Justin Sun’s NFT Fund Adds Picasso, Warhol Art To Portfolio

Tron (TRX) founder Justin Sun is continuing his artwork shopping spree, transitioning his JUST NFT fund from digital to in real life (IRL) art in a series of purchases that added works by renowned artists such as Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol to its collection. The latest deals follow Sun’s earlier declaration he was planning to make the fund “the ARK Funds in the NFT space” for world-class art registered as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the blockchain.

Sun missed out to buy an NFT art piece by the record-breaking artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, at an auction in early March. However, the same month, the tech entrepreneur succeeded in acquiring another piece by the artist, ‘Ocean Front,’ bidding USD 6m at a live auction.

After his unsuccessful attempt to buy a Beeple, Sun reached out to the sales department of the Christie’s auction house, looking for more NFT-connected pieces but eventually settling for a Picasso and a Warhol, as reported by Bloomberg.

“The team in China was clever enough to say that we don’t have NFTs to offer, but has he seen this wonderful sale that’s just been announced in London?” Giovanna Bertazzoni, Vice-chairman of Christie’s 20th and 21st centuries department, who added that Sun became interested in “some brand names like Picasso, Warhol, Basquiat, Renoir,” was quoted as saying in the report.

Shortly afterward, the entrepreneur announced his fund bought Pablo Picasso’s ‘Femme nue couchée au collier (Marie-Thérèse)’ for some USD 20m, and Andy Warhol’s ‘Three Self Portraits’ for USD 2m at the auction house’s March 23 sale.

Sun said the “auction represents a very significant milestone for #JUST #NFT in its entry into the top fine #art industry. I believe more world-class artworks by top-notch artists will be added to the JUST NFT’s catalog in the future.”

As reported, in a recently released open letter, Sun declared the “fund was born to build a bridge between top-notch artists and blockchain, and to support the growth of native crypto NFT artists.”

“JUST NFT only focuses on top-notch artists and artworks. In principle, the fund only accepts art pieces with a price tag of no less than USD 1m and a median value of USD 10m. We believe the art space is also subject to the 80–20 rule, or the Pareto Principle, where only the value of the artists sitting at the tippy-top of the pyramid can stand the test of time,” he said.

Meanwhile, the entrepreneur’s latest art-related moves have generated some positive reactions from the TRX community. Among others, a Twitter user who goes by the name Letti said that “hopefully this means you can use $TRX to buy/bid for NFTs and we can see some noticeable gains.”

At the time of writing (08:55 UTC), TRX, ranked 19th by market capitalization, trades at USD 0.089 and is unchanged in a day. The price is up by 60.5% in a week and 89% in a month.
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