NFT (non-fungible token) artwork by Beeple sells for $69.4 million

I might have a go at this lark !

When the virtual auction bell rang at Christie’s on Thursday, Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist better known as Beeple, made history: he had sold a “non-fungible token” representing his piece Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, for $69.4m.

But while the new cryptocurrency craze may have brought the high-end art market into the 21st century, it’s also modernising another aspect of the industry: art thieves.

At their simplest, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, can be thought of as “bitcoin for art”. Just as bitcoin created the ability to spend and save a sort of digital money without any centralised authority, so too do NFTs allow for pictures, videos, music, or anything else that can be digitally represented, to be wrapped up in a format that can be traded, stored or authenticated without needing to turn to a gatekeeper.

Once an NFT is created, it can be digitally traced for ever. And unlike a simple image file, for instance, an NFT can’t be duplicated, giving it a similar cachet to an original artwork, and enabling the sort of transactions that have seen the field garner mainstream interest over the last month.

But while the very technology of NFTs prevents them from being duplicated without permission, there’s nothing inherent to the sector that controls who can make an NFT in the first place – a fact that has caused dismay to some artists, who have found their work ending up in the “control” of people who had nothing to do with its creation.