New York (AFP)

An entirely digital work by the American artist Beeple was sold Thursday for 69.3 million dollars by the auction house Christie's, a record which testifies to the revolution underway in this long confidential market.

"Everydays: the First 5,000 Days", a collection of drawings and animations produced daily for 5,000 days in a row, places Mike Winkelmann, the real name of Beeple, among the three most expensive artists in the world during their lifetime, all media combined.

"Shit then", responded Mike Winkelmann on his Twitter account after the close of the sale, which will have lasted two weeks in total.

Second record: some 22 million Internet users followed the last minutes of the sale on the Christie's site, for what was the first sale of an entirely digital work by a major auction house.

Almost all of the auction participants (91%) had never bid at Christie's.

A majority of them (58%) were between 25 and 40 years old, according to the auction house.

39-year-old Mike Winkelmann was known for his digital projects and collaborations, but before the end of October, he had never sold a work in his name.

Thursday's sale illustrates the rise of a new authentication technology, using the "blockchain" used for cryptocurrencies, presented as a miracle cure for copies, one of the brakes on the development of digital art.

It makes it possible to market works - and just about anything imaginable on the internet, from musical albums to personalities' tweets - in the form of "non-fungible token", "NFT", or non-fungible token.

This obscure name, born in 2017, covers any virtual object with indisputable and inviolable identity, authenticity and traceability in theory.

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."

- "New chapter in the history of art" -

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

Totally dematerialized art contains "as much know-how, nuances and intentions as anything that can be done on a physical canvas," he added.

"I am more than honored and touched to represent the digital arts community at this historic moment."

At the end of February, another work by Beeple, "Crossroads", had already sold for 6.6 million dollars 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 that he himself sold at the end of October for a symbolic dollar was recently acquired for 150,000 dollars.

Most "NFT" digital items can be purchased with cryptocurrency, as was the case with Beeple's artwork sold Thursday by Christie's, which accepted Ether, one of the most popular digital currencies.

Other high profile "NFTs" include the first tweet from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey posted in 2006.

Auctions are underway on the Valuables platform, and the highest so far is $ 2.5 million.

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.

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 put on sale, last week, an "NFT" version of their new album "When You See Yourself".

© 2021 AFP