After a flurry of more than 180 bids in the final hour, a JPG file made by Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist known as Beeple, was sold on Thursday by Christie’s in an online auction for $69.3 million with fees. The price was a new high for an artwork that exists only digitally, beating auction records for physical paintings by museum-valorized greats like J.M.W. Turner, Georges Seurat and Francisco Goya. Bidding at the two-week Beeple sale, consisting of just one lot, began at $100.
With seconds remaining, the work was set to sell for less than $30 million, but a last-moment cascade of bids prompted a two-minute extension of the auction and pushed the final price over $60 million. Rebecca Riegelhaupt, a Christie’s spokeswoman, said 33 active bidders had contested the work, adding that the result was the third-highest auction price achieved for a living artist, after Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
Billed by the auction house as “a unique work in the history of digital art,” “Everydays — The First 5000 Days” is a collage of all the images that Beeple has been posting online each day since 2007. The artist, who has collaborated with Louis Vuitton and pop stars like Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, uses software to create an irreverent visual commentary on 21st century life.
Beeple’s collaged JPG was made, or “minted,” in February as a “nonfungible token,” or NFT. A secure network of computer systems that records the sale on a digital ledger, known as a blockchain, gives buyers proof of authenticity and ownership. Most pay with the Ethereum cryptocurrency. “Everydays” was the first purely digital NFT sold by Christie’s, and it offered to accept payment in Ethereum, another first for the 255-year-old auction house.
I can't really wrap my head around this. It's an obscene amount of money for something so useless (though I guess one could argue it would be an obscene amount of money to also pay for something physical which is essentially canvas and a frame). I assume this is more of a speculation thing?
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NFT (non-fungible tokens) are all the rage. NBA's Topshot is going insane right now with sales.
The general sense is they are using blockchains to transfer ownership and rights of digital items such as art, gifs, domain names, etc. It is really taking off.
I think it's also trying to cash in as a piece of history as well.
It's one of the first NFT/blockchain tech objects out there, it's one of the first purchases to be expected to be done in pure Ethereum etc.
I agree it's kinda dumb, just saying that with how ridiculous art prices can be anyways, this is probably what someone is attempting to tack on as part of the value of the art?
I suggest we put a tax on these types of things, just so we can hear a person who spent $69M on a JPEG complain about how bad that kind of tax would be for everyone else.
obviously too many rich people have too much money if they can throw it at a digital art work... and thanks to GETBAK above I can print it off. Granted I won't, and don't want it, plus it'll look even crappier than in real life, but I'd rather see some of my kids art or even my own decent photography....
JPG file sells for US $69 million
