Incredible at Christie's: digital artwork sold for $69 million

It is unprecedented what happened yesterday at Christie’s: the auction house in fact sold an entirely digital work for the first time for a record sum. Practically an image file, a very common JPG file: it is a work by the American artist Beeple (born Mike Winkelmann, a graphic designer from Charleston, South Carolina), entitled Everydays - The First 5000 Days, measuring 21,069 pixels per side. Pixels are a unit of measurement for online images: a pixel is the smallest element of the image, and we can imagine it as a colored square, which together with all the others makes up the image (every image we see daily on the web is composed of pixels). Beeple’s work, which is considered a masterpiece of “Crypto art” (art whose authenticity is guaranteed, as will be seen below, by encrypted codes), sold for the monstrous sum of $69,346,250 million ($60.2 net of premium), and is a collage of five thousand images (hence the name) that the artist made between May 1, 2007 and January 7, 2021, unceasingly, with an enviable constancy and tenacity.

The work sets at least two important records: it is the most expensive digital work ever and is the most expensive single lot ever sold in an all-online auction. It is also the third highest price paid at auction for a living artist: Beeple is preceded only by Jeff Koons’ Rabbit, which sold in May 2019 for $91.1 million, and David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist, which sold in November 2018 for $90.3 million. Beeple leaves behind artists such as Gerhard Richter, Lucian Freud, Damien Hirst, and Jeff Koons himself with other works.

Beeple, Everydays - The First 5000 Days (2007-20021; JPG file, 21,069 x 21,069 pixels)

The incredible auction

And to think that on February 25, when the auction opened, the base for Beeple’s millionaire work was just $100. Within a short time, however, bidding had raised it to $1 million, and by March 10 it had already risen to $9 million. The increments that led to the record sum all came in the last few minutes.

Christie’s also reported several figures. The one that is perhaps most surprising (but not so much for those familiar with the digital marketplace) is the demographic composition of the participants (33 in all, and 91 percent of them were new clients to Christie’s). In fact, 58 percent of the bids came from Millennials (i.e., born between 1981 and 1996), followed by 33 percent bids from customers of the X Generation (born between 1965 and 1980), and 6 percent from the Z Generation (born between 1997 and 2012). Boomers, that is, those born between 1946 and 1964, accounted for only 3%. As for geographic origin, 55 percent of the bids came from the Americas, 27 percent from Europe, and 18 percent from Asia.

“The past year,” said Noah Davis, Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art specialist, “has been extraordinary for the art market, and today’s result is a fitting tribute to the significant digital transformation that has taken place at Christie’s. And as our business has evolved, so have the ways in which art is created. I am delighted to be able to introduce the Christie’s audience to the work of Beeple, and I am honored to welcome all of our new clients, who not only bid on, but shared brilliant ideas on how to further develop the crypto art movement. Beeple’s success is a testament to the exciting possibilities for this new market. And today’s result is a clear call to all digital artists. Your work has value. Keep doing it.”

How can people buy a JPG file?

The question many people are asking is: does it make sense to spend all this money on a common JPG file? The answer lies in the fact that in reality the file the buyer has obtained is unique: the authenticity of Crypto Art’s works is in fact guaranteed by so-called NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), encrypted codes that contain the artist’s signature and several other pieces of information (for example, the time of the creations, the technical characteristics the file must have, and so on, as well as the owner’s name), and that are issued only with the original file.

The buyer thus buys an original file that he can then display and exhibit wherever he wants: he can view it on his computer, show it around on a tablet, use augmented reality applications to see it on the walls of his home as if it were an oil painting, he can project it on his home television and enjoy the work from the comfort of his couch. And of course he will be able to lend the work for temporary exhibitions. The NFT mechanism has enabled the market to make an important evolution: Christie’s explains that “before the introduction of NFTs and Blockchain technology [a kind of public ledger that produces the codes that authenticate the work, ed.], it was impossible, even for the most celebrated digital artists, to claim a place in the art market. These mechanisms paved the way for the future for art created exclusively by digital means.” The British house has already let it be known that there will be further sales of digital works secured by NFTs.

“Artists,” Beeple confirms, “have been using hardware and software means for 20 years to create artworks and distribute them on the Internet, but there has never been a real way to own and collect them. With NFTs now everything has changed. I think we are witnessing the beginning of the next chapter in art history: digital art.”

Beeple (Mike Winkelmann)

Who is Beeple and why this success?

But how is it possible that a misunderstood graphic designer living in a South Carolina town has managed to become the third highest-paid living artist in history, outclassing such historicized artists as Gerhard Richter and Lucian Freud, and being recognized with a figure that surpasses even works by Raphael (the record at auction for the Divine Painter, for example, is $36 million), Rembrandt, Dalí and other great masters of art history? It should be premised that we are actually talking about an artist who is well known in Crypto Art circles and is considered a leader and one of the most talented artists, but even his story is nonetheless incredible: by profession a web designer, with a degree in Computer Science and a very normal life, Beeple began creating his Everydays: The First 5,000 Days on May 1, 2007, simply because he was bored. So he started making one work a day, constantly trying to improve himself, and continuously posting images online, gaining a large number of followers: before the auction, on Twitter he had about 200,000 fans (now raised to 260,000, with a sharp increase in the days of the auction), and on Instagram he had as many as 1.8 million (after the auction they came close to two million). In the meantime, he continued his profession, even going so far as to work for prominent brands (Apple, Louis Vuitton, musicians Avicii, Eminem, Justin Bieber), and with the proceeds from his work he supported his business as an artist.

A success that has thus come thanks to his constant and very skillful use of social media (his works often touch on urgent current issues, or topics that are much discussed on the Web), of which Beeple seems to be an avid user, thanks to constant and painstaking work, a talent recognized by experts in this type of art, and above all thanks to the fact that his is a name that is anything but unknown to digital art admirers, who have been following Beeple for some time. The sale at Christie’s did not come out of the blue: Beeple had already successfully sold many works on Nifty Gateway, the leading digital art marketplace (just last December, he had managed to dominate an online auction on Nifty Gateway by selling 20 of his works for $3.5 million, but this is not unique in his career). And thanks to this success then came his Christie’s debut, news greeted with great excitement by Crypto Art enthusiasts.

“My work,” says the artist, “contains the same craftsmanship, messages, nuances and intent as any work created on canvas or physical medium. And I am honored to represent the digital art community at this moment in history.” The artist himself was amazed at the result, barely noticing the turn the auction was taking. “Holy fuck” was his first comment on Twitter: an untranslatable phrase in Italian, which we could almost compare to blasphemy, to express great astonishment (the artist is also known for his constant use of profanity, so much so that his own website is beeple-crap.com, or “Beeple’s crap,” and in his bio he introduces himself as an artist who “creates a lot of artistic crap in different mediums, some of it is okay, but a lot of it sucks: Beeple works to make it so that it sucks a little less day after day, so be patient with him.”) Those who know him describe Beeple as an artist who is not only talented, but also very generous, open, hard-working. And as of yesterday, he has already become a legend in the Crypto Art world.

Incredible at Christie's: digital artwork sold for $69 million

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