Digital artist Beeple is “a rich man” after his non-fungible token sold for nearly $ 70 million at auction, Noah Davis, a contemporary and contemporary art specialist at Christie’s, said Thursday.
Davis made the comments in an interview with “Power Lunch” after the auction window at Christie’s closed earlier Thursday. Beeple’s NFT – a collage of images entitled “Every Day: The First 5,000 Days” – sold for $ 69,346,250, according to Christie’s.
In a tweet, the auction house said that the sale price positioned Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, to be “among the top three most valuable artists in life.” Christie’s was the first major auction house to sell a piece of purely digital art.
“Mike Winkelmann is a rich man today,” Davis told CNBC. “He’s always been rich in spirit … I’m really proud of him.”
Sales of NFTs, which are blockchain-based assets, have exploded in popularity recently, spanning the spectrum from basketball to the first post on Twitter so far, a digital art piece worth tens of millions of dollars.
NFTs are stored in digital wallets and are unique in design. This deficiency, say supporters, is essential to their value. The ownership of each NFT is registered on a blockchain network, the digital registers that also supply cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.
Winkelmann tried to explain the rise in NFTs in a CNBC interview last month.
“There are a few different analogies that I like to use. One of them is the Mona Lisa. Anyone can take a picture with the Mona Lisa, but that doesn’t mean you own the Mona Lisa,” Winkelmann said at the time, referring to the iconic portrait. painted by Leonardo da Vinci.
The “Squawk Alley” interview took place on February 25, the same day that his NFT was auctioned at Christie’s.
“Another one I like to use is like MP3s. You can have a copy of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, but … you won’t be able to convince people that you have the master recordings of ‘Thriller’. “Winkelmann said. “You can still have copies of digital art online and everyone can view it, but the blockchain, NFT, is proof that this person owns it.”
The buyer of Winkelmann’s creation receives “essentially a long string of numbers and letters,” Christie’s Davis told CNBC. “It’s a code that exists on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s a chain block that will be thrown into their Ethereum wallet.”
“They will also receive a giant JPEG. A massive, high-resolution JPEG. It’s a hundred megabytes,” Davis added.
Some people see NFT madness as temporary, believing that ownership of digital assets will eventually disappear out of desire and cause their values to drop sharply.
At least in terms of NFTs being considered art, Davis said the sale of Winkelmann’s work is a milestone.
“I don’t think it’s unique and I think this is a validation of the collection category,” Davis said. “NFTs are clearly more than an emerging and nascent collection space.”