An auction by a virtually unknown visual artist from an NFT digital art collage closed at a selling price of over 69 million dollars. The art, “Everyday – The First 5000 Day,” is a cumulation of regular drawings by artist Mike Winkelmann – known online as Beeple for many years. In contrast to all other works, Christie’s Auction House has listed a completely digital work for the first time in its 250+ years of history.
Christie announced in their auction tweet that Beeple came into the rarified atmosphere of the world’s most valuable live performers. It is stunning to think that a single jpeg file that can be copied and pasted on your computer is sold for such an amount, but it is unique because it’s authenticated using Bitcoin. This copy of The First 5000 Days can be owned by one person only.
NFTs in the cryptocurrency universe is a relatively recent trend but have quickly gained ground. NFT stands for Non-fungible tokens and in plain language, each of them represents a blockchain object that is not interchangeable. NFTs must not compulsorily be photographed, even though they sometimes are. Videos and objects in the game were auctioned as NFTs. Surprisingly, a tweet has also been auctioned as an NFT.
But such a situation is simply transforming for artists such as Beeple. He said in a YouTube video that when he started, he didn’t skip a day to make art and that he didn’t hold a backlog — each piece was made fresh during the day. The first 5000 Days is an image of 21,069 x 21,069 pixels which is a collection of all images he has made since he began making art, registered as NFT on 16th February 2021, obtained since its beginning.
