The mad gold rush of the digital art world has come to an abrupt end – and people are losing money fast
“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 (about £50m) 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.
Unbelievable? Hardly. NFT’s were pimped like all art is pimped.
