Christie’s says it has auctioned off a digital collage by an artist named Beeple for nearly $70m, in an unprecedented sale of a digital artwork that fetched more money than physical works by many better known artists.
- ‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’ by Beeple sold for a record $69.3 million on Thursday at Christie’s
- The artwork, a collage of 5,000 individual images, exists only as a JPG file
- It is a collage of 5,000 individual images, which were made one-per-day over more than thirteen years
- It is the most expensive ever ‘non-fungible token’, a unique digital token encrypted with an artist’s signature which verifies its ownership and authenticity and is permanently attached to the piece
- Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, is now among the top three most valuable living artists.
- Six months ago, the 39-year-old from South Carolina had not sold any work.
- ‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’ fetched the highest price in an online-only auction and the highest price for any winning bid placed online.
- It also marks the first time a major auction house has offered a digital-only artwork with a non-fungible token as a guarantee of its authenticity
- And it is the first-time cryptocurrency has been used to pay for an artwork at auction
Beeple responded to the sale result with an expletive on Twitter. “Artists have been using hardware and software to create artwork and distribute it on the internet for the last 20+ years but there was never a real way to truly own and collect it,” Beeple said in a statement released by Christie’s. “With NFT’s that has now changed. I believe we are witnessing the beginning of the next chapter in art history, digital art.”
