The sale of the artwork – the first digital work sold by an established auction house – brings cryptocurrencies and blockchain into the world of fine art.
Christie's has sold a digital collage by artist Mike Winklemann, better known as Beeple, for $69 million in ether to an unnamed bidder at an auction on Thursday.
«Everydays: The First 5,000 Days» is a collage of sketches and digital drawings made everyday by Winklemann for the past 13 years. Bids for started at $100 but quickly climbed to reach the third-highest price at auction for a living artist, and a record price for a digital artwork and one sold at an online-only auction.
Future of Art?
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are strings of code linked to a digital file that live on the blockchain, which provide verification of authenticity and ownership. Many collectors feel this is the way digital art will be collected and traded going forward.
«Artists have been using hardware and software to create artwork and distribute it on the internet for the last 20+ years but there was never a real way to truly own and collect it. With NFT’s that has now changed. I believe we are witnessing the beginning of the next chapter in art history, digital art,» Beeple said in the statement.
NFT artworks are also drawing a completely new audience: the mass majority of bidders were new to the auction house – 91 percent of the 33 active bidders were new bidders, and 58 percent were millennials (1981-1996), Christie's noted in a statement.
Booming Popularity
In December 2020, Winklemann raised $3.5 million over a weekend with the sale of his 2020 collection of «Everydays,» which included 21 single editions, three pieces sold as open editions in a five-minute auction, and 100 pieces for $1.
The popularity of NFTs has exploded in recent weeks, becoming an asset class of their own, with sales of a LeBron James highlight clip going for $208,000, a .gif of «Nyan Cat» selling for $600,000. There is even a bid of $2.5 million for an NFT of the first tweet by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Singer Grimes, married to Tesla founder Elon Musk, sold $6 million of digital art in the past month alone.
Last month, a 10-second video clip by Beeple, featuring an image of a fallen Donald Trump, was sold for $6.6 million, 100 times its October 2020 purchase price.
