In March 2021, the well-known auction house Christie's sold a very particular work of art for at least two reasons: the first is that it is not a tangible product, such as a sculpture or a canvas, but an NFT, an acronym for Non-Fungible Token, so it is a work of art certified as authentic and unique, but it only exists in digital format. More precisely, an NFT is a data package recorded on a blockchain, a shared and immutable register that certifies the transfers of ownership of the non-fungible token. In a nutshell, NFTs are tools used to demonstrate the ownership, authenticity and uniqueness of digital content (images, videos, music tracks, etc.), but they can also be applied to physical objects, for which a digital twin is created. The second reason is that it is not really a work of art, but a collage of 5000 different drawings, which have no connection with each other, except that they were all made by the same author and each in a single day, starting from May 1st 2007.
The author is Beeple, stage name of Mike Winkelmann, and the work in question, entitled Everydays: The First 5000 Days, was purchased for 69.4 million dollars by the Indian programmer and entrepreneur Vignesh Sundaresan, better known as MetaKovan. Following the transaction, Beeple became the third most valuable living artist in the world, after Jeff Koons and David Hockney. Everydays, on the other hand, is in first place among the most expensive NFTs ever and, incidentally, in third place is another of his creations, Human One (28.9 million), a 3D digital sculpture of an astronaut walking in a glass case, in which the backgrounds are digital and the scenography changes in rotation.
Beeple began composing Everydays unknowingly at the age of 25, starting from a portrait of his uncle Jim, with the goal of creating something artistic every day. This goal was motivated by the fact that Winkelmann considered himself a very fickle and unmotivated person and that project would lead him to be more active and tenacious. Day after day, his drawings became more and more complex and accurate, also thanks to the experimentation of new programs. The themes covered are among the most disparate. Often, in his surrealist, dystopian, robotic or post-apocalyptic scenarios, characters from popular culture are inserted, in a sort of political and social satire. Thus, searching in the chaotic Everydays, you can find Mickey Mouse and Donald Trump, Pikachu and Kim Jong Un, Buzz Lightyear and Michael Jackson.
Winkelmann is inspired by the world around him: he stages an absurd reality, but imagined by taking the trends of current society to the extreme. He manages to generate surprise, inserting elements of our daily life into cyberpunk scenarios. These are probably the factors that make Beeple one of the most followed artists on the web (he has more than two million followers on Instagram alone) and, consequently, more popular.
Art critics, on the other hand, are not always so enthusiastic. There are even those who believe that the drawings from the early days are not even to be considered art. But perhaps the value of Everydays is not to be found in the quality or quantity of the drawings that compose it, but rather in its being a representative work, not only of a new genre and way of making art, but also of a different economy, one based on blockchain technology, and of a different finance, the decentralized one. It is no coincidence that Winckelmann's buyers, as he himself observed, appear more like investors than art collectors.
Trying to take a more global perspective, it would seem that computer engineering is developing, together with an alternative economic and financial world, also its own particular aesthetic.