Auction introduction: "The OTAKU, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur… is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not." - William Gibson Sotheby’s Contemporary Showcase is a series of boutique online auctions that adopt a ‘pop-up shop’ concept with exciting thematic presentations. This edition will tap into our inner ‘otaku’ through our tightly curated assemblage of works. Otaku is a loaded word to describe the notoriously anime-obsessed fans who consume, collect and worship forms of popular visual culture. Its emergence as a major phenomenon in the 1980s had become the source of both widespread fascination and scorn. In the past three decades, however otaku culture has undergone an image overhaul. With the ascendance of geek culture, the obsessive pursuit has become a lifestyle to be celebrated not denigrated.