Sale of Digital Arts Ignites the Crypto Market
An artwork that exists only digitally was sold for $69.3 million!
So what is the deal with digital art compared to traditional art? Will digital art ever rival the infamous record price of $450 million paid for Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in 2017?
The Sale that Shocked the World
In 2021, an NFT by digital artist Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) was sold for 69 million at Christie’s auction house. The work Everyday: The First 5000 Days is a collage that consists of 5000 digital images created by Winkelmann for his Everyday series. The highest bidder got a digital file, plus some rights to present the image. Winkelmann claimed to have worked with the buyer to find ways to display this image, even onto “the side of a f**king building” at Art Basel. The NFT market is the story of 2021, and just in the first half of this year, the market sales volume surged to $2.5 billion (Reuters 2021). But how does NFT work?
NFT’s Function and Having Ownership of a Digital Product
How can someone own artwork over the internet? Thanks to NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which act as a digital certificate of authenticity, it is now possible to really “own” an artwork over the internet. NFTs are a form of cryptocurrency, and they are entirely unique in that they make artworks on the internet scarce. Essentially, through a blockchain where the ownership information is recorded, the owner can have a digital signature of ownership over the artworks. Thus, NFTs allow digital artists to make their creations more valuable, and since there is only one token in the world for each work, the value of an artwork can skyrocket.
Record-Setting Salvator Mundi
While the story of art in 2021 is centred around Beeple and digital arts, the record of the most expensive work of art at an auction still belongs to a physical painting. The painting Salvator Mundi, by Italian High Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, was sold for 450 million in 2017 at Christie’s auction house. Referred by many as the male version of Mona Lisa, Salvator Mundi is an iconography depicting Christ and his role as the celestial sphere of the heavens. The owner of da Vinci’s masterpiece is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman. In 2021, there was a real excitement for the painting to be displayed in the Louvre Abu Dhabi, but the event was indefinitely postponed. Compared to digital arts, traditional art uses mediums and techniques that have existed and developed over centuries of art history by artisans worldwide. Some might argue that physical arts will always have more value, as there is a fundamental difference between owning the original artwork than seeing a digital photograph online. Only when people are in person can they appreciate the true beauty and notice the subtle nuances in Salvator Mundi and the ingenuity in the embedded symbolism, and the attention to detail in the oil paint. However, with any digital arts, all that is required is the internet, and everything is more or less the same on a mobile screen.
Conclusion
Despite the financial success and the growth of the NFT market, it is unlikely that NFTs will trump traditional arts that have thousands of years of history. Further, It is undoubtable that NFTs still have significant problems in today’s markets, such as their requirement of massive electricity use to store the information in blockchains. The irony of digital art is that even though the buyer owns the original digital painting, in the case of Beeple’s work, the person can’t keep others from copying the image and using it for whatever purposes they want. In reality, all buyers are getting is the bragging rights and an asset that could be resold. So, are NFTs genuinely going to turn the crypto and art market upside down, or is it just a digital bubble destined to fail?
