Art prices in a ‘bubble’, says Beeple after his record sale

NFT art is in a bubble, says Beeple, the digital artist who this month sold a non-fungible token (NFT) of his artwork “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” for an eye-watering US$69.3mil (RM283mil).

“I absolutely think it’s a bubble, to be quite honest. I go back to the analogy of the beginning of the internet. There was a bubble. And the bubble burst. But it didn’t wipe out the internet. And so the technology itself is strong enough where I think it’s going to outlive that, ” said Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann.

The record-setting NFT is a collage of images made each day for 13 years.

“It’s really something that sort of catalogues both my life over that time and the sort of things that have happened in the world over that time, ” he said.

Beeple said watching the conclusion of the Christie’s online auction on March 11 was “very surreal”.

“It sort of jumped from like 27 million to 50 million. It was literally just like a bomb went off in the room, ” he said.

The sale was a record for digital art and catapulted Winklemann to third place on the list of notable works by a living artist, behind the Jeff Koons sculpture “Rabbit” and and David Hockney’s painting, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures).” — Bloomberg