fought ISIS), his booth partner pulled out a week before and he paid double with no contract to protect him.
The Alotta Money retrospective
His dream project, and the first one he ever pitched Sotheby's: a memorial auction for Alotta Money, celebrated at Trevor Jones's Castle Party. It never happened, and he now wants a full retrospective exhibition, from early comic book work to the World of Warcraft machinima days, at a cost of at least 50,000 dollars he hopes sponsors or commission sales will cover. Without a monograph or retrospective, he warns, people forget, and Alotta Money's personality carried value the space should not lose. He shares his own story of grief and losing parents as the personal root of the project.
In their words
“My ambition personally is to have a long lasting impact on art history.”
Arthemort“I'm not a finance advisor, I'm an art advisor. I cannot promise huge ROI, I can just tell you that the artist is talented.”
Arthemort“Don't undervalue yourself. Price things as expensive as you think it should be, and you'll see.”
Arthemort“Whenever it starts with, we're not able to pay you, you're sure that later down the road there's going to be a lot of other problems.”
Arthemort“I don't do things for the sake of doing it. I want to do things that I can be proud of.”
Arthemort“I look up to you in terms of your curation skills.”
MLowCite this conversation
Arthemort in conversation with MLow, "MLow X Arthemort," The MLow Show, unaired recording, 4 Oct 2023. https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-04-mlow-x-arthemort.html. Quoted from a machine transcript.
Quotations come from machine transcripts. Check wording against the audio before republishing.