Mysterious crypto investor who goes by pseudonym MetaKovan is revealed by Christie's as the buyer who spent $70MILLION to purchase a massive digital collage by artist Beeple
Christie's auction house has named the buyer of a $70 million digital-only artwork as a crypto asset investor based in Singapore who goes by the pseudonym 'MetaKovan.'
The auction to buy the work by digital artist Beeple, which ended on Thursday, was the first ever sale by a major auction house of a piece of digital art that does not exist in physical form.
The work is in the form of a new kind of digital asset: a Non-Fungible Token (NFT). This means that it is authenticated by blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin, which certifies the work's originality and ownership.
MetaKovan, whose real name was not disclosed, is the founder of Metapurse, the world's largest NFT fund, which stands to gain from the publicity surrounding the sale.
The Singaporean crypto investor paid $69.3 million for this massive digital collage by Beeple, and brazenly predicts that its true value is $1 billion
The work, called 'Everydays: The First 5000 Days' is a collage of 5,000 individual images, which were made one-per-day over more than thirteen years.
It sold for $69,346,250, which MetaKovan paid in the form of cryptocurrency Ether.
The sale put Beeple into the top three most valuable living artists, Christie's said, trailing only David Hockney and Jeff Koons.
'When you think of high-valued NFTs, this one is going to be pretty hard to beat. And here's why - it represents 13 years of everyday work,' MetaKovan said in a statement released by Christie's.
'Techniques are replicable and skill is surpassable, but the only thing you can't hack digitally is time. This is the crown jewel, the most valuable piece of art for this generation. It is worth $1 billion.'
Beeple is an American digital artist based in South Carolina whose real name is Mike Winkelmann. He's been creating digital sketches using 3D tools on a daily basis for the past 13 years.
Beeple is an American digital artist based in South Carolina whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, seen above. He is now the third-highest selling living artist in the world
The work, called 'Everydays: The First 5000 Days' (detail above) is a collage of 5,000 individual images, which were made one-per-day over more than thirteen years
Auction house Christie's calls his work 'abstract, fantastical, grotesque or absurd.' He has 1.9 million followers on Instagram.
'I believe we are witnessing the beginning of the next chapter in art history, digital art,' Beeple said in a statement released by Christie's.
'This is work that has just as much craft, message, nuance and intent as anything made on a physical canvas and I am beyond honored and humbled to represent the digital art community in this historic moment,' added Beeple.
In December, the first extensive auction of his art brought in $3.5 million, an eye-catching amount that was surpassed by this week's record-shattering sale of his collage.
At detail from one of the panels of the massive collage shows Beeple's handiwork
Another panel from the collage shows one of the 5,000 images that make it up
It comes as the NFT trend takes the art world by storm, with memes and old tweets selling for millions of dollars in what some are calling a speculative bubble.
Digital artist Anne Spalter started out as an NFT skeptic but has now sold multiple artworks using the tokens.
The latest was a video called 'Dark Castles' - of mysteriously distorted castles generated by artificial intelligence technology - that sold for $2,752.
'NFTs have opened up art to a whole bunch of people who never would have gone to a gallery in New York,' said Spalter, who pioneered digital fine arts courses at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1990s. 'They're investors, they're tech entrepreneurs, they're in that world.'
Spalter said she expects this bubble to pop, though she still believes NFTs hold promise for artists as a way to reduce fraud and misattribution of works.
'I'm still mystified by the prices and how high they are,' she said. 'I think there will be a correction.'
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