“Everydays: the First 5.000 Days”, a digital work by American artist Beeple, was auctioned for $ 69.3 million on March 11, 2021. -

BEEPLE / CHRISTIE'S

Banksy can go and get dressed.

A fully digital work by American artist Beeple was sold Thursday for $ 69.3 million by auction house Christie's.

A record which testifies to the revolution underway in this long confidential market shaken by the NFTs, these tokens which allow to authenticate any digital object: image, video, music or even recently, the first tweet published by Jack Dorsey.

Beeple –Mike Winkelmann, his real name– climbed to 3rd position among the most expensive living artists, behind Jeff Koons and David Hockney.

For more than 13 years, Beeple has created a work of art on his computer every day, ranging from science fiction to political satire.

Everydays: the First 5,000 Days

, is a collage of his 5,000 works.

“Oh my god, I'm going to Disneyworld,” exclaimed the artist, who is expected to receive about half of that, around $ 34 million, after commission and taxes.

"Oh my god, I'm going to Disneyworld", the moment when @beeple sold his creation for $ 69 million (Christie's takes a 14% commission, and you have to add up to 37% in taxes, so Mike Winkelmann should pocket $ 34 million) https://t.co/8982gJe5zJ

- Philippe Berry (@ptiberry) March 11, 2021

Flaming NFT speculation

For years, digital art has hit a wall: not only is there no visible difference between an original and a copy made of 0's and 1's, it was very complicated to establish authenticity. of a work.

Then come the NFTs, for “non-fungible tokens”.

We are not much more advanced in French: a non-fungible token, a virtual asset that cannot be substituted by another of equivalent value.

This is a technology that uses a blockchain, this tamper-proof shared ledger that can be used to buy and sell bitcoins, for example, or here, NFTs.

Still lost?

They should be considered as a kind of certificate authenticating the ownership of a digital asset.

For about six months since the "NFT" entered the vocabulary of a wider circle of Internet users, records have followed one another at a wild pace and more and more artists, entrepreneurs and collectors want to be part of it.

"Artists have been using data storage and software to create art and distribute it on the internet for over twenty years, but there was (until now) no real way to own and collect it." , commented Mike Winkelmann, in a statement released by Christie's after the sale.

"With the NFT, all that has changed."

Flaming speculation

For him, "we are witnessing the beginning of a new chapter in the history of art, of digital art".

At the end of February, another work by Beeple,

Crossroads

, had already sold for $ 6.6 million on the Nifty Gateway platform, specializing in virtual works.

The artist received 10% of this amount, as is the practice on most specialized platforms, and an animation he himself sold at the end of October for a symbolic dollar, was recently acquired for 150,000 dollars. .

Witness to its taste for new technologies, the North American Professional Basketball League (NBA) has also launched its "NFT" platform, Top Shot, which sells video clips of a few seconds of game action. In February, a clip of a flight of Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James sold for $ 208,000, a record for a "moment", the name of these clips.

Canadian artist Grimes recently sold NFT art for over $ 6 million, with many buyers hoping to ride the wave and make a profit in the future.

The Larva Labs collective is often considered as the founder of this new era of digital collection.

In 2017, he launched the CryptoPunks project, a series of 10,000 computer-drawn faces, all different, with pixelated and deliberately coarse features.

Each face, in "NFT" form, can now be resold on the Larva Labs platform.

One of them, a face with a pipe and cap, was bought back for $ 7.5 million by an anonymous buyer on Wednesday.

In music, the American rock group Kings of Leon released a limited NFT version of their new album

When You See Yourself

last week

.

Speculative bubble or not, only the future will tell.

Culture

What are NFTs, the tokens that allow you to buy tweets and works of art on the Internet?

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