Beeple Explains The Absurdity Of NFTs | So Expensive - YouTube

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.

<i>Like, I never thought I</i> <i>could sell my work like this.</i>

Then he heard about NFTs.

<i>Kind of late September, early October,</i>

<i>people kept hitting me up, being like,</i>

<i>"Oh, you got to look at this NFT thing."</i>

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.

<i>Is it a bubble?</i>

<i>I think there is a very good chance.</i>

<i>There could be a bubble.</i>

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.