After bidding that lasted two weeks, “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” as the digital product is called, sold for $69.3 million on March 11, making it the third-highest price paid at auction for work by a living artist. Topping that list are Jeff Koons’s “Rabbit,” which took in $91.1 million in 2019, and David Hockney’s “Portrait of an Artist,” purchased for $90.2 million in 2018.
The work in question is a mosaic of 5,000 artworks made over the last 13 years by Mike Winkelmann, who goes by the artist name Beeple.
Included in the mosaic are images of Abraham Lincoln spanking a baby Donald Trump, a giant rabbit eating children on a playground, and a muscled Tom Hanks beating up an anthropomorphic representation of the coronavirus. The image file is connected to a non-fungible token (NFT), which was “minted” just last month, and serves as its certificate of authenticity recorded via blockchain technology.
Despite being listed for $100 at the start of the two-week auction, the file received more than 180 bids in the final hour. The uptake in interest ultimately pushed the price up from under $30 million to over $60 million in the two-minute extension granted by the auction house. As a result, Beeple’s digital asset became the third-most-expensive piece of artwork to be sold by a living artist at auction.
A digital asset investor who goes by the handle Metakovan and refuses to give his full name, announced that he is the buyer of the record-breaking $69.3 million digital artwork that sold Thursday. Christie’s auction house, which hosted the sale, confirmed his statement, also declining to reveal his legal name.
Metakovan is the chief financier behind Metapurse, a crytpo-based fund that acquires NFTs and other virtual properties; it claims to be the largest NFT fund in the world. In January, the company released a statement saying that, excluding works by Beeple, it had acquired a portfolio of $3.2 million worth of NFTs.
“I think this is going to be a billion-dollar piece,” Metakovan says in an interview over Google Hangouts. “I don’t know when.”