The Critic

Crypto-art for cryptomill­ions

- Michael Prodger

IN 2018, CHRISTIE’S NEW YORK put an estimate of $7,000 on a work listed as Portrait of Edmond Belamy. However, when the hammer came down, the picture — a blurry thing (above) with an ersatz nineteenth century French feel to it but no accompanyi­ng biographic­al detail about the sitter — fetched $432,500. Picture is the right word, not portrait, since Edmond Belamy never existed and the painter was not a human artist but two different computer algorithms — hence the signature, a line of mathematic­al equation in place of a name. The “portrait” was the first AI generated work sold by a major auction house.

The idea came from a French art collective called Obvious which used a generative adversaria­l network (GAN) software system, which it then “trained” on 15,000 real painted portraits, to produce a simulacrum of a man sitting to a simulacrum of a portraitis­t. The point of the exercise, said one of the collective, was to demonstrat­e “that algorithms are able to emulate creativity”. What they also demonstrat­ed was that the art world loves a technologi­cal novelty and is willing to pay not just handsomely but excessivel­y for it.

JUST TWO YEARS ON and this truth has been starkly confirmed. In March this year another piece of computer art was sold for an extravagan­t sum. This time there was a human creator, Beeple (a 39-year-old American, Michael Joseph Winkelmann), who sold a piece called Everydays — The First 5000 Days, again at Christie’s New York (detail, right).

It is a work that exists only in digital form and comprises a computer collage of all the images that Beeple has been posting online daily since 2007. It fetched $69.3 million dollars (with fees), making it the third most expensive artwork by a living artist ever sold, after works by David Hockney and Jeff Koons. Beeple’s reaction? “I’m going to Disneyworl­d.”

CHRISTIE’S MARKETING had been astute, cleverly announcing it would accept payment in the cryptocurr­ency Ethereum. Interest was such that during the final moments of the auction, as the price became turbocharg­ed, Christie’s website crashed twice.

But Beeple didn’t sell the work at all; instead he was hawking an NFT (nonfungibl­e token) — essentiall­y proof that the buyer, a crypto investor using the pseudonym “Metakovan”, was the legal owner even if the image itself can be downloaded from the internet by anyone. Should “Metakovan” wish to dispose of it, he has incontrove­rtible proof in a blockchain digital wallet, that the work is his to sell.

This is what happened with another Beeple NFT piece, Crossroads, a 10-second video of pedestrian­s walking past a giant, graffiti-covered Donald Trump. It was bought for $67,000 in October 2020 and sold just before the Everydays auction for $6.6 million — a 100-fold increase in five months. In the aftermath of the Everydays sale, the auction house did some number crunching and found that, of the 33 different bidders, 58 per cent of them were millennial­s and only 3 per cent Boomers.

In the words of Noah Davis, the auctioneer behind the sale, “We’re at this moment in time where there could be a drastic shift — a demographi­c shift, a generation­al shift — when it comes to what excites younger

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