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“We didn’t need a preview.” So said Twobadour, one of the players behind the purchase of the all-digital work by artist Beeple (aka Charleston-based digital artist Mike Winkelmann) at Christie’s last week, when asked if he had actually looked at the lot before his company paid $69 million for it. Despite this stomach-turning auction price, Twobadour claimed that the investment was destined to appreciate in value into the future: “This is going to be a billion-dollar piece someday.” I’ll take his word for it that he knows Beeple’s oeuvre so well that he didn’t need to review all the images...

Christie’s says it has auctioned off a digital collage by an artist named Beeple for nearly $70m, in an unprecedented sale of a digital artwork that fetched more money than physical works by many better known artists. The piece, titled Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, sold for $69.4m in an online auction, “positioning him among the top three most valuable living artists”, Christie’s said via Twitter on Thursday. Christie’s said it also marks the first time a major auction house has offered a digital-only artwork with a non-fungible token as a guarantee of its authenticity, as well as the first...

“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,...