| Everydays: the First 5000 Days | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Mike Winkelmann |
| Completion date | 21 February 2021 (2021-02-21) |
| Medium | Digital (JPEG) |
| Dimensions | 21,069 × 21,069 pixels |
| Owner | Vignesh Sundaresan (MetaKovan) |
Everydays: the First 5000 Days is a digital work of art created byMike Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple. The work is a collage of 5000 digital images created by Winkelmann for hisEverydays series. Its associatednon-fungible token (NFT) was sold for $69.3 million atChristie's in 2021, making it themost expensive non-fungible token ever.[1][2][3][4]
Everydays was purchased by Singapore-based programmerVignesh Sundaresan, a cryptocurrency investor[5][6] and the founder of the Metapurse NFT project, also known online by his pseudonym MetaKovan.[7] Sundaresan paid for the artwork using 42,329Ether.[8] Both the buyer Sundaresan and the seller Winkelmann had a vested interest in driving up the price of the work, in order to bring attention to and drive sales for a speculative asset related to twenty other Beeple works, which they called "B20 tokens." The price of these tokens, in which Sundaresan held a majority stake, reached its peak during media coverage of the Everydays auction, and subsequently collapsed.[9] Because of this, some observers have described the auction as a publicity stunt and a scam.[10][11]
Sundaresan receives rights to display the artwork, but does not receive copyright. He has displayed the artwork in a digital museum[12] within "themetaverse", which the public can view through a web browser.[13]
Winkelmann was inspired by British artist Tom Judd and began the daily project on 1 May 2007.[14] Some of the images involve figures from pop culture, includingJeff Bezos andDonald Trump, and are arranged chronologically.[15] Some of the earlier images are hand-drawn and not computer-produced.[14]
In an article published toArtnet, art criticBen Davis asserted that some of the 5,000 images comprising the work revealed various racial, misogynistic, and homophobic stereotypes, and that the collection in general was uninteresting and of poor artistic quality.[14]Will Gompertz considered Winkelmann a "talented exponent" of the comic book aesthetic, and compared his work toHieronymus Bosch andPhilip Guston. He predicted that the work would be regarded "either as the moment before the short-lived cryptoart bubble burst, or as the first chapter in a new story of art".[1]
The buyer for the $69 million Beeple in March—angel investor Vignesh Sundaresan, also known as Metakovan—also owned 59 percent of the B20 tokens. B20 tokens were initially sold to the public on January 23 at 36 cents per token before hitting a high of $23.62—a 6,461 percent increase—just a couple of days before the two-week-long $69 million Beeple auction reached its end. By the end of May, B20 was back down to trading for under a dollar. As of this writing, the token is trading for 40 cents.