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New York (AP) - Over 69 million dollars for a file: a collage of 5000 small pictures has set a record for digital art.
The particularly striking thing about it is not even the price itself, but that practically anyone could recreate the work at home.
Because it consists of tiny images of digital images lined up next to one another, which can be viewed free of charge on the Tumblr online platform.
The artist Beeple uploads one of them almost every day.
Now he combined them into a JPEG file with 21 069 by 21 069 pixels.
The collage with the title "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" was worth 69,346,250 dollars (around 57.8 million euros) to a buyer after a two-week auction.
Beeple, real name Mike Winkelmann, published the shocked, incredulous reaction of his family in a video on Youtube: "I'm going to Disneyworld!" He exclaimed there.
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The result is the highlight of the recent boom in digital certificates of authenticity with the name NFT (non-fungible token).
They ensure that, among a large number of identical copies, only one file can be considered a signed original, so to speak.
With most current NFTs, the authenticity of the files is secured with the blockchain data chain of the crypto currency Ethereum.
The blockchain is basically a database that stores all transactions with a digital item and is distributed across many computers on the network.
That makes them forgery-proof.
The hype about crypto money with price records for the digital currency Bitcoin is also likely to have fueled the run on NFTs.
Over the past few months, prices achieved with the sale of NFT files have made headlines over and over again.
Grimes, pop musician and partner of Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, sold a series of short videos for a total of around six million dollars.
A clip in which basketball star LeBron James pounded the ball into the basket changed hands for more than $ 200,000.
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Twitter boss Jack Dorsey is currently auctioning a digital copy of the very first tweet from 2006 that everyone can still see online.
The highest bid is $ 2.5 million.
Buyers speculate that at some point the NFT-certified files could be worth as much as rare trading cards from baseball players today.
Beeple, born in 1981, became a star of the digital art scene even before the auction at Christie's.
In December, he sold a collection of 20 NFT images for $ 3.5 million.
In February, his work "Crossroads", which shows Donald Trump as the loser in the US presidential election, changed hands for $ 6.6 million.
After specialized platforms, Christie's jumped on the bandwagon.
The auction house did not set an estimate before the auction - because the NFT market was so new, as its expert Noah Davis told the Wall Street Journal.
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The renowned auction houses are struggling to attract younger customers.
More than half of the 33 bidders were born between 1981 and 1996, Christie's announced after the auction on Thursday.
The buyer of the 319 megabyte file can at least zoom in enough to look at every single image in the collage - even if the individual pixels become visible if the magnification is too high.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210312-99-793196 / 4
Beeple's Tumblr profile
Message from Christie's
Video with reaction from Beeple