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Lot Essay
(i) Traits: Army Green Background (1,243 Bored Apes have this trait); Laser Eyes (69 Bored Apes have this trait); Brown Fur (1,370 Bored Apes have this trait); Bored Unshaven Mouth with Cigarette (438 Bored Apes have this trait).
(ii) Traits: M1 Army Green Background (1,417 Mutant Apes have this trait); M1 Laser Eyes (91 Mutant Apes have this trait); M1 Brown Fur (1,607 Mutant Apes have this trait); M1 Bored Unshaven Mouth with Cigarette (438 Mutant Apes have this trait).
(iii) Traits: M2 Army Green Background (424 Mutant Apes have this trait); M2 Laser Eyes (52 Mutant Apes have this trait); M2 Brown Fur (454 Mutant Apes have this trait); M2 Bored Unshaven Mouth with Cigarette (156 Mutant Apes have this trait).
Noah Davis, Head of Digital Art at Christie’s, discusses the Mutant Ape Yacht Club
The sixteenth century was a great one for oil painting, generally speaking, and especially for portraiture. Particularly in Italy, painters developed increasingly realistic techniques of representation to dazzle the eye and stimulate the imagination. Countless genius painters made their mark in this moment, but no one did it quite like Giuseppe Arcimboldo. His outlandishly quirky mode of portraiture set him apart from his peers and really did not look remotely like anything that had come before. His paintings are garish, bizarre and technically exquisite, mostly adhering to this format: an uncanny portrait bust made of component parts of fruit, vegetables, bread, fish and sundry other stuff. Arcimboldo’s pictures are equally grotesque and beautiful, virtuosic in their randomness. In his most famous painting, Vertumnus, the artist depicts none other than the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II as the titular Roman god of the seasons. Rudolf is rendered as a sentient, sympathetic heap of veggies wearing a garland of flowers, resplendent in his compostable glory.
Frankly, it’s an incredibly weird painting; all the more so considering it’s a commissioned portrait of possibly the most powerful person on the planet. So, why would Rudolf consent to—indeed pay handsomely for—such a transformational interpretation of his image for posterity? Perhaps he didn’t take himself as seriously as most men in positions of power in his time (doubtful) or he admired Arcimboldo’s audacity and expert dexterity as a painter so much that the transformation into a regal veggie-mound was ultimately honorific. Looking at Arcimboldo’s portraiture, I’m reminded fondly of the shimmering excess and madcap mashup at play in Yuga Labs’ most recent project: the MAYC, or Mutant Ape Yacht Club, a collection of surreal, outrageously ugly and yet still somehow peculiarly charming avatars riffing on the original Yuga Labs NFT collection, the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Where Arcimboldo favored fruits and vegetables, the MAYC are overloaded with corrupted and radical traits such as glowing lava rocks, festering fungi, prismatic geological specimens and all manner of oozing sludges. Cute!
In late August this year, holders of BAYC tokens—the variously laidback, snarling, snoozing, smirking and smoking humanoid primate profile pics now proliferating on Twitter and Discord—randomly received an airdrop consisting of one of three mysterious ‘serums’, an M1, an M2 or a Mega Mutant (M3). Serums can either be traded or combined with an existing Bored Ape to create a corresponding M1 or M2 Mutant; the rarer M3 serums produce a unique 1⁄1 Mutant with singular traits shared by no other examples in the sprawling set of almost 16,000 (as of this writing). The present lot consists of an impeccably clean, smoking Bored Ape with the coveted red laser eyes trait alongside his M1 and M2 Mutant derivatives. In his M1 form, Ape #4418 has devolved into a half-melted orange-furred monstrosity with gleaming ruby eyes; in his M2 form, he is downright demonic, with red mist pouring from his white hot eye sockets—an extra eyeball with lolling tongue and fangs has inexplicably sprouted in the centre of his chest. The serum airdrop is not even the first time in the short handful of months since BAYC’s debut at the end of April this year that holders have received a valuable gift. Earlier in August, canine companion NFTs were conjured into every Ethereum wallet containing a BAYC token. Herein lies the magic of belonging to such a club as the Bored/Mutant Apes: holding the token not only means you very well might randomly receive expensive stuff (regularly!), it grants access to a community that is passionate, loyal, loving and legion.
If you’re having trouble wrapping your brain around why a successful NFT project should be offered in an Evening Sale context alongside other spectacularly expensive, great works of art, imagine in the present day a proxy for Rudolf II changing their Twitter pfp to a newly purchased legendary MAYC and tell me how this hypothetical is any different than commissioning Arcimboldo to paint your portrait as a living pile of fruit ... I will wait.
