“Everyone during this time, everyone I knew, was saying, ‘You gotta make an NFT,’” says the painter Max Denison-Pender, recalling the tulip fever that spread through the art world at the beginning of the 2020s. Its peak was marked by one seismic event. In March 2021, the venerable auction house Christie’s sold its first wholly digital artwork, Everydays: the First 5000 Days, by the artist known as Beeple, for $69.3 million in cryptocurrency, making it one of the most expensive works ever sold by a living artist; by contrast, Jeff Koons’s stainless steel sculpture Rabbit (1986) sold for $91.07 million in 2019 at the same auction house.
Everydays was a vast collage of individual digital works that its creator had been posting online at the rate of one a day since May 1, 2007. But there was little reason to believe that the art world had found another Warhol or Picasso. The Telegraph’s chief art critic dismissed the work as “a symptom of the desolation of digital culture”. Whatever you thought of it as an artwork, though, its price tag drove the art market into a frenzy. By December 2021, the digital artist Pak had sold a single artwork, Merge, split into 312,686 NFTs, for $91.8m at Art Basel. And it wasn’t even any good. It was an uninteresting monochrome digital image of spheres that suggested planetary (or molecular) distance.
