Posted on 03/11/2021 11:35:09 AM PST by Responsibility2nd
“Everydays — The First 5000 Days,” by the artist known as Beeple, set a record for a digital artwork in a sale at Christie’s.
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.
~snip~
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...

I wonder if the O'Henry heiress put in a bid?
Dear Rich People:
I’ll make crap like that for you every day, and only charge $6500.
Yours Truly,
Starving Artist
Psst, I got a 4k screenshot of a Beeple I’m trying to move, you interested?
“What other explanation makes sense?”
Well, there’s always speculation. Speculators are not always particularly smart in their speculations.
Yes!
I’ll give you 5 dogecoin for it.
That’s why they won’t pay you, you are charging too little.
Rich people can’t impress their friends with a piece they only paid a piddly 6 1/2 grand for.
A lot of idiots are worth that and more.
I’ll have to check the exchange rates, I usually only trade in trollfacecoins...
Back in 2005 a guy made a million dollars selling ad space.
Free Republic needs some static ads... you get rich!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
What is the actual product that was bought? A JPG file? 5000 PPGs? Emperor’s new clothes?
It’s on a blockchain. It’s a one off.
Bitcoin is on a blockchain. They MUST be the same thing.
They aren’t. They are on the etherium network. That is a network where you can tokenize things and write smart contracts.
That is digital. It is different than Bitcoin.
I know it reads as petty—but we are entering a world where the terms have specific means and they function in specific ways.
Oooh! Oooh!
Dogecoin is currently trading at $0.0560!
That ‘s up 1.24%!
I’m feeling generous. I’ll raise my bid to 10 dogecoins!
It depends. The JPEG standard has implemented lossless compression.
[Another sign of a declining civilization.]
I tried to scan a few of the images in there. Some of them are rather odd.
But then, some people have been collecting disturbing “art” haven’t they?
That’s why Hunter Biden is reportedly getting into the business
Wouldn’t you rather a TIFF?
Tulips are tasty.
But I agree with you in that I would want the original, sole source file/files and also that the artist retains no digital capture of the image/images whatsoever.
In the case of the composite, I would have insisted on all of Beeple's 5000 source images, and the composite, and that he be left with none.
But these cryptokids are dumber than rocks. "High school with money." - Martin Mull
Can't wait until the fakes arrive...
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