Famed auction house Christie’s wasn’t exactly sure what kind of demand it was going to see when it announced a $100 starting price for its first-ever digital art auction by way of a non-fungible token, or NFT, in February.
But as bidding wrapped up Wednesday on a collage of work, dubbed “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” from rising digital artist Beeple to top a price of $13 million, Christie’s Contemporary Art Specialist Noah Davis explained, nothing he’s seen before “even comes close.”
“The first 10 minutes of this sale we had more than 100 bids placed. We went from an opening bid of $100 to more than $1 million. We had bidders from seven different countries,” Davis told Yahoo Finance Live. “What’s a really compelling stat, and probably the most amazing to me, is only three of those bidders were previously known to Christie’s, so everyone else was brand new.”
That might not be terribly surprising, given how many people are still learning about NFTs and how the digital tokens function to digitize ownership of assets on blockchains. The tech has enabled verifiable digital ownership and the resale of anything from digital art, to NBA highlights that have re-sold for thousands of dollars on platform NBA Top Shot. Even the artist himself, Beeple (also known as Mike Winkelmann) only recently catapulted to mainstream fame after one of his other art works, a 10-second clip of people walking by a nude Donald Trump, re-sold for $6.6 million after selling for just over $66,000 four months prior.
This digital art piece which originally sold for $66,666 in October was just resold on the Nifty Gateway secondary market for $6.6 million. A 9900% return in less than 4 months.
So why pay for digital art that anyone can view, download, or embed elsewhere for free on the internet? As Beeple and other digital artists have tried to explain: anyone can take a picture of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, but that doesn’t prove ownership of the Mona Lisa in the same way owning an NFT attached to the art piece can. Unlike physical art, ownership cannot be proven merely by possession, which is why the public history of an uneditable blockchain presents real value for digital art that can be readily copied.
“NFTs have a lot of very interesting and unique properties,” Davis said. “It establishes scarcity, it solves for the question of authenticity testing, there’s no way to forge this artwork.”
Critics might point out that NFTs are still a bit detached from a true sense of ownership. In the case of many NFT sales, commercial ownership for works of art remain with the original artists. NBA Top Shot’s NFTs for collectible video highlights also don’t give collectors commercial rights, either (the NBA retains those.) But to many, any sense of ownership is better than none and its given rise for an entirely new way of digital artists like Beeple to make money off of previously less valuable projects.
“I know that so many people are going to feel empowered to be creative with their digital art works,” Davis said about the first Christie’s NFT auction, adding that more could follow. “We are going to have a lot more responsibility in this space to curate our content thoughtfully and to offer only the best of the best to the audience we have.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, the First 5000 Days auction, which consists of one NFT for a digital photo collage of every daily art piece from Beeple’s consecutive run of 5,000 days, had topped $13.25 million. The auction also marks the first time Christie’s planned to accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment. Bidding closes Thursday at 9 a.m. ET.
Zack Guzman is an anchor for Yahoo Finance Live as well as a senior writer covering entrepreneurship, cannabis, cryptocurrency, and breaking news at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @zGuz.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
