I wonder how much this will sell for 5,000 days from now. I recommend reading the whole article to get a perspective on how NFT art sales are spinning into outer space:
I haven’t found a copy of the 5000-image collage on-line (at any kind of meaningful resolution) yet, but if you want to look at all of Beeple’s work, including those 5000 images displayed separately, they’re all available for free on his web site: https://www.beeple-crap.com/
He also has placed a lot of his images on line in high resolution format that can easily be downloaded over here: https://www.behance.net/beeple
I’ll let others decide if “ownership” rights to this collage is work $69M, but for the rest of us that just want to view the art, Beeple has made it really easy, even releasing some of it (like his VJ Loops) under Creative Commons licenses.
And digging a bit further, it appears that Beeple is including physical objects as a part of selling his NFTs:
In addition to a record of the sale on a blockchain, he is shipping “physical tokens” consisting of:
- A display device (looks like an LCD photo frame with custom software) to exhibit the artwork
- A signed, numbered titanium backplate with authentication codes
- A certificate of authenticity, including the token ID
- A hair sample (?!)
- A fancy box
So at least you have something to show for your purchase.
I hadn’t heard of Beeple before all this, but wow, some of his stuff is pretty dark. I do like The First Emoji a lot though. 
https://www.beeple-crap.com/everydays?pgid=kdyix8la-the-first-emoji_57
If we end up with a way to do NFTs without wasting insane amounts of power, maybe I should make NFTs for every TidBITS article, with a portion of the resale proceeds going to TidBITS and a portion to the author.
I wonder how much someone would pay for
How about Clarus, the dogcow. I recon how much she’ll fetch.
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NFTs are investments in ‘value’. A kind of feedback loop of sorts. The work exists independently. For work that is omnipresent or available everywhere at least, people have asked the question ‘where is the value in this?’. NFTs are an attempt to answer that question by providing a vehicle for value. In this it is tempting to see it as something new and hence the buzz.
Also should note that the kind of work that is widespread on these sites are outside the art market mainstream or even minor stream… My instinct is that IF it survives, it might form a parallel art world, with it’s own influencers, critics, collectors and practitioners, with its own reputation matrix and price index, quite separate from the art world as it stands. This has happened before with YouTube, there’s relatively little crossover into mainstream film and television, and they’ve formed their own universe there.
The predication of a kind of digital elite, uber-wealthy bros, who collect these, pop them in their custom VR galleries, underpins all this speculation. There’s the narrow taste spectrum, the references, the thinness of the intellectual underpinnings, all this leads down very short paths. It may simply end up as a kind of cool thing about web culture, like collecting 50s decals, or movie posters…
…or it could end up being where money moves to. The high end real estate market and art market has vacuumed up money from tech and oligarchs etc etc for a while now. They’re bored I’d say, and this is giving their consultants something to talk about.
Let’s see how it plays.
A very good point. For centuries, a significant % of art that was sold turns out to be forgeries. An excellent documentary debuted on Netflix just this week about hundreds of artworks sold by New York’s Knoedler galleries that turned out to be fakes, “Made You Look: A True Story about Fake Art,’ a fascinating $80 million con.” Most of them were really bad fakes; in one case the spelling of Pollock’s “signature” on the painting was wrong. It did sell without being questioned.
There’s also an interesting story about what was then the equally highly regarded Mary Boone Gallery. Alec Baldwin bought a painting he had admired for years before he became famous. When he brought it home it smelled like paint that hadn’t dried, and the colors looked off:
It will be interesting to see if NFT fakes will be easier or harder to identify. The vast majority of fakes are sold after the artists have died and there aren’t many people around that can verify whether or not a work is “real.”
BTW, Mary Boone was recently incarcerated for non payment of oncome taxes:
And Alec Baldwin came out ahead of the game
At least Dorsey is donating the money to a worthy cause.
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It looks like a downward slide has started:
For a different point of view:
https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3
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I recommend John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Ways of Seeing by John Berger: 9780140135152 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
I picked this up while in college and keep re-reading it. He covers the issue of reproductions and how there the need for having the original has more to do with status than the art.