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.
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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 ...
Exactly my first thought.
How much anyone wanna offer for a webp copy of this? :D
How can this JPG even be appreciated or admired by anyone else without it being duplicated and disseminated making it worth much less that the so called original? Sheer lunacy.
I'm ashamed to be a trained electronics technician. An electron is an electron, and a photon is a photon. They cannot be bought and sold as a tangible item, no matter how many are grouped together.
A fool and his money will both work fine in a wood chipper.
That's sort of the twist in this lunacy. An exact copy can exist. Millions of exact copies can exist. What is unique is the token recorded in a blockchain. How that token identifies a specific copy is beyond me. My guess is a timestamp recording the sale.
If a woman had made that as a quilt, you couldn’t get $1,500 for it.
Marketing hype is everything.
The copyright owners of those individual images have a lot to work with there.
Bitcoin...
You know this nails it right down. We have been told that banks have transferred currency since, as we understand it, the Knights Templar and the Knights Knights Hospitaller first formed. In all that time, banks actually exchanged something of value for something of the same value.
The cryptocurrencies don't do that. In effect, bitcoin users are all invested in a giant rolling Ponzi scheme. The aficionados must push others to buy-in before they all go bust from lack of new suckers to fleece.
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