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High Art
work of art called Everydays—The First 5000 Days exists solely on the internet and has no presence in the physical world, yet it sold for nearly $70 million a year ago in online bidding at Christie’s. Observers heralded the jaw-dropping transaction as the first time a major auction house sold a solely digital image. But it wasn’t the last. Estimates vary widely as to how much buyers shelled out last year for non-fun-
AFTER A DOWN YEAR IN 2020, PRICES EXPLODED IN 2021 FOR PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL ART By Andrew Prochnow
Artist Damien Hirst adorned his sculpture For the Love of God with 8.601 flawless diamonds.
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gible tokens (NFTs) that reside online instead of on canvas or as sculptures. However, widely quoted data from DappRadar indicates that trading in NFTs reached $22 billion in 2021, up from just $100 million the year before. Buyers paid for most of them with cryptocurrency, which seems appropriate because—like NFTs—crypto arguably has no offline presence. Perhaps the explosion in NFT art purchases came as part of a larger trend, one that’s operating in the temporal world as well as in the metaverse. As of early November, sales for the year at the three largest auction houses set a new record of $15 billion, a CNBC report said. Several factors are at work. Wealthy, young first-time buyers are entering the market. Meanwhile, older patrons are not only buying more art
Luckbox | March 2022
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