This NFT Painting Is a Work of Art
On March 11, 2021, the auction house Christie’s sold a work by an American graphic designer, Michael Winkelmann, a.k.a. Beeple, for a colossal $69 million, making it the third most expensive work ever sold by a living artist. The work, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, is a nonfungible token, or NFT. It’s a computer file that cannot be exchanged, copied, or destroyed, which gives the purchaser proof of authenticity. It lives online in a virtual space—an immaterial space—in a blockchain, a secure digital public ledger. The file is a mint copy, an original, like the Mona Lisa that hangs in the Louvre. It’s also a work of art.
Everydays exemplifies a new generation of digital art that uses computers in adventurous ways and is pushing boundaries, just as artists from Da Vinci to Picasso to Rothko have always done. Even more exciting is AI art, generated by machines with just a little prompting by humans. It’s exciting because AI art may one day show us how machines see the world.
The point is not whether we can distinguish AI-created music from human music but whether machines will be able to create music of their own, music we cannot imagine.
For 5,000. There are scatological images, people rollerblading among giant juice bottles, disturbing otherworldly images of astronauts, some nightmarish, some surreal, all colorful and inventive. The whole contents of a weird imagination are there to be seen.
