Beeple’s “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” (Source: Christie’s)
Beeple, a 35-year-old husband and father of two, has been creating elaborate digital art every day for the past 13 years.
Much of it ends up on his Instagram feed, which now has 1.8m followers.
Yesterday, Christie’s started auctioning off one of his pieces…
… with bidding open until March 11.
This isn’t any old auction, though.
Beeple’s piece — dubbed “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS”, which includes images from his prolific daily output — is a non-fungible token (NFT) based piece of artwork.
Say whuuu?
Per CNBC, “NFTs are unique cryptocurrency tokens used to represent assets.”
Translation: Even though the artwork is digital (which is easily replicated; think GIFs or MP3s), ownership of the piece can be tracked and assigned to an individual.
An art world first
Beeple tweets, “This will be the first time that a global auction house has auctioned off an entirely digital artwork with no physical component.”
He actually sold $3.5m of digital artwork in December and — with NFTs absolutely exploding (read about NFT marketplace NBA Top Shot here) — expect this Beeple piece to get a bit crazy.
Bids hit $2m+ on Day 1, and Christie’s — for the first time — will accept cryptocurrency Ether as payment.
Here are some of Beeple’s other works, from an Esquire profile (wild stuff):
