Digital artist Beeple is “a rich man” after his non-replaceable token was sold at auction for nearly $ 70 million, Noah Davis, a post-war and contemporary art specialist at Christie’s, told CNBC on Thursday.
Davis made the comments in an interview on “Power Lunch” after the bidding window at Christie’s closed earlier Thursday. Beeple’s NFT – a collage of images titled “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” – sold for $ 69,346,250, according to Christie’s.
In a tweet, the auction house said the sale price places Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, as “one of the three most valuable living artists.” Christie’s was the first major auction house to sell a purely digital work of art.
“Mike Winkelmann is a rich man today,” Davis told CNBC. “He’s always been rich in spirit … I’m really proud of him.”
Sales of NFTs, which are blockchain-based assets, have skyrocketed in popularity recently, spanning the spectrum from basketball highlights to the very first Twitter post to now a piece of digital artwork worth tens of millions of dollars.
NFTs are stored in digital wallets and are unique in design. That scarcity, proponents say, is critical to their value. Ownership of each NFT is recorded on a blockchain network, the digital ledgers that also power cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.
Winkelmann tried to explain the rise of NFTs in a CNBC interview last month.
“There are a few different analogies that I like to use. One of them is the Mona Lisa. Anyone can take a picture of the Mona Lisa, but that doesn’t mean you own the Mona Lisa,” Winkelmann said at the time, referring to the iconic portrait painted by Leonardo da Vinci.
The “Squawk Alley” interview took place on February 25, the same day his NFT opened for bidding at Christie’s.
“Another one I like to use is as mp3s. You can have a copy of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, but … you won’t be able to convince people that you own the master recordings from ‘Thriller’.” Winkelmann said. “You can still have copies of digital art online and anyone can view them, but the blockchain, the NFT, is the thing that proves that this one person owns it.”
The buyer of Winkelmann’s creation “essentially gets a long string of numbers and letters,” Christie’s Davis told CNBC. “It’s code that exists on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s a block in the chain that gets dropped into their Ethereum wallets.”
“They also get a giant JPEG. A huge high-resolution JPEG. It’s a hundred megabytes,” Davis added.
Some people see the NFT craze as temporary, believing that ownership of the digital assets will eventually fade from desirability and cause their values to deteriorate sharply.
As for NFTs being considered art, Davis said the sale of Winkelmann’s work is a milestone.
“I don’t think it’s a one-off, and I do think this confirms the collectors category,” Davis said. “NFTs are clearly more than just an emerging, burgeoning gathering space.”