A digital work of crypto art goes up for auction at Christie's for the first time and the batter's hammer stands at over $ 60 million, a record figure that makes its author the third most valued living artist in the world after Jeff. Koons and David Hockney.
The still anonymous buyer then ended up paying $ 69.3 million including auction fees for "The Last 5000 Days," a monumental JPG file of Beeple, (real name Mike Winkelmann), a 39-year-old Wisconsin illustrator who he has built millions of followers on social media thanks to commercial projects for pop stars like Justin Bieber and brands like Louis Vuitton and Nike.
The work in question is entirely digital: a collage of 5,000 images created and posted from 2007 to 2021 that incorporates surreal scenes and drawings by politicians like Donald Trump and Mao Tse Tung alongside cartoon characters from Mickey Mouse to Pokemon.
The sale marks the height of the growing frenzy for Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs), a form of digital work registered on the blockchain with a token that verifies the rightful owner and authenticity of the creation.
For Christie's it was the first auction of a work without a physical component and the first time in its 255-year history that bets have been accepted in the crypto currency Ethereum.
Offered on February 25 with a starting price of just one hundred dollars, "The Last 5000 Days" saw prices soar thanks to about thirty fierce collectors - 60% millennials, from 11 countries and 91% new to Chrietie's - who in the last half hour they have made the offers soar from 15 million dollars to over 60 million final.
All expectations of the eve, therefore, have also been beaten the record so far for a work by Beeple: 6.6 million dollars paid last week for a 10-second video.
Beeple's work focuses on society's fears and obsessions over technology.
The artist is one of the initiators of the "everyday" movement of 3D graphics: since 2007 part of his work has consisted in creating an image posted online every day without missing a single appointment.
"He's a leader of the digital art community," said a Christie's representative who compared the legitimacy of NFT to that of Street Art. But who buys works like Beeple's?
The target audience of young collectors and people hitherto unrelated to the traditional art market circuit includes characters such as 28-year-old Tim Kang, founder of Cue Music and a cryptocurrency investor who was Beeple's first collector.
"The boom in bitcoin has given birth to a new class of potential philanthropists and collectors," painter Lucien Smith noted with ArtNews, focusing on a generation of "crypto-millionaires who are trying to build assets with the money they have accumulated and one of the few ways they can do this is through NFTs because their market accepts cryptocurrencies. "