American artist Beeple became the first to sell a purely digital work of art at auction, raising more than $ 69.3 million for “Everydays – The First 5000 Days”, an impressive collage composed of works of art that he created all the days for the past 13 years.
The sale also catapulted Beeple, whose name is Mike Winkelmann, to become one of the three most valuable living artists, announced auction house Christie’s, calling it “a defining moment in the development of digital art”.
To prove its authenticity, the work features what is known as a non-fungible token that digitally attaches the artist’s signature to it and cannot be changed, Christie’s said.
Bids started at $ 100 in the online auction, which ran from February 25 through Thursday, and the piece finally sold for $ 69,346,250. Beeple’s work also brought a new class of collectors to the century-old auction house: of 33 active bidders, 91% were new to Christie’s and buyers from Generation Y and Generation X made up the majority, Christie’s said in a statement. the press. Most bidders were in the Americas, followed by Europe and Asia.
Beeple is a graphic designer who lives in Charleston, South Carolina, in the United States. The idea of the “Everydays” project is to create art on a daily basis, however complex or simple it may be, he said.
“These photos are all taken from start to finish, every day,” he wrote on his website. “The objective of this project is to help me to improve in different things.”
Some of the first pieces in the collage are simple drawings, while others are more complex three-dimensional representations.
A Christie’s press release highlighted some of the milestones of the work, including the first piece in the series, which Beeple did on May 1, 2007.
“This was my first time every day. It’s a photo of my uncle Jim, who I nicknamed Uber Jay. I probably would have spent more time on it, if I knew it would eventually be part of a piece auctioned by Christie’s! ”Beeple wrote.
There is also a figure he created “very quickly, in about three minutes at 5 am, just before taking my wife to the hospital to have our first child” on September 18, 2013, he said.
Although digital art has been around for decades, concerns about how to verify its authenticity meant that it was not as valued by collectors as more traditional works.
But, said Christie’s, “the recent introduction of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and blockchain technology has enabled collectors and artists to verify the legitimate owner and authenticity of digital works of art.”
“Every day: the first 5000 days 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,” added the auction house.
Blockchain technology is also used in the cryptocurrency world to verify transactions, and NFTs have made headlines recently, as celebrity investors seek them out.
“NFTs are really an interesting phenomenon here in the art world, because digital art is something that the traditional art world has a hard time selling and, frankly, is not so interested in selling traditionally,” Tim Schneider, art business editor from Artnet news, he told Al Jazeera. “Did it really get around the whole question of how to make something that is infinitely replicable really work more like paintings and sculptures, which are scarce objects in which you can create an air of exclusivity?”
“NFTs are a mechanism that basically allows you to treat digital files like traditional works of art, and I think that makes the art world a lot more comfortable with them, at least on one level,” added Schneider.
The sale of Beeple’s artwork also made headlines after Christie’s announced it would accept cryptocurrency Ether as payment for the artwork. The auction house did not say whether the winning bidder paid in encryption, however.
Schneider said that the rise of NFTs was driven by a new class of collectors.
“The people who are driving these prices are ‘cryptography rich’ quotes, people who have assets in bitcoin, in Ether, in cryptocurrencies and see this specific type of digital asset as something they are interested in and understand and are willing to spending money on a lot more things than, say, a Jeff Koons sculpture or something, ”he explained.
Beeple has worked with several top brands and artists throughout his career, including SpaceX, Apple, Nike and Louis Vuitton, as well as Eminem, Nicki Minaj, One Direction, Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, among others.