Digital artist Beeple is a ‘rich man’ after his non-fungal sign was sold at auction for nearly $ 70 million, Noah Davis, a post-war and contemporary art specialist at Christie’s, told CNBC on Thursday.
Davis made the remarks in an interview on “Power Lunch” after the bid window at Christie’s closed earlier Thursday. Beeple’s NFT – a collage of images titled “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” – was sold for $ 69,346,250, according to Christie’s.
In a tweet, the auction house said that the selling price Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, has positioned itself to be ‘one of the three most important living artists’. Christie’s was the first large auction house to sell a purely digital work of art.
“Mike Winkelmann is a rich man today,” Davis told CNBC. “He’s always been rich in spirit … I’m really proud of him.”
Sales of NFTs, which are blockchain-based assets, have recently exploded in popularity, spanning the spectrum from basketball highlights to the very first Twitter post to date a ten million dollar piece of digital artwork.
NFTs are stored in digital wallets and are unique in design. The scarcity is, according to proponents, critical to its value. The ownership of each NFT is recorded in a blockchain network, the digital ledgers that also drive cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.
Winkelmann tried to explain the rise of NFTs in a CNBC interview last month.
“There are a few different analogies I would like to use. One of them is the Mona Lisa. Anyone can take a picture of the Mona Lisa, but that does not mean you own the Mona Lisa,” Winkelmann then said. with reference to the iconic portrait painted by Leonardo da Vinci.
The “Squawk Alley” interview took place on February 25, the same day that his NFT was presented to Christie’s.
“Another one I would like to use is like MP3s. You may have a copy of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, but … you will not be able to convince people that you own the master recordings of ‘Thriller’. “You can still have copies of digital art online and everyone can see it, but the blockchain, the NFT, is the proof that proves this one person owns it.”
The buyer of Winkelmann’s creation gets ‘essentially a long series of numbers and letters’, explains Davis, of Christie, to CNBC. “This is a code that exists on the Ethereum blockchain. It is a block in the chain that will fall into their Ethereum wallet.”
“They’ll also get a gigantic JPEG. A massive, high-resolution JPEG. That’s a hundred megabytes,” Davis added.
Some people view the NFT craze as temporary, believing that digital asset ownership will eventually fade from desirability and that their values will fall sharply.
At least as far as NFTs as art are concerned, Davis said selling Winkelmann’s work is a milestone.
“I don’t think it’s one-time, and I think it’s a validation of the collection category,” Davis said. “NFTs are clearly more than just a budding, budding gathering space.”