Online artist Beeple has quickly become one of the world’s most valuable living artists after selling an NFT today. After months of investment into the online cryptoart market, the artist sold a single piece at a value of over $69 million.
Announced by Christie's, the massive cost of the latest Beeple work comes in the wake of the artists huge online following. Coupled with the wildfire-like fascination with NFT cryptoart, the artists’ work has generated huge value in the crypto community.
What did Beeple sell for $69 million?
Beeple’s latest work is the artist’s largest yet. Titled Everydays: The First 5000 Days, Beeple has crafted a digital collage that combines thousands of pieces into one. Binding 5000 pieces of art designed over the past 13-and-a-half years into a single piece, the collage shows the designer’s journey as an artist.
The massive digital art piece is displayed in a single 319 megabyte file on a 21,069 x 21,069 canvas. Christie's explains that the art is supposed to signify “society’s obsession with and fear of technology; the desire for and resentment of wealth; and America’s recent political turbulence.”
If you want to see the entire image, check out the tweet below:
What exactly is an NFT?
NFTs are non-fungible tokens. Essentially, these digital files have been ”minted” as original copies of a file that may be redistributed as much as the owner likes. However, no matter how much a piece is copied, the owner will always have the original.
On the contrary, there’s often conflict over whether or not a minted piece of cryptoart is the original copy. Even if the digital artwork is original, is it still worth the extortionate cost? For some, it would appear so. In the light of cryptoart’s exploding popularity, some believe it’s the future of art collecting in the digital age.