Beeple digital-only 'NFT' artwork sells for £50m at auction

When Christie's auctioned an artwork yesterday for £50 million, it showed that the world's high-end art market was changing dramatically. The sale made the 39-year-old American known as Beeple the third richest living artist. What is so different about his collage of 5,000 images and drawings made over 5,000 days is that it doesn't exist in physical form - it is only available digitally.

Just as bitcoin was the internet's answer to currency. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are now being called the digital version of a collectable.

With traditional paintings like the Mona Lisa, exact copies can't be made. But for digital-only artwork, the rules are different. A person can prove that they own the original artwork with their non-fungible token, but anybody can simply click and download a copy of the artwork for themselves.

Lady Pheonix is a leading digital art curator and a good friend of Beeple. She was in the online auction yesterday.

[Martial-Mat]

Yes, the world has gone totally crazy.

[ProjectDystopia]

The last suggestion Lady Pheonix made would make the British museums very uncomfortable.

[felixsenmache]

Her last comment about digitalizing the pieces of the British museum and sending back to their original owners is not gonna happen. She speaks nonsense

[joeker]

Ah at least we enjoyed sanity when it existed

[Dessydd]

I brought a man a nights sleep last night. 16 pound. He hadn't slept for days. He was cold to the bone. The bones that were pushing hard through his skin. He just wanted to rest. Art is important. Art is important.

[ewsdneaxeaxe]

The world has gone crazy, just like crypto currency🙄🙄🙄

[AnotherSale]

Right click - Copy - Paste

Waste of cash

[PuenteAJ]

Sickening when there is so much poverty and sickness in the world

[barrymchugh]

Where does the NFTs actually add anything to these communities that wasn't there to begin with?

[ljcomments]

I wonder if Beeple could lend me a Grand right! Might have to WiFi it to me

[ac]

It actually IS just a bunch of JPEGs compiled together!

[tentimetex]

If everything can be tokenized, ...then theres no point. The barriers to entry are too low. This will destroy the concept of collectibles, because everything can be a collectible. And if everything is....then nothing is. Making a collectible was difficult: thats is what adds value. If it is easy to make something into a collectible, then that removes from the point. Yes, this does make every piece of digital art Unique, but you will have 500 billion pieces of digital art. Who cares.

[byroncudworth]

Great followed Beeple for a while via the Art Cafe channel.
(The commentator has a lovely carved screen behind her.)

[hmq]

What a total farce. Apparently no one has any money. And yet...

[louisdzialo]

These things take the electrical power of a small city to validate. immensely wasteful and stupid

[neilog]

He left out De-Fi, which is going to be more important than Bitcoin or NFTs

[thefuture]

Banks will collapse and end soon; it's inevitable. Cryptocurrency incoming

[Nitroat-xotj]

How stupid is this? Seems like a scam.

[guff]

For this amount of money I expect the artist to be a lot prettier. Can she please spend the proceeds on plastic surgery?