The cost of a single tulip bulb surged to the same price as a mansion 400 years ago: are NFTs the ‘tulipmania’ of the 21st century?

Similarities between the new digital technology craze in the art world and the surge in value of tulips in 17th-century Holland suggest that it could all end in (real) tears

The cost of a single tulip bulb surged to the same price as a mansion 400 years ago: are NFTs the ‘tulipmania’ of the 21st century? 333_am_semper_augustus_tulip_17th_century_yes

It is not often that the commercial churn of the art world produces a moment that feels truly seismic. Plenty of people thought that moment had come on 11 March when the digital artist Beeple’s non-fungible token (NFT) sold at Christie’s in an online auction for $69.3m, a price far higher than anything yet paid for works by canonical greats such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Eugene Delacroix, Francisco Goya, Jackson Pollock and Marcel Duchamp.

For the first time, Christie’s accepted payment in Ethereum cryptocurrency—including for its own fees. The work, which has no physical existence, was bought by Metakovan, a pseudonymous crypto investor who already owns numerous Beeple works, for 42,329.453 Ether, including Christie’s buyer’s premium.

“It’s like Duchamp. We’re dealing with the same kind of conceptual leap,” says Candace Worth, a New York-based art adviser. “Are we just the wrong generation?” adds an uncomprehending Worth, who wonders whether Beeple’s jpeg could turn out to be the 21st-century equivalent of Duchamp’s Fountain readymade, which proved equally baffling when first exhibited in 1917.

Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days was a digital collage of all the images he had posted online since 2007. NFTs are essentially digital files in which authenticity and ownership are certified, at considerable environmental expense, by blockchain computer networks. They can turn almost anything into a virtual collectible: cars, tweets, land, sneakers, music, even video clips of basketball shots. During the past few months, these tokens have been traded at heady prices on specialist platforms by speculators who have made digital fortunes from cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. The aggregate value of this virtual money has soared to more than $1trn after backing from Elon Musk’s Tesla group, hedge funds and other major investors.

As a stunned analogue art world is now realising, the crypto-wealthy are paying the headiest prices of all for NFT art. As well as tokens by Beeple, CryptoPunks, a collection of 10,000 algorithm-generated characters made since 2017 by Larva Labs, have also been selling at mind-altering levels. On 11 March, Punk no. 7804, one of only nine rare “alien” CryptoPunks, sold for 4,200 Ether, around $7.5m at the time.

That price, given for a computer file containing a Space Invader-like image comprising just 576 pixels, was way above the latest auction highs for works by in-demand analogue artists such as Amoako Boafo and Matthew Wong. Just three years earlier, Punk no. 7804 had sold for 12 Ether, or about $15,000.

.https://www.theartnewspaper.com/analysis/nfts-and-tulipmania

The cost of a single tulip bulb surged to the same price as a mansion 400 years ago: are NFTs the ‘tulipmania’ of the 21st century?

Similarities between the new digital technology craze in the art world and the surge in value of tulips in 17th-century Holland suggest that it could all end in (real) tears

The cost of a single tulip bulb surged to the same price as a mansion 400 years ago: are NFTs the ‘tulipmania’ of the 21st century?

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