(ii) Traits: M1 Army Green Background (1,417 Mutant Apes have this trait); M1 Laser Eyes (91 Mutant Apes have this trait); M1 Brown Fur (1,607 Mutant Apes have this trait); M1 Bored Unshaven Mouth with Cigarette (438 Mutant Apes have this trait).
(iii) Traits: M2 Army Green Background (424 Mutant Apes have this trait); M2 Laser Eyes (52 Mutant Apes have this trait); M2 Brown Fur (454 Mutant Apes have this trait); M2 Bored Unshaven Mouth with Cigarette (156 Mutant Apes have this trait).
Noah Davis, Head of Digital Art at Christie’s, discusses the Mutant Ape Yacht Club
The sixteenth century was a great one for oil painting, generally speaking, and especially for portraiture. Particularly in Italy, painters developed increasingly realistic techniques of representation to dazzle the eye and stimulate the imagination. Countless genius painters made their mark in this moment, but no one did it quite like Giuseppe Arcimboldo. His outlandishly quirky mode of portraiture set him apart from his peers and really did not look remotely like anything that had come before. His paintings are garish, bizarre and technically exquisite, mostly adhering to this format: an uncanny portrait bust made of component parts of fruit, vegetables, bread, fish and sundry other stuff. Arcimboldo’s pictures are equally grotesque and beautiful, virtuosic in their randomness. In his most famous painting, Vertumnus, the artist depicts none other than the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II as the titular Roman god of the seasons. Rudolf is rendered as a sentient, sympathetic heap of veggies wearing a garland of flowers, resplendent in his compostable glory.
Frankly, it’s an incredibly weird painting; all the more so considering it’s a commissioned portrait of possibly the most powerful person on the planet. So, why would Rudolf consent to—indeed pay handsomely for—such a transformational interpretation of his image for posterity? Perhaps he didn’t take himself as seriously as most men in positions of power in his time (doubtful) or he admired Arcimboldo’s audacity and expert dexterity as a painter so much that the transformation into a regal veggie-mound was ultimately honorific. Looking at Arcimboldo’s portraiture, I’m reminded fondly of the shimmering excess and madcap mashup at play in Yuga Labs’ most recent project: the MAYC, or Mutant Ape Yacht Club, a collection of surreal, outrageously ugly and yet still somehow peculiarly charming avatars riffing on the original Yuga Labs NFT collection, the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Where Arcimboldo favored fruits and vegetables, the MAYC are overloaded with corrupted and radical traits such as glowing lava rocks, festering fungi, prismatic geological specimens and all manner of oozing sludges. Cute!
In late August this year, holders of BAYC tokens—the variously laidback, snarling, snoozing, smirking and smoking humanoid primate profile pics now proliferating on Twitter and Discord—randomly received an airdrop consisting of one of three mysterious ‘serums’, an M1, an M2 or a Mega Mutant (M3). Serums can either be traded or combined with an existing Bored Ape to create a corresponding M1 or M2 Mutant; the rarer M3 serums produce a unique 1⁄1 Mutant with singular traits shared by no other examples in the sprawling set of almost 16,000 (as of this writing). The present lot consists of an impeccably clean, smoking Bored Ape with the coveted red laser eyes trait alongside his M1 and M2 Mutant derivatives. In his M1 form, Ape #4418 has devolved into a half-melted orange-furred monstrosity with gleaming ruby eyes; in his M2 form, he is downright demonic, with red mist pouring from his white hot eye sockets—an extra eyeball with lolling tongue and fangs has inexplicably sprouted in the centre of his chest. The serum airdrop is not even the first time in the short handful of months since BAYC’s debut at the end of April this year that holders have received a valuable gift. Earlier in August, canine companion NFTs were conjured into every Ethereum wallet containing a BAYC token. Herein lies the magic of belonging to such a club as the Bored/Mutant Apes: holding the token not only means you very well might randomly receive expensive stuff (regularly!), it grants access to a community that is passionate, loyal, loving and legion.
If you’re having trouble wrapping your brain around why a successful NFT project should be offered in an Evening Sale context alongside other spectacularly expensive, great works of art, imagine in the present day a proxy for Rudolf II changing their Twitter pfp to a newly purchased legendary MAYC and tell me how this hypothetical is any different than commissioning Arcimboldo to paint your portrait as a living pile of fruit ... I will wait.