Beeple, a digital artist, sold one JPG file for $69 Million on Thursday. The file was up for bidding by Christie’s auction house. This is yet another price record in the increasingly popular digital art market. According to Christie’s statement, Beeple’s piece is the 3rd most expensive art piece at auction by a living artist.
The JPG file of art is a digital collage by the name “Everyday’s — The First Five Thousand Days,” which is also known as Non-Fungible token or NFT. NFTs prove ownership of an individual for a particular piece of art on blockchain technology.
NFTs are rising technology in 2021. Digital artists make their work rare by using cryptographic code. The art pieces are easily downloadable, however, the ownership of the original work is transferred through a transaction. NFTs are unique and distinguishable.
Age of NFTs
Mike Winkelmann, nicknamed Beeple, gave a statement regarding the importance of digital art on Thursday.
Artists have been using hardware and software to create artwork and distribute it on the internet for the last 20 plus years but there was never a real way to truly own and collect it,.., I believe we are witnessing the beginning of the next chapter in art history, digital art.
The sale of Beeple’s art piece is undoubtedly a milestone in the NFT transaction. The first high profile digital art was Nyan Cat, featuring an animated flying cat meme from 2011. It sold for $600,000 in an online auction.
A ten seconds video clip was sold for 6.6 million dollars last week. The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has also sold the first-ever tweet on the platform for millions of dollars. Like any asset class in its infancy, NFT’s price also depends on speculative mania at the moment. Nevertheless, crypto enthusiasts consider it another revolution in the digital world.