Digital artist Beeple is “a rich man” after his non-expendable listing sold for about $ 70 million at auction, Noah Davis, a contemporary and postwar art specialist at Christie’s, told CNBC on Thursday.
Davis made the comments in an interview on “Power Lunch” after Christie’s bidding window closed Thursday before. Beeple’s NFT, an image collage 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 positioned Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, for being “one of the three most valuable living artists.” Christie’s was the first major auction house to sell a piece of purely digital art.
“Mike Winkelmann is a rich man today,” Davis told CNBC. “He’s always been rich in spirit … I’m very proud of him.”
Sales of NFT, which is an active blockchain-based business, have recently exploded in popularity, ranging from basketball highlights to the first post on Twitter to date, a digital-only piece of art worth dozens of millions of dollars.
NFTs are stored in digital portfolios and are exclusive for design. This scarcity, advocates say, is critical to its value. Ownership of each NFT is recorded on a blockchain network, digital books that also feed cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.
Winkelmann tried to explain the rise in NFTs in a CNBC interview last month.
“There are a couple of different analogies 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 have the Mona Lisa,” he said. then Winkelmann, referring to the iconic portrait painted by Leonardo da Vinci.
The “Squawk Alley” interview took place on Feb. 25, the same day its NFT opened its doors at Christie’s.
“Another one I like to use is like MP3. You can have a copy of Michael Jackson’s thriller, but … you won’t be able to convince people that you have the master recordings of ‘Thriller.'” Winkelmann said. “You can still have copies of digital art online and everyone can see them, but the blockchain, the NFT, is what proves this person has them.”
The buyer of Winkelmann’s creation receives “essentially a long string of numbers and letters,” Christis’s Davis told CNBC. “It’s code that exists in the Ethereum blockchain. It’s a blockchain that will drop into your Ethereum wallet.”
“They’ll also get a giant JPEG. A massive, high-resolution JPEG. It’s a hundred megabytes,” Davis added.
Some people see NFT fashion as temporary, as they believe that ownership of digital assets will eventually disappear from convenience and cause their values to decline dramatically.
At least in terms of NFT’s art consideration, Davis said the sale of Winkelmann’s work is a milestone.
“I don’t think it’s timely, and I think it’s a validation of the collecting category,” Davis said. “NFTs are clearly more than just an emerging and nascent collection space.”