art du jour

Someone Really Spent $69 Million on This Nice JPG

Photo: Beeple via Christie’s

The very real art world, and not a Kraftwerk lyric, made history on Thursday when $69.3 million was spent on a JPG file made by graphic designer Mike Winkelmann. (Pause for a requisite “nice.”) The New York Times reports that Christie’s facilitated the bidding frenzy of an auction for the collage, “Everydays — The First 5000 Days,” which only exists digitally. The collage consists of all the images that Winkelmann (a digital artist who goes by the name Beeple) “has been posting online each day since 2007,” and is described as being an “irreverent visual commentary on 21st century life.” The more historic nature of the sale, though, is that the artwork was made as an NFT, or “nonfungible token,” which our friends at the Verge explain as being sort of like a one-of-a-kind blockchain trading card that gives you ownership of whatever you buy. The likes of Kings of Leon, Banksy, and Grimes have recently pivoted to selling their artistic creations as NFTs, which, again, is indeed a real thing people do now and not a random episode of The Jetsons.

Someone Really Spent $69 Million on This Nice JPG