On March 11, Christie's auctioned the work Everydays: The First 5,000 Days for $69.3 million, propelling the work's little-known author, Beeple, as the third most expensive living artist today. It was the first time that the former auction house dared to auction an NFT and it had a starting price of just $100.
Everydays: The First 5,000 Days by Mike Winkelman, also known as Beeple, is a digital work made up of 5,000 different pictures. The work brings together all the illustrations that the artist produced daily for 13 years, and its digital size is 21,069 x 21,069 pixels.
NFT and its differentiation in the digital world
Digital art, such as digital illustration and painting, videos, animations, digital photography, 3D modeling, among others, have been around for several years and its introduction is not new in the art market. But one of the limitations it has faced is its easy reproduction and the difficulty for owners to recognize that the work they have is an “original” and not a copy downloaded from the Internet. Even physical works of art, such as paintings that have been digitized through photography or scanning, have suffered from the excessive reproduction that today's technologies allow.
And here is where the important question comes in: how do you sell as “original” something that everyone can copy and reproduce?
This is where NFTs come in, from their acronym “Non-fungible token” or Non-Fungible Piece. NFTs are digital files, such as photographs, videos or illustrations, to which a certificate is associated and are linked to a blockchain, a digital record in which one can see the history of all the people who have owned the file, and the moment in which they were sold to their next owner, thus proving the authenticity of the work. NFTs are saleable and exchangeable, but each time they change ownership, a record of their new ownership is created, and in most cases, their payment method is associated with cryptocurrencies.
NFTs are not reproducible, but that does not prevent others from creating “copies” of a work that is registered. That is, any Internet user can now search for The First 5,000 Days by Beeple in their browser, and save the image on their device, but there is only 1 file that is considered the original and it is the NFT. This is what gives it added value that distinguishes it from the rest of the files you could download from the internet.
NFTs had their first forays into the market in 2013, just 8 years ago. Its introduction into art is still very new, but in the world of sports, particularly basketball, there are already some companies that market NFTs, such as “NBA Top Shot” in which people can collect video clips of highlights of NBA games; a form of business that takes up the idea of collecting player cards, popular among sports lovers. And considering that society is increasingly evolving towards digital tools, will NFTs be the way to collect art in the future?