Would You Pay $70 Million For This Digital File?

Is it the new pop art? Or is it the hoax of the century? Welcome to the mysterious, multimillion-dollar digital art world.

- William Langley

From the time early humans began daubing pictures of woolly mammoths on cave walls, art has remained a relatively simple business: someone creates it, someone buys it and the rest of us get to see it in galleries or museums. For decades, there have been long queues for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in Paris and Michelangelo’s David in Florence because the best way to truly appreciate these works is to turn up in person.

Not anymore. A revolution is sweeping the art world, up-ending centuries of cosy coexistence between dealers and collectors. In March this year, Christie’s – the venerable, 255-year-old London auction house – achieved the third-highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist. The winning bid of almost US$70 million was for a digital collage called Everydays: The First 5000 Days. The artist was a 39-year-old graphic designer known as Beeple. Contacted at his modest suburban home in the US state of South Carolina, Beeple’s reaction was: “This is too goddamn awesome, man.”

Welcome to the world of crypto art. For $70 million, you could own a topnotch work by Picasso or Monet, and when the auctioneer’s hammer comes down, have your prize packaged up and delivered to your mansion, yacht or ski lodge, where you can gloat over it being entirely unique and all yours. But anyone can see Beeple’s work exactly as the buyer sees it. It exists only as a sequence of digital files, viewable on a screen, and infinitely replicable. So, why would a buyer spend so much money on something the rest of us can have for free?