Christie’s Pioneers First Major Digital Art Auction With Beeple NFT

Major auction house Christie’s is selling a piece of digital art by Beeple. The move comes as part of a partnership with NFT marketplace MakersPlace.

Christie’s Pioneers First Major Digital Art Auction With Beeple NFT
Shutterstock image by Gena Melendrez

Key Takeaways

  • Christie's is an auction house behind the world's most expensive art sale, Da Vinci's Salvador Mundi for $450 million.
  • It will become the first major auction house to sell purely digital art with the upcoming Ethereum NFT sale.
  • Beeple, the NFT artist, raised a record-breaking $3.5 million from a recent NFT release.

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Christie’s is running an auction for Beeple’s digital art piece “Everydays — The First 5000 Days”.

Christie’s Readying Beeple NFT 

Christie’s, one of the world’s most famous auction houses, is preparing to sell an NFT by Beeple. 

The 250-year-old institution has teamed up with NFT marketplace MakersPlace to sell the artwork. Bidding will run from Feb. 25 through March 11. The piece is called “Everydays — The First 5000 Days”, and it features images from the first 5,000 days of Beeple’s “Everydays” project. 

Beeple, real name Mike Winkelmann, is a popular digital artist who has recently made huge waves in the NFT world. In December, he raised a record-breaking $3.5 million from his “Everydays” 2020 drop. 

Winkelmann has been working on “Everydays” for 5,040 consecutive days. The project sees him producing a new piece from start to finish each day. 

NFTs enable artists to tokenized their work on Ethereum. Despite being a relatively nascent technology, the space has boomed over recent months.

Though Christie’s is typically associated with traditional art, selling iconic pieces like Leonardo da Vinci’s $450 million masterpiece Salvator Mundi in 2017, recently it’s embraced blockchain. In October of last year, the auction house sold the Satoshi Nakamoto-themed “Portraits of a Mind” collection by Benjamin Gentilli, also known as Robert Alice. One piece and its accompanying NFT called “Block 21” fetched $131,250, a record at the time. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this feature owned ETH, among a number of other cryptocurrencies. 

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