Everydays – The First 5000 Days, made by an artist named Beeple, was sold at Christie’s Auction in March 2021 for $69,346,250. Beeple’s artwork is a unique digital art or NFT. What are NFT artworks? Why are they worth millions? Who is Beeple? What exactly is his artwork? Here’s a brief panoramic view of digital art:
What are NFT artworks?
NFT stands for Non-Fungible Tokens. It is tokens that we can use to represent ownership of unique items, powered by the Ethereum blockchain.
Artists can tokenize their artworks. Once they tokenize, the artwork can only have one official owner at a time and they’re secured by the Ethereum blockchain. It means that no one can modify the record of ownership or copy/paste a new NFT into existence. On the internet, you can copy a file, like .mp3 or .jpg, and the copy is the same as the original, but NFTs are digitally unique, you can’t copy two NFTs tokens.
Fungible items are also exchangeable. For example, ETH (Ethereum) or dollars are fungible because 1 ETH/ $1 is exchangeable for another 1 ETH / $1.
Why are they worth millions?
The price of NFT artwork is so high because it is the ‘original’. The buyer of the NFT will own a “token” that proves they own the “original” work. We can imagine owning an NFT artwork like buying an autographed print.
Beeple, VIBE CITY, 11 October 2020, from EVERYDAYS. Courtesy the artist. https://artreview.com/
By the way, who is Beeple?
Beeple is Mike Winkelmann, an artist who makes digital art—pixels on screens. He posted and sold his artworks online. Recently, his work with an NFT token was sold for $69 million, broke the record for digital art.
Beeple, SPACE EXPLORATION, 26 December 2020, from EVERYDAYS. Courtesy the artist. https://artreview.com/
What exactly is Beeple’s artwork?
EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS (2007–20) is a large JPEG consisting of 5,000 individual JPEGs. Beeple has been creating and posting a new digital picture every day from 1 May 2007 until 2020. He called it, “every single day for 13-and-a-half years”. His pictures are surreal, comical, critical, futuristic, and sometimes grotesque. For example, a man in the astronaut suit is pointing at a flower, stones of Buzz Lightyear character in Toy Story, Trump and cartoon characters, and many others.
Beeple Explains Of NFTs
