Photo: Beeple’s collage, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, sold at Christie’s; Beeple
Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist who goes by the name Beeple, has sold a piece of digital artwork at Christie’s auction house in London for $69 million.
The sale makes Beeple one of the three wealthiest living artists.
The image is a collection of smaller images formed into a collage. Beeple has made one of these images every day since 2007 and has garnered him a huge following on Instagram. Many of the images have sci-fi themes and fantastical imagery of imagined planets. In total, the collage bought contains 5,000 images.
The sale of the image makes it the highest-ever grossing NFT ever sold. An NFT is a non-fungible token, a file that lives on a blockchain. When an individual buys the image, it becomes their property until they sell it on.
Christie's is proud to offer "Everydays - The First 5000 Days" by @beeple as the first purely digital work of art ever offered by a major auction house. Bidding will be open from Feb 25-Mar 11.
— Christie's (@ChristiesInc) February 16, 2021
Learn more here https://t.co/srx95HCE0o | NFT issued in partnership w/ @makersplaceco pic.twitter.com/zymq2DSjy7
Much like Bitcoin, the value of these NFTs is totally subjective, and based entirely upon the faith people put upon it. At this time last year, the most money Beeple had made from one print sale was $100.
Noah Davis, a specialist at auction house Christie's, said of the sale:
"He showed us this collage, and that was my eureka moment when I knew this was going to be extremely important. It was just so monumental and so indicative of what NFTs can do."
"We have more responsibility than we've ever had in any collecting category as arbiters of the items that we're selling. The plan isn't to pull more traditional artists into the digital world but to work with established digital artists to explore their alternative art history."
The popularity and desire for NFTs has sky-rocketed in the last few months, with many purchasing them in the belief that they will be worth more in the long-run.
Some economists believe that, much like Bitcoin, the huge rise in popularity of NFTs is fuelled by the fact that so much money has been pumped into the global economy by central banks in recent years. At the same time, a small group of individuals has become unbelievably rich. These factors mean that people simply have nowhere left to put their money. In many ways, investments such as Bitcoin and NFTs are taking the place of traditional safe-havens such as gold and property.
Some worry however, that the NFT phenomenon could be a short-lived speculative bubble in which investors could lose huge sums of money in the long-term.
[h/t: The Verge]
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