Auction house Christie’s sold its first purely digital work of art on Thursday for a record $ 69 million, the highest price paid for an NFT, or non-fungible token.
The work, “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” is by Mike Winkelmann, who goes by the name Beeple. The work is a collage of 5,000 drawings, created and posted every day for the past 13 and a half years.
Originally created with pen and paper and now mainly with illustration software, the sketches range from an angular line drawing of her first baby to Hillary Clinton and well-known cartoon characters.
The winning bidder owns the work in the form of a unique code string, called a non-fungible token. The piece has no physical presence and will be “delivered directly from Beeple to the buyer, accompanied by an exclusive NFT encrypted with the artist’s unpredictable signature and uniquely identified on the blockchain,” said Christie’s.
NFTs have grown in popularity in the past few months. Singer and visual artist Grimes sold $ 6 million in digital art last month, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is auctioning off his first tweet – a March 21, 2006 post that says “just configuring my twttr” – as a non-fungible token. The bidding is currently at $ 2.5 million.
Noah Davis, a postwar and contemporary art specialist at Christie’s, drew Beeple’s attention from the auction house after witnessing the graphic artist’s growing popularity.
“In the first 10 minutes of this sale, we had more than 100 bids placed. We went from an initial bid of $ 100 to more than $ 1 million. We had bidders from seven different countries,” Davis told Yahoo Finance.
Beeple’s digital photos have already earned him 1.8 million followers on Instagram and collaborations with Louis Vuitton, Katy Perry and Nike.
NFTs can also do what Picasso’s genius failed: to generate a future flow of profits for the artist each time the work changes hands.
“Each time this token is traded, I will receive 10 percent,” digital artist Jimmy Simmons told NBC News. “It is a new frontier, a new contract”.
The auction is also the first time that Christie’s accepts cryptocurrency as a form of payment, noting that bidders “can choose to pay the purchase price for this lot in the Ether cryptocurrency. Payment in Ether must be made via a wire transfer of Ether’s digital wallet for Christie’s. “