Christie’s auction house sold its first pure digital artwork Thursday for a record $ 69 million, the highest price paid for an NFT or non-flammable sign.
The work, “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”, is by Mike Winkelmann, named Beeple. The work is a collage of 5,000 drawings, of which the past 13 and a half years have been created and posted every day.
Originally created with pen and paper and now mostly illustration software, the sketches carry the spectrum of an angular line drawing of his first baby to Hillary Clinton and famous cartoon characters.
The winning bidder is the owner of the work in the form of a unique code, called a non-fungible token. The piece has no physical presence and will be “delivered directly from Beeple to the buyer, accompanied by a unique NFT encrypted with the artist’s memorable signature and uniquely identified on the blockchain,” Christie said.
NFTs have increased in popularity over the past few months. Singer and visual artist Grimes sold $ 6 million worth of digital art last month, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is auctioning off his first tweet – a message dated March 21, 2006 – with the compilation of “just setting me up twttr “- as an infallible sign. Bie is currently $ 2.5 million.
Noah Davis, a specialist in post-war and contemporary art for Christie’s, brought Beeple to the attention of the auction house after seeing the growing popularity of the graphic artist.
“The first ten minutes of this auction made us over 100 bids. We went from an opening bid of $ 100 to over $ 1 million. We had bidders from seven different countries,” Davis told Yahoo Finance.
Beeple’s digital photos have already garnered 1.8 million followers on Instagram and collaborations with Louis Vuitton, Katy Perry and Nike.
NFTs can also do what Picasso’s genius could not: generate a future profit stream for the artist every time the work changes owner.
“Every time this token is traded, I’ll get 10 percent,” digital artist Jimmy Simmons told NBC News. “It’s a new frontier, a new contract.”
The auction is also the first time that Christie’s cryptocurrency has been accepted as a means of payment, pointing out that bidders can choose to pay the purchase price for this lot in the cryptocurrency payment. Payment in Ether must be made via a digital wallet transfer from Ether to Christie’s. ‘