Two months after CENTS debuted, the 1/1 inscription from Rutherford Chang’s Ordinals project is going to Christie’s. Chang inscribed 10,000 US pennies on the Bitcoin blockchain, then melted them and cast them into a copper block.
He created a 4 MB digital model of the block that encapsulates the transformation of the pennies. The digital model, inscribed as a Bitcoin Ordinal, takes up the entirety of Bitcoin block #839969.
Now, “CENTS Block 839969,” the highly detailed, 3D digital model of the heavy, dense ingot containing the remains of the physical CENTS pennies, will be featured in Christie’s “Beyond the Screen” auction, a highly-curated digital art offering that includes works by renowned creators including Tyler Hobbs, Sarah Meyohas and Alpha Centauri Kid.
Following on from today’s announcement, Christie’s will open online bidding on Friday, May 31. A physical exhibition, which will display “Block Copper” alongside the digital model and physical CENTS prints, will open at Christie’s New York City headquarters on June 7, closing on June 11 to coincide with the close of bidding.
With a sales volume of over 46 BTC, CENTS has been one of the most successful art projects on Ordinals.
To create CENTS, artist Rutherford Chang, with a solid history in the traditional art world, took 10,000 copper US pennies (the last full-copper pennies were minted in 1982) and photographed them in incredible detail. With the images of the pennies inscribed onto the Bitcoin blockchain, Chang melted them down and cast them into a copper cube, which he digitally modeled and placed on-chain.
Against a backdrop of slowed activity among Ordinals as well as NFTs more broadly, CENTS, released in collaboration with Sovrn Art, Inscribing Atlantis, and Gamma, has maintained a lively volume, with a vibrant community forming around the project.
While CENTS dropped without inbuilt rarity metadata aside from year and mint-marks, rare years and battered, worn pennies with their unique patinas and copper verdigris have become especially desirable to collectors. Inspired by SquiggleDAO, the CENTS community has organized to create a Trait Explorer that catalogs these emergent properties.
gm everyone!
A little #CENTS sneak peak for you all this morning! The CENTS Trait Explorer (inspired by Squiggle DAO) we have been building out, will allow you to search, filter and sort by existing traits (year, mint mark) as well as community traits (Ghost, Patinas, Assassin… pic.twitter.com/2iXNxlddiO— ol1y (@ol1y_art) April 13, 2024
CENTS began with an intriguing value discrepancy: the metals used to make a copper penny with a face value of 1¢ were actually worth 2.5¢! Chang then recontextualized 10,000 pennies in two ways—as art objects and as on-chain “cryptographic entities.”
Inviting speculation and community discernment of what is rare and desirable in a CENTS token is all part of the art, Shibboleth explained in a post on X. “It is absurd that a cent should be valued at hundreds/thousands of dollars, yet here we are, here we go,” he wrote.
Grail Capital founder Jean-Michel Pailhon, who curated a selection of CENTS for display at this week’s NFCSummit in Lisbon, finds the work compelling due to its incisive crossing of physical and digital boundaries.
“I found it extremely interesting, from the conceptual art perspective, when I saw on one side a physical piece being tokenized and then melted into a bigger physical sculpture. For me, that kind of checks all the boxes of economics, art, and culture,” he told nft now.
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