Digital artist Beeple could only say two words. “Holy fuck,” he wrote on Twitter just minutes after the auction of his masterpiece was over. And that’s exactly how he captured the reaction of most of the art world and its crypto of parallel reality, which met yesterday at Christie’s auction house. Their rendezvous ended with a record sale of Beepl’s NFT digital image collage for $ 69.3 million. That is one and a half billion crowns.
NFTs, ie nonfungible tokens, are a relatively new and in recent weeks rocketing category of digital art, the ownership of which is listed in the blockchain.
And the nearly seventy tens of millions is not just an absolute record for which a token has ever been sold. At the same time, it also makes Beepl, a hitherto inconspicuous illustrator from Wisconsin, creating his own digital images, making him one of the world’s most expensive artists ever.
The only two more expensive works by living authors ever sold at auction are extraordinary, backward-looking and physical pieces of art, as we know them from galleries. One is a steel rabbit statue by Jeff Koon, which sold for $ 91.1 million the year before, and the other is a painting by David Hockney, sold for $ 90.3 million in 2018.
And right after them, Beeple and his collage of five thousand fantastic and sometimes dystopian digital illustrations, which their new owner can’t even exhibit properly – but he can boast to his friends writing in a blockchain that he owns the few megabytes of pictures. Half an hour before the end of Christie’s two-week online auction, it looked like an interesting but not shocking result.
Thirteen years, one illustration every day
The Everyday: The first 5000 Days collage, composed of Beeply’s illustrations, which he gradually drew and put on the Internet every day for the last thirteen years, has climbed to some fifteen million dollars at that time. That would be a nice number and still a record in NFT sales, but still below the $ 20 million that analysts have guessed as a result of the auction.
But then came a series of rocket bids in the last minutes, and a duel between several bidders shot the price up to the final seventy million, which the new owner paid in ether. History has been rewritten twice. Christie’s traditional auction network, which has a tradition of several hundred years, enabled payment in cryptocurrency for the first time during an online auction.
The fact that the NFT, through the auction at Christie’s, reached the very top of the contemporary art market, not just the digital one, is just another proof of how high the gold rush that has spread around the digital cryptoformat is rising. Beeply’s Everyday collage is not the only NFT that has changed owners for millions in recent days.
At the beginning of March, the musician Grimes, including the current girlfriend of billionaire Elon Musk and the mother of his seventh child, sold the NFT a series of ten pieces of her digital art for about six million dollars.
The week before, an art collector from Miami sold a ten-second video, coincidentally also the NFT from Beepl, for 6.6 million. At the same time, he achieved quite a nice appreciation – he bought a short clip last October for $ 67,000.
Beeple’s real-world name is Mike Winkelmann, he drives a Toyota Corrol, he looks like a young Bill Gates, and his wife teaches at school. And even though few people knew his name or nickname a year ago, he is now a superstar in digital art circles and only his works make up almost a quarter of the entire market.
In total, the NFT market has outpaced $ 400 million in sales in recent months – several times the number of tokens sold in all previous years.
Next big thing?
Whether the NFT will be the mythical “next big thing” in art, or just a fashion wave that will fall again, only time will tell.
“For our business, it can be a revolution or just a one-time experiment. In the future, it will be important for us to be flexible not only about how clients can pay, ”explained Noah Davis, a contemporary art specialist at Christie’s, before the auction.
Yesterday, however, he at least told the auction world how much money is spinning in the cryptoworld and that it pays to take it seriously.
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