Everydays: The First 5000 Days. The First Digital Artwork sold by $69 million
Christie’s has sold its first digital artwork and its third most expensive in its history behind two artworks by Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
In May 2007, digital artist Beeple (Mike Winnkelmann) began an archive of digital pictures by posting it in his own website to create kind of a mural of the images created, reproduced and disseminated in the digital world. For 13-and-a-half-years, he saved day by day over thounsands of images that have veen brought together in the collage titled Everydays: The First 5000 days.
According to Chritie’s: “In EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, the artist has stitched together recurring themes and colour schemes into an aesthetic whole. The individual pieces are organised in loose chronological order: zooming in reveals pictures by turn abstract, fantastical, grotesque or absurd, deeply personal or representative of current events. Recurring themes include society’s obsession with and fear of technology; the desire for and resentment of wealth; and America’s recent political turbulence.”
Minted exclusively for Christie’s, the monumental digital collage was offered as a single lot sale concurrently with First Open, and realised $69,346,250. Marking two industry firsts, Christie’s is the first major auction house to offer a purely digital work with a unique NFT (Non-fungible token) — effectively a guarantee of its authenticity — and to accept cryptocurrency, in this case Ether, in addition to standard forms of payment for the singular lot.
Source: Christies.com