The craze for NFT digital art that wins millions of creators

LONDON (AP) – A digital work of art, tweaked using cryptocurrency technology to make it unique, sold at auction this week for nearly $ 70 million. The deal made headlines around the world and sparked an already growing interest in these types of digital items – known as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs – that have caught the attention of artists and collectors.

In economic jargon, a fungible token is an asset that can be traded one for one. Think of dollars or bitcoins – each is exactly the same in value and can be traded freely. A non-fungible object, on the other hand, has its own distinct value, such as an old house or a classic car.

Go through this notion with the cryptocurrency technology known as blockchain and you get NFTs. They are actually digital certificates of authenticity that can be attached to digital art or, well, almost anything that comes in digital form – audio files, video clips, animated stickers, that article you are reading.

NFTs confirm ownership of an item by recording details on a digital ledger known as a blockchain, which is public and stored on computers across the internet, effectively making loss or destruction impossible.

At the moment, these tokens are hot in the collectable world, where they are used to solve a central problem with digital collectibles: how to claim ownership of something that can be easily and indefinitely duplicated.

I STILL DO NOT UNDERSTAND. CAN NO ONE COPY DIGITAL ITEMS ON THE INTERNET?

Of course, anyone can download a copy of Beeple’s art from their social media feed, print it out, and hang it on the wall. Just like you can take a picture of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre or buy a print at the museum’s gift shop. But that doesn’t mean you own these original works of art.

One of the purposes of NFTs is that they can be used to trace the digital provenance of an object, allowing a select few to prove ownership. In a larger perspective, it’s a way to create scarcity – albeit an artificial one – so that you can sell something for higher prices because of its scarcity.

“All the time, money, and effort that you put into your digital life, you can create value for it,” said Andrew Steinwold, Chicago fund manager, who started an NFT fund in 2019. “ You have property rights in the physical world. Why don’t we have property rights in the digital world? “

Some NFT issuers grant full copyright to the buyer, while others do not.

Beeple is an American digital artist based in South Carolina real name Mike Winkelmann. He has been creating digital sketches daily using 3D tools for 13 years. Christie’s auction house calls its work “abstract, fantastic, grotesque or absurd”. He has 1.9 million followers on Instagram.

In December, the first auction of her art grossed $ 3.5 million, an eye-catching amount that was surpassed by this week’s record-breaking sale of her “Everyday: The First 5,000 Days” collage for nearly of $ 70 million, paid in digital currency known as Ethereum.

SO WHO ELSE SELLS NFT?

William Shatner of “Star Trek” fame sold 90,000 virtual collectible cards last year for $ 1 each. Electronic musician Grimes sold her digital art for $ 6 million last month, including a music video featuring winged cherubs floating in pastel dreamy landscapes that cost $ 389,000. Music videos of NBA star LeBron James Dunking sell for up to $ 225,000. Actress Lindsey Lohan has sold an image of her face. You can also buy virtual land in video games and memes like Nyan Cat.

Digital artist Anne Spalter started out as a skeptic of the NFT, but has now sold several works of art using the tokens. The latest was a video titled “Dark Castles” – of mysteriously warped castles generated by artificial intelligence technology – which sold for $ 2,752.

“NFT opened up art to a whole bunch of people who would never have been to a gallery in New York City,” said Spalter, pioneer of digital fine art courses at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1990s. “They are investors, technological entrepreneurs, they are in this world.”

BUT WHO WOULD SPEND $ 70 MILLION ON ONE?

Christie’s on Friday identified the buyer of Beeple’s work as the funder of a digital art fund known as Metakovan, an announcement that could fuel concerns of a bubble in the art market of cryptocurrency. The buyer founded Metapurse, described as the world’s largest NFT fund, which should receive more attention.

The UK auction house said the purchase made Beeple’s work the third most valuable piece of art ever sold by a living artist, behind works by Jeff Koons and David Hockney.

Spalter said she expects this bubble to burst, although she still believes NFTs hold promise for artists as a way to reduce fraud and misattribution of works.

“I am always mystified by the prices and their high level,” she said. “I think there will be a correction.”