By October, the most Mike Winkelmann – the digital artist known as Beeple – was ever a $ 100 print.
Today, an NFT sold $ 69 million of his work at Christie’s. According to the auction house, the sale is “one of the three most important living artists”.
The flat-selling NFT auction comes after months of increasingly valuable auctions. In October, Winkelmann sold his first series of NFTs, with a pair for $ 66,666.66 each. In December, he sold a series of works for a total of $ 3.5 million. Last month, one of the NFTs originally sold for $ 66,666.66 was resold for $ 6.6 million.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique files that live on a blockchain and can verify ownership of a work of digital art. Buyers usually get limited rights to display the digital artwork they represent, but in many ways they only buy bragging rights and an asset that they may be able to resell later. The technology has absolutely exploded over the past few weeks – and Winkelmann, more than anyone else, was at the forefront of his rapid rise.
“He showed us this collage, and it was my eureka moment when I knew it would be extremely important,” said Noah Davis, a specialist in post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s. The edge. “It was just so monumental and so indicative of what NFTs can do.”
A few factors explain why Beeple’s work has become so valuable. First, he developed a large fan base, with about 2.5 million followers across social channels. And he’s famously productive: as part of a project called “Everydays”, Winkelmann creates and publishes a new digital artwork every day. The project is now in its 14th year.
At the same time, NFTs have inflated over the past month and are currently seen by many as many as the way digital art will henceforth be acquired and traded. For collectors who believe this to be true, rising prices are nothing compared to what NFTs will be worth along the way if the rest of the world utilizes their value.
Christie’s is also a legitimizing force for Winkelmann’s art and NFTs as a technology. The 255-year-old auction house sold some of the most famous paintings in history, from the only famous portrait of Shakespeare he created during his lifetime to the last discovered painting by Leonardo da Vinci.
Combine that with Winkelmann who was already at the forefront of NFT sales, and today’s auction was destined to set records.
“I consider it the next chapter of art history,” Winkelmann said. “There’s now a way to collect digital art.”
The piece sold, Everydays: The first 5000 days, is a collage of Winkelmann’s work that began at the beginning of the project, when he posted somewhat crude sketches. It takes years with digital forms and landscapes until the beginning of this year, when he posted extremely crude political illustrations.
The winner of the auction does not get much: a digital file, mostly, plus a few vague rights to represent the image. But Winkelmann expects to work with the buyer to find different ways to physically display the piece, whether it’s on a TV in their home or projected on the “side of a fucking building” at Art Basel.
The increase in NFTs has already been pushed back. Many works of dubious artistic value are sold at auction with hype. It is alleged that artists’ works were stolen and auctioned off. And many artists are concerned about the climate impact of art sales relying on blockchain technology, which is notoriously ineffective by design. (Winkelmann said he plans to buy carbon offsets for all his NFTs in the future, so that their impact is net positive.)
Those who are in space early think that technology is here to stay. Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile, the collector who bought a Beeple for $ 66,666 and resold it 100 times just four months later, began collecting digital art a year ago and partially founded the Museum of Crypto Art to partially grow his growing collection. show. He sees Winkelmann’s rising sales prices as a way to prove to the public that technology matters.
“The reason I did the sale was by no means for the money,” Rodriguez-Fraile said. “I really thought it was the right catalyst to indicate the confirmation of what was happening in the industry.”
At Christie’s, Davis plans to collaborate with more digital artists to auction NFTs. With a growing crop of smaller markets and countless NFTs being created daily, he sees Christie’s role as contributing to the advancement of space in an ‘extremely thoughtful’ way.
“We have more responsibility than we have ever had in any collection category as arbitrators of the items we sell,” Davis said.
The plan is not to attract more traditional artists to the digital world (a Jeff Koons NFT is not next on the list, Davis joked), but to explore their ‘alternative art history’ with established digital artists.
Rodriguez-Fraile believes that the next wave of artists and collectors will see NFTs as merely the way art is bought and sold.
“I’m confident it’s not a hype thing,” he said. “It’s the catalyst for a generation.”