No digital art piece has garnered as much attention thus far as “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days," the non-fungible token, or NFT, by the artist known as Beeple. Selling for almost $69.4 million at Christie's, Noah Davis, the specialist in post-war and contemporary art for the auction house, explained that the emergence of big-time digital art was bound to happen.
"We decided to hold this auction because it just honestly was inevitable that we would enter this space where the virtual and the real kind of collided and then became one," Davis told Cheddar. "I think that this last year in the pandemic we all were preparing for this mentally in some way or another, and it was just the right place and the right time."
Davis touted blockchain's unique ability to store information that NFTs rely on to preserve the "authenticity" of particular digital works of art, such as Beeple's piece. But, he also noted that, at first, he hadn't imagined it would be put to use in this fashion in the auction world.
"I probably would have expected, if I'm being honest, that blockchain technology would have been utilized in the art-at-auction field more as a kind of clerical device first rather than an actual collectible category," he said.
The auctioning of crypto art is so brand new that Christie's Auction House was unable to set a dollar value range estimate for the expected sale price labeling it "unknown," according to Davis, who said it was among the first things he had to clear with the firm's legal department.
"The estimate was unknown. We went from a $100 starting bid to $1 million in a little more than eight minutes," he said. "The kind of activity in bidding, the frenzy around this lot is like nothing I have ever seen in art-at-auction before."
Despite NFTs being the hot (in perhaps more ways than one) commodity right now and the traditional auction consumer getting up to speed with virtual auctions amid the pandemic, Davis doesn't see tangible artwork disappearing from auction houses any time soon.
"I don't think that auctions of physical art are going anywhere," he said. "But it does mean that there is a new space where art auction houses can operate and it's a purely digital space."
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
