Story at a glance
- Beeple’s visual showcase was the third highest art sale in Christie’s history.
- It was paid for by cryptocurrency.
On Thursday, a piece of artwork made history at Christie’s Auction House, becoming the third best selling artwork by a living artist at auction.
The piece itself, titled “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” was made by digital artist Beeple, otherwise known as Mike Winkelmann. It featured a series of photos Beeple has posted online over the past 5,000 days, or since 2007. It was the first work composed entirely of nonfungible tokens, a type of digital platform.
It sold for a record $69.3 million.
Breaking News: The first NFT sold by Christie’s was just bought for $69.3 million. The price for “Everydays — The First 5000 Days,” by the artist Beeple, is a new high for an artwork that exists only digitally. https://t.co/JzsQG6i0tF
— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 11, 2021
“Christie’s is grateful to both the artist and MakersPlace, a leading marketplace for online collectibles, for facilitating this monumental sale, and for helping us to usher the international art market into the exhilarating world of digital art,” the auction house wrote.
A total of 33 active bidders set prices for the piece, with more than 90 percent being new to Christie’s. Most were within the Americas.
It was sold on a blockchain software platform, as was the first artwork at Christie’s to be purchased with a cryptocurrency, Ethereum. Payments from Ethereum were verified with blockchain technology.
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