Spending Millions On What’s Essentially A Link To A JPEG File – Why Would Anyone Buy Crypto Art
As an academic researcher, developer of artistic technology and amateur artist, I was quite skeptical about crypto art when I first read about it several years ago.
However, I follow a community of artists on social media, and some of the artists there whom I respect, like Mario Klingemann and Jason Bailey, embraced and advocated for crypto art. Within the past few months, activity and prices seemed to snowball. I started thinking it deserves to be taken seriously.
Then the Beeple sale happened.
On March 11, Beeple, a computer science graduate whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, auctioned a piece of crypto art at Christie’s for US$69 million.
The winning bidder is now named in a digital record that confers ownership. This record, called a nonfungible token, or NFT, is stored in a share...