As of October, the maximum that Mike Winkelmann – the digital artist known as Beeple – sold a print was $ 100.
Today, an NFT of his work was sold for $ 69 million at Christie’s. The sale places him “among the three most valuable living artists”, according to the auction house.
The record NFT sale comes after months of increasingly valuable auctions. In October, Winkelmann sold his first series of NFTs, with a pair going for $ 66,666.66 each. In December, he sold a series of works for $ 3.5 million in total. And last month, one of the NFTs originally sold for $ 66,666.66 was resold for $ 6.6 million.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique files that reside on a blockchain and are capable of verifying the ownership of a digital work of art. Buyers usually get limited rights to display the digital art they represent, but in many ways, they are just buying the bragging rights and an asset that they can resell later. Technology has exploded in recent weeks – and Winkelmann, more than anyone else, is at the forefront of its rapid growth.
“He showed us this collage, and that was my eureka moment when I knew it was going to be extremely important,” said Noah Davis, Christie’s postwar and contemporary art expert. The Verge. “It was so monumental and indicative of what NFTs can do.”
Some factors explain why Beeple’s work has become so valuable. On the one hand, he has developed a large fan base, with about 2.5 million followers on social channels. And he is notoriously prolific: as part of a project called “Everydays”, Winkelmann creates and publishes a new work of digital art everyday. The project is now in its 14th year.
At the same time, NFTs have exploded in the last month and – for now, at least – are being seen by many as the way digital art will be acquired and commercialized in the future. For collectors who believe this to be true, rising prices are nothing compared to what NFTs will be worth in the future, when the rest of the world realizes their value.
Christie’s is also a force that legitimizes the art of Winkelmann and the NFTs as technology. The 255-year-old auction house sold some of the most famous paintings in history, from the only known portrait of Shakespeare created during his lifetime to the last painting discovered by Leonardo da Vinci.
Combine that with Winkelmann already at the forefront of NFT sales, and today’s auction was meant to set records.
“I see this as the next chapter in art history,” said Winkelmann. “Now there is a way to collect digital art.”
The piece that was sold, Every day: the first 5,000 days, is a collage of Winkelmann ‘s work that started at the beginning of the project, when he posted rather rough sketches. He goes through years of evolution of digital forms and scenarios until the beginning of this year, when he was posting extremely crude political illustrations.
The winner of the auction does not earn much: a digital file, mainly, plus some vague rights to present the image. But Winkelmann hopes to work with the buyer to find several ways to physically display the piece, whether on a TV in his home or projected “on the side of a fucking building” at Art Basel.
There has already been resistance against the increase in NFTs. Many works of questionable artistic value are being sold at stimulated auctions. Works by artists would have been stolen and auctioned as authentic. And many artists are concerned about the climate impact of art sales that depend on blockchain technology, which is notoriously inefficient by design. (Winkelmann said he plans to buy carbon offset for all of his NFTs going forward, so that their impact is positive.)
Those who arrive early in space think that technology is here to stay. Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile, the collector who bought a Beeple for $ 66,666 and resold it 100 times that just four months later, started collecting digital art a year ago and co-founded the Museum of Crypto Art, in part to exhibit its growing collection. He sees the increase in Winkelmann’s selling prices as a way of proving to the public that technology is important.
“The reason I made this sale was not at all for the money,” said Rodriguez-Fraile. “I really thought it was the right catalyst to signal the validation of what’s going on in the industry.”
At Christie’s, Davis plans to work with more digital artists to auction NFTs. With a growing crop of smaller markets and countless numbers of NFTs being created daily, he sees Christie’s role as helping to promote space in an “extremely careful” way.
“We have more responsibility than ever before in any collection category as arbitrators for the items we are selling,” said Davis.
The plan is not to attract more traditional artists to the digital world (a Jeff Koons NFT is not next on the list, Davis joked), but to work with established digital artists to explore their “alternative art history”.
Rodriguez-Fraile believes that the next wave of artists and collectors will see NFTs simply as the way art is bought and sold.
“I am confident that it is not an exaggeration,” he said. “It is the catalyst for a generation”.