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NFT artwork sells for US$69 million and sparks new blockchain craze.
Non-Fungible-what-now?
A graphic designer known for digital artworks depicting scenes like a nude Elon Musk riding the Dogecoin dog bareback, has sparked a wave of interest in NFTs and made himself one of history’s highest valued artists in the process.
Six months ago not many people knew what a non-fungible token (NFT) was. Even in April the concept was only really discussed in particularly forward-thinking blockchain enthusiast forums. In March however, Mike Winkelman, the artist known by his handle Beeple, managed to sell an entirely digital NFT artwork through Christie’s auction house for US$69,346,250.
The sale made Winkleman one of the top three most valuable living artists overnight, with the digital file currently valued in the top 100 most expensive artworks ever sold, just above some renowned Picasso and Van Gogh pieces.
This isn’t Winkleman’s first NFT artwork, on November 1st 2020, just before the national US elections on November 3rd, Beeple sold an animated GIF of a giant dead Trump corpse covered in graffiti over the Nifty NFT online art marketplace. The digital artwork managed to attract an investment of US$66,666 even though it came with the irrevocable clause: “If Trump wins, this token will change to that video of sexy boi king Trump stomping through hell FOREVER.”
Unlike Banksy’s self shredding ‘Girl With Balloon’ painting, the artist explicitly warned investors of the fluid and unknowable nature of the artwork labeling it further with “I don’t want you coming back to me bitching that you spent $2M on this and now it’s a video of orangeman going HAM and it’s keeping u up at night popping mad boners.” Since Trump didn’t win in 2020, the artwork maintained its original form and changed hands again on February 25th of this year for a solid appreciation amounting to US$6.6m.
Beeple’s NFTs had a lot of momentum by this point, and when you combine that with the fact that ‘Everydays - The First 5000 Days’ was Christie’s first ‘purely digital’ artwork it makes sense that it achieved runaway prices.
NFT artworks use an irreplicable hashed ‘proof of authenticity’ code stored in the metadata that allows the image file to be exchanged and validated as a token using Ethereum smart contracts. The amazing result has sparked a broad belief that NFTs could be the answer to the exchange and commoditisation of digital artworks, but the sudden peak in interest in this novel tech means there is a tsunami of comedians and charletons minting tokens for the most ridiculous things they can think of.
Whether it’s a New York director’s fart audio file NFT, Jack Dorsey’s US$2.9million first Tweet or the particularly Machiavellian NFT poster of the fraudulent and dangerous ponzi scheme known as Fyre Festival, sold by cleared co-conspirator Ja Rule for $122,000, there is a genuine risk of an investment bubble that threatens to undo the progress or even permanently stifle
NFTs forever.
While we’re pretty sure Beeple’s $69m windfall means he will be able to continue his daily renditions of large Jeff Bezos cyborg heads floating over dystopian factories and giant Keanu Reeves sperm harvesting facilities, whatever the future holds, we’re kind of hoping that the market wisens up to the potential for NFT scams before the bubble gets big enough to blow up any future for this valuable new blockchain tool.