Beeple, aka Mike Winkelmann, made history in this past spring when his Everydays artwork sold for 69.3 million dollars at an online Christie’s auction. The buyer, Metakovan, aka Vignesh Sundaresan, paid entirely in cryptocurrency. This iconic transaction is well-known in the art world and beyond, and received it’s fair share of media coverage. So why am I talking about it? Because I believe most peeple’s (mis-spelling intended) vision was and is obscured by opulence. Beeple did not simply sell one art piece for $69m, but 5000 pieces for very close to $14k each. Or you can see it as Beeple being paid very close to $5m per year - for 14 years - for his output during that time, all at once. The miracle here is not the amount - which everyone is justifiably amazed by - but the facts that first, digital technology has made it possible for Beeple’s creative output of 14 years (!!) to be presented as one collage, and second, digital technology, again, has made it possible for this mass collection to be sold all at once and permanently recorded on the blockchain.
Image: Everydays: The First 5000 Days by Beeple (Mike Winkelmann)
Simply and emphatically, Beeple could not have sold Everydays if he was not a digital artist: Everydays wouldn’t have existed, making its eight-figure sale impossible. And what about that multi-million dollar sale? Well, it wasn’t paid in dollars, it was paid in cryptocurrency, giving crypto - Ethereum in particular - tons and tons of legitimacy. But Art has commanded stratospherically-figured sales for a long time. The real superstar, aside from the artist, of course, is blockchain technology with its smart contracts. Without these, No Everydays, no stellar sale, no amazement, no history. It truly is the world of computers.
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