Everydays: the First 5000 Days | |
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Artist | Mike Winkelmann |
Completion date | 21 February 2021 |
Medium | Digital (JPEG) |
Dimensions | 21,069 × 21,069 pixels |
Owner | Vignesh Sundaresan (MetaKovan) |
Everydays: the First 5000 Days is a digital work of art created by Mike Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple. The work is a collage of 5000 digital images created by Winkelmann for his Everydays series. Its associated non-fungible token (NFT) was sold for $69.3 million at Christie's in 2021, making it the most expensive non-fungible token ever. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Everydays was purchased by Singapore-based programmer Vignesh Sundaresan, a cryptocurrency investor [5] [6] and the founder of the Metapurse NFT project, also known online by his pseudonym MetaKovan. [7] Sundaresan paid for the artwork using 42,329 Ether. [8] Both the buyer Sundaresan and the seller Winkelmann had a vested interest in driving up the price of the work, in order to bring attention to and drive sales for a speculative asset related to twenty other Beeple works, which they called "B20 tokens." The price of these tokens, in which Sundaresan held a majority stake, reached its peak during media coverage of the Everydays auction, and subsequently collapsed. [9] Because of this, some observers have described the auction as a publicity stunt and a scam. [10] [11]
Sundaresan receives rights to display the artwork, but does not receive copyright. He has displayed the artwork in a digital museum [12] within "the metaverse", which the public can view through a web browser. [13]
Winkelmann was inspired by British artist Tom Judd and began the daily project on 1 May 2007. [14] Some of the images involve figures from pop culture, including Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump, and are arranged chronologically. [15] Some of the earlier images are hand-drawn and not computer-produced. [14]
In an article published to Artnet, art critic Ben Davis asserted that some of the 5,000 images comprising the work revealed various racial, misogynistic, and homophobic stereotypes. [14] Will Gompertz considered Winkelmann a "talented exponent" of the comic book aesthetic, and compared his work to Hieronymus Bosch and Philip Guston. He predicted that the work would be regarded "either as the moment before the short-lived cryptoart bubble burst, or as the first chapter in a new story of art". [1]
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Michael Joseph Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple, is an American digital artist, graphic designer, and animator known for selling NFTs. In his art, he uses various media to create comical, phantasmagoric works that make political and social commentary while using pop culture figures as references. British auction house Christie's has called him "A visionary digital artist at the forefront of NFTs". Beeple was introduced to NFTs in October 2020 and credits Pak for providing his first "primer" on selling NFTs. The NFT associated with Everydays: the First 5000 Days, a collage of images from his "Everydays" series, was sold on March 12, 2021, for $69 million in cryptocurrency to an investor in NFTs. It is the first purely non-fungible token to be sold by Christie's. The auction house had previously sold Block 21, an NFT with accompanying physical painting for approximately $130,000 in October 2020.
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The buyer for the $69 million Beeple in March—angel investor Vignesh Sundaresan, also known as Metakovan—also owned 59 percent of the B20 tokens. B20 tokens were initially sold to the public on January 23 at 36 cents per token before hitting a high of $23.62—a 6,461 percent increase—just a couple of days before the two-week-long $69 million Beeple auction reached its end. By the end of May, B20 was back down to trading for under a dollar. As of this writing, the token is trading for 40 cents.