Auction house Christie’s has announced that they will accept offers in ETH for the auction of the First 5000 Days crypto art NFT by Beeple. It’s the first time ever that the originally British auction house will accept a cryptocurrency. Christie’s was establish in 1766 and now has its main premises on King Street, St James’s in London and in the Rockefeller Center in New York City.
Accepting ETH will just be something Christie’s is doing for this Beeple auction. However, if they like the experience, they could allow cryptocurrencies for more auctions in the future. First 5000 Days is an artwork that shows 13 years of work by Mike ‘Beeple’ Winkelmann.
Last year Beeple made a strong appearance into the crypto art market by making $3.5 million dollars from his second art drop. From his first art drop he sold one hundred artworks for 1 dollar, and these sold out within seconds. Recently these one dollar artworks have been trading on the secondary market for close to $100.000. Winkelmann earns royalties over every resale from one of his artworks.
What are NFTs?
NFT is the abbreviation for non-fungible tokens, which are tokens that signify ownership over unique digital assets. These assets can for example be items in a game, crypto art, or digital collectibles. In addition it could also be a ticket for a cinema or perhaps a subscription for public transit. The usability of NFTs doesn’t end with gaming, it only starts there.
A non-fungible token can’t be swapped one-on-one with another non-fungible token. It represents something unique. That’s why non-fungible tokens can be based compared with rare art, an owned house or a signed mint edition of a certain comic book. These products are unique and in the same way a non-fungible token is unique as well. This gives non-fungible tokens also an unique value that only represents that one specific token.
What is crypto art?
Crypto art is a piece of digital art that is tokenized on the blockchain as a non-fungible token. That means that the owner of the token will always hold a proven and original copy of a piece of art. Just like physical art, there can be unlimited copies. But ultimately there can only be one Mona Lisa.
Mostly we value art for its aesthetics and cultural relevance, but above all on the ability to verify the creator and its proven rarity. With blockchain technology these last two features are part of the blockchain. Everybody can see and confirm who minted these original creations.
The concept of seeing a digital image as art, is one thing. However, for many people it will be a challenge to consider digital images as valuable. Consider this: The Mona Lisa is worth many millions of dollars. If I would paint the Mona Lisa in an exact copy, it would be worth only 50 dollars. Because we all know where the original version is. Being able to verify the authenticity and rarity of a piece of art is crucial. In the end everything can be art. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a still image, moving image, video, music or a combination of everything.
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