New York – With the collage “Everyday: The First 5000 Days”, the first purely digital work of art will be auctioned at a traditional auction house on Thursday. For the work of the artist Mike Winkelmann alias Beeple a record sum is expected at the New York auction house Christie’s. As reported by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in the first few hours of the auction, the bid amount rose from a starting price of 100 US dollars to 2.4 million US dollars. The purchase price can be paid in the crypto currency Ether.
The work of art is a collage of 5000 images, which consists of 21,000 pixels square and thus 316,939,910 bytes. The American artist Beeple previously had the pictures as an ongoing project on his Instagram channel beeple_crap presents. He’s been sharing a grotesquely hyper-realistic image in the style of Internet memes every day since 2007. In his art, the political cartoonist refers to current events. He is now followed by over two million subscribers.
Blockchain technology makes digital works of art unique
Experts consider the fact that a purely digital work of art is going under the hammer at Christie’s for the first time as a breakthrough for crypto art. This is made possible by the principle of so-called non-fungible tokens (NFT). These are non-exchangeable or replicable cryptographic coins or tokens. A token represents rules on a blockchain that are encrypted by smart contracts. Each token belongs to a blockchain address. This makes the digital work of art unique.
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