This fund offers “B.20” crypto-tokens, which are shares in Metapurse’s portfolio of NFTs-including existing works of Beeple’s art. The buyer, known by the pseudonym Metakovan, is linked to an NFT “index fund” called Metapurse. People want Beeple, and the market decided.” But the words “people,” “market,” and “worth” are all questionable in that sentence. NFTs are a new version of the “ I Am Rich” app from 2008: an early iPhone app that cost $999.99 and did nothing but show that you could afford to spend a thousand dollars.Īlex Rotter of Christie’s said of the Beeple sale: “We let the market decide what it’s worth, we didn’t push anyone to bid $60.25 million. In other words, you buy a certificate of authenticity, but not the work authenticated by it-just the bragging rights to it. You are buying only the NFT itself: a crypto-asset containing a pointer to a copy of the digital image file. The Christie’s conditions of sale are 33 pages of small print, but they eventually admit that you are not buying any copyright or other rights-not even reproduction rights-to the digital image. An index entry, scribbled in inedible ink-and dependent on you not physically losing it. An NFT is just a pointer, containing a website address, or maybe just a number. Nonfungible tokens are individually unique and can be used as an identifier for an individual object. Most crypto-assets, such as bitcoins, are “fungible”-you don’t care which particular bitcoins you have, only how much bitcoin you have in total.
That makes it a natural match for the world of blockchain.
But high art is a strange world, one that for decades has run on hype, pumping prices, the convenience of transferring large sums of money through nominal purchases across borders, and an increasing detachment from any physical reality. That brought plenty of publicity-both to Beeple and to NFTs themselves. This is the third most expensive auction sale ever of a work by a living artist. The digital artist Mike Winkelmann, professionally known as Beeple, just sold an NFT-a “nonfungible token,” an asset on a cryptocurrency blockchain-of his image Everydays: the First 5000 Days at auction by Christie’s for $69,346,250.