Would you pay $70 million for this digital file?
“Why spend so much on something the rest of us can have for free?”
From the time early humans began daubing pictures of woolly mammoths on cave walls, art has remained a relatively simple business: someone creates it, someone buys it and the rest of us get to see it in galleries or museums. For decades, there have been long queues for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in Paris and Michelangelo’s David in Florence because the best way to truly appreciate these works is to turn up in person.
Not anymore. A revolution is sweeping the art world, up-ending centuries of cosy coexistence between dealers and collectors. In March this year, Christie’s – the venerable, 255-year-old London auction house – achieved the third-highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist. The winning bid of almost US$70 million was for a digital collage called . The artist was a 39-year-old graphic designer known as Beeple. Contacted at his modest suburban home in the US state of South Carolina, Beeple’s reaction was: “This
