Cutting a Banksy Into 10,000 (Digital) Pieces

In the latest example of art market disruption, a prominent former auction executive teamed up with cryptocurrency experts in May to purchase the 2005 Banksy painting “Love Is in the Air” for $12.9 million and now plans to sell off 10,000 pieces of it as NFTs, or nonfungible tokens.

The executive, Loic Gouzer, who upended the traditional auction format while he was at Christie’s — most notably orchestrating the sale of a $450.3 million Leonardo da Vinci painting in a contemporary art auction in 2017 — has helped found the company Particle, a platform that merges art and technology with a goal of reaching a broader pool of potential buyers.

“When I was a kid and I was looking at auctions and catalogs, I always felt it was impossible to participate financially and that I was by definition excluded,” Gouzer said in a telephone interview. “Fractionalizing the work in 10,000 NFTs allows a much wider audience to be part of a collecting experience.

“Of course you can enjoy art when you go to a museum, but the enjoyment from art comes also with owning it,” he continued. “That’s why people collect.”