A JPG file made by a digital artist known as Beeple was sold on Thursday for almost $ 70 million by auction house Christie’s. That price set a new record for the increasingly popular market for exclusively digital art – and makes Beeple’s piece the third most expensive piece sold by a live artist at an auction, according to a statement from Christie’s.
The artwork, a digital collage called “Everydays – The First Five Thousand Days”, is known as NFT, or non-fungible token. NFTs signal ownership and authenticity of digital artworks, registering the sale through blockchain technology.
Blockchains record cryptocurrency transactions; records can be shared, but not duplicated.
“Artists have been using hardware and software to create works of art and distribute them on the Internet for over 20 years, but there has never been a real way to really own and collect them,” said Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, in a statement Thursday. “I believe that we are witnessing the beginning of the next chapter in art history, digital art.”
The South Carolina graphic designer did “Everydays” posting a new work of art online every day for 5,000 days, a project he started in 2007. He then put these images together to complete the piece.
DAY 5000 #every day pic.twitter.com/VBW1HX0Dno
– beeple (@beeple) January 8, 2021
The sale signals a new milestone for the expanding NFT market, which has seen other high-profile transactions, such as the sale of Nyan Cat, a popular 2011 meme featuring an animated flying cat.
This piece, created by Chris Torres, was sold for nearly $ 600,000 at an online auction last month on the Art Foundation’s cryptography platform. NFTs, including Nyan Cat, are usually purchased using the Ethereum cryptocurrency.
Another Beeple work, Crossroad, sold for $ 6.6 million last month on Nifty Gateway, another online marketplace.
The sale of a purely digital NFT work is the first time for Christie’s, a step that brings more legitimacy to the emerging form of digital originals.
Until last year, Beeple sold art for just $ 100. But with the sale of “Everyday”, his work could be one of the most valuable in the art world today – that is, until another NFT reaches that price.
