In a groundbreaking auction sale a digital artwork in the form of a JPG file as non-fungible token (or NFT) sold at Christies for $69 million Thursday. The artwork is by the artist known as Beeple.
The artwork is titled “Everydays — The First 5000 Days” and is a collage of images by the artist created during a 14 year period. Beeple, whose real name is Michael Winkelmann, posted each of the images used in the collage online every day for 5,000 days starting in 2007.
According to the New York Times the final sale price is “the third-highest auction price achieved for a living artist, after Jeff Koons and David Hockney.”
Price aside, and aside from the fact that this is a digital artwork by a living artist, it’s that the artwork is itself an NFT, basically a form a of cryptocurrency, that make the sale of this work so genuinely groundbreaking.
GLOBAL GRAPHICA 