These works of art exist in the digital world.
And now they're worth millions of dollars.
It's part of an explosion in the market for NFTs,
digital tokens that prove ownership
of things like digital art that you can't even touch.
The center of this virtual gold rush is Mike Winkelmann,
better known as Beeple.
Like, I never thought I could sell my work like this.
Then he heard about NFTs.
Kind of late September, early October,
people kept hitting me up, being like,
"Oh, you got to look at this NFT thing."
Two months later, he netted $3.5 million
selling art backed by NFTs.
Definitely just, like, mind-boggling.
In March, Christie's,
a 225-year-old auction house
that previously only sold physical art ...
Previously in the collections of three kings of England.
At $90 million.
... auctioned an entirely digital Beeple
for millions of dollars.
Is it a bubble?
I think there is a very good chance.
There could be a bubble.
So why are NFTs and digital art
getting so expensive so quickly?
The speculation in this market is so wild
that when a $95,000 Banksy was burned and then resold,
it raised a staggering $400,000 as an NFT.
We sort of value things,
it's like, if everybody wants it, well, then it has value.
I mean, what makes a Louis Vuitton purse have value?
It's just brown, like, leather purse.
To understand who pays,
it's important to understand NFTs.
So it's sort of like saying,
"Do you think a webpage is valuable?"
Well, I don't know. It could be.
NFT stands for non-fungible token,
essentially a digital signature
backed by blockchain technology
that proves ownership of something.
Unlike Bitcoin, which are all identical by design,
NFTs are unique.
To some degree, what NFTs offer for sale
is the idea of scarcity.
It's possible to buy a token
that represents art in the physical world,
but NFTs also back digital assets
like an image, or even a tweet.
The current bid on Jack Dorsey's first tweet
is $2.5 million.
This cat meme recently sold for $600,000.
Last week, Logan Paul made over $5,081,490
selling digital trading cards of himself known as NFTs.
For Beeple, his daily dedication to his craft
helped drive his popularity as he posted art
he created from his home in Charleston, South Carolina.
So May 1, 2007, I started doing a sketch a day
every single day, start to finish.
And year after year,
Beeple gave them away and built an audience online.
Sharing my stuff and sort of putting it out there,
I think, actually makes the stuff more valuable
because it makes it more popular.
His rise to broader fame as an artist
happened seemingly overnight.
Back in the olden days of 2020,
Beeple's NFT-backed "Crossroads" sold for $66,666.
I was like, "Oh my God, I sold a piece for 66,000."
It was just, like, insane.
In December, Beeple sold $3.5 million
worth of art in one day.
On February 26, "Crossroads" resold
on the secondary NFT market for $6.6 million,
of which Beeple got 10%.
And so now, fast-forward four months,
and it's like $6.6 million.
It's just like,
yeah. I don't – it's very – it's a lot.
It's a thing. I don't know.
Then in March,
Christie's sells the 5,000-image montage by Beeple
for nearly $70 million.
That makes Beeple the third-most expensive
living artist in the world.
It's like, OK, now the next thing happening.
Now the next thing happening, and the next thing happening.
It's just like, you know.
Now the "Today" show calling. OK.
His work can also cross into topics
that can be offensive or provocative.
So is Beeple trolling us with his art
and with this idea of selling something
you can get for free off his Instagram?
So, I'm like, OK, well that's, you know,
not a totally invalid argument.
What can I do to sort of, like, nullify that argument?
Back in December,
Beeple provided a physical product
along with the NFT for his digital art.
This you can't get on Instagram.
This is like, you know, a physical thing that you can,
if you're buying the NFT, you get this.
So it really kind of instantly sort of like, changes it.
And it's like, you don't even really need
to understand the NFT part.
Like, you're buying this.
But for Christie's, being all digital
is what made Beeple's artwork
all the more unique and valuable.
It's really a radical gesture
to offer for sale something without any object.
And we might as well lean into that.
Beeple's day job is as a graphic designer,
with clients like Louis Vuitton, Nike, and Apple.
So I don't really like the term artist
because it sounds very pretentious and douche-y.
Like, I would never be like, "I'm an artist."
Still, he's regularly compared
to Banksy and Warhol,
artists who undermine the notion of owning art,
and also to that Italian artist
who mocked the fine art market
by taping a banana to the wall.
This banana duct-taped to a wall.
It's Maurizio Cattelan's latest work of art.
It's called "The Comedian."
Yeah, I think if you looked at a lot of fine art,
you would probably say the same thing, or most people would say the same thing.
They'd be like, "Who paid for this?" This is Ryoma Ito, cofounder of MakersPlace,
an online marketplace that sells NFTs.
He teamed up with Christie's
for the sale of Beeple's collage.
The big catalyst was the Christie's auction.
That announcement brought in a lot of visibility in so many different channels.
To build anticipation
for the Christie's auction,
Ryoma teamed up with Beeple
to sell some of his artworks for a dollar each.
It crashed the MakersPlace site.
At our peak, we had about 450,000
requests coming through at a second, so.
Day trader Key Fluellen
was one of the lucky ones,
buying the NFT for just $1.
So I learned about NFTs last week
just before I posted this video on my TikTok.
Then I followed the world's biggest NFT artist
and noticed he was having an NFT drop
where his work was going for only a dollar.
Key ended up with one of Beeple's artworks,
and was offered $50,000 for it the same day,
but didn't take the offer.
I expect it to expand, like, exponentially
by the end of this year.
Instead of art collectors,
many of the buyers at the moment are like Key,
speculators and investors in this gold rush.
Just like with cryptocurrencies,
environmental and climate concerns are real.
NFT transactions use significant,
growing amounts of electricity.
In a single month, one NFT marketplace
went from 200 transactions a day to 5,000.
And I honestly think that
the sort of digital art community
is going to take this much more seriously
addressing these issues
than sort of the broader blockchain community.
The question is
if this mania will keep going or come crashing down.