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A bid of $100 on 25 February became a bid of $69,346,250 on 11 March.^{1The Art NewspaperWTAF? Beeple NFT work sells for astonishing $69.3m at Christie's after flurry of last-minute bids nearly crashes website11 Mar 2021,3Al JazeeraPower to the Beeple: Digital art fetches $69.3M at auction11 Mar 2021} The hammer fell at $60.25m; Christie’s fees took the total to $69.3m.^{1The Art NewspaperWTAF? Beeple NFT work sells for astonishing $69.3m at Christie's after flurry of last-minute bids nearly crashes website11 Mar 2021} The last quarter of an hour added more than $40m to the price, and the auction house’s website came close to falling over.^{1The Art NewspaperWTAF? Beeple NFT work sells for astonishing $69.3m at Christie's after flurry of last-minute bids nearly crashes website11 Mar 2021,2The Art NewspaperBeeple sells for Christie's NFT art auction, cryptocurrency11 Mar 2021} Few paintings have been so decisively bought on impulse.

What was bought is “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”, a collage of the pictures Mike Winkelmann, who works as Beeple, has made every day for 13 years.^{3Al JazeeraPower to the Beeple: Digital art fetches $69.3M at auction11 Mar 2021} The sale was the first by an auction house of a standalone non-fungible token, or NFT.^{1The Art NewspaperWTAF? Beeple NFT work sells for astonishing $69.3m at Christie's after flurry of last-minute bids nearly crashes website11 Mar 2021} It makes Mr Winkelmann the third most expensive living artist ever sold at auction, behind Jeff Koons and David Hockney, and ahead of Gerhard Richter’s $44.5m “Abstraktes Bild (599)”, sold at Sotheby’s in 2015.^{1The Art NewspaperWTAF? Beeple NFT work sells for astonishing $69.3m at Christie's after flurry of last-minute bids nearly crashes website11 Mar 2021} Only 33 bidders took part, 91% of them new to Christie’s.^{1The Art NewspaperWTAF? Beeple NFT work sells for astonishing $69.3m at Christie's after flurry of last-minute bids nearly crashes website11 Mar 2021}

Rapid ascent. Auction prices, $m

	Price
Previous NFT record	6.6
Richter, 2015	44.5
Beeple, with fees	69.3

Source: The Art Newspaper¹

We think two things at once. The technology behind the sale is a genuine novelty, and the price is a bubble. A buyer who does not know which is which will find out soon enough.

Start with the novelty. Digital files have always been free to copy, which is why nobody could sell the original of one. An NFT is a unique entry on a blockchain, which anyone can inspect, that is tied to a particular file and a particular owner. Christie’s says the technology lets collectors and artists “verify the rightful owner and authenticity” of digital works.^{3Al JazeeraPower to the Beeple: Digital art fetches $69.3M at auction11 Mar 2021} Mr Winkelmann called the result “the beginning of the next chapter in art history: digital art”.^{2The Art NewspaperBeeple sells for Christie's NFT art auction, cryptocurrency11 Mar 2021} As a claim about provenance, that is fair. The lot is delivered from the artist to the winner with its token, and a ledger records who holds it.^{3Al JazeeraPower to the Beeple: Digital art fetches $69.3M at auction11 Mar 2021} Digital artists, who had little way into the art market, now have one. Christie’s Noah Davis called the result “a clarion call to all digital artists. Your work has value. Keep making it.”^{2The Art NewspaperBeeple sells for Christie's NFT art auction, cryptocurrency11 Mar 2021} There is no quarrel from us on that score.

Now the price. A token is a receipt, and a receipt proves a purchase; it does not make anything scarce. The picture itself remains on the internet for anyone to look at. What the winner holds is the right to say, with a ledger to back the claim, that he is the owner. The coverage we have read does not say whether copyright, or any other right over the image, changes hands. That is an odd gap in a $69m transaction. Nobody buying a house would skip the deeds.

The defence is that this is just what art markets do. A Rothko can be photographed by anyone, too, and nobody thinks the owner a fool for hanging the original. The analogy is useful but incomplete. A painting is a single physical object, and its owner can lock it in a vault and the world will take his word that it exists. An NFT is a pointer to a file and its value rests wholly on a shared belief that the pointer matters. Beliefs are legitimate assets. They are also what tulip bulbs were in the Netherlands in the 1630s.

The trajectory is hard to describe in any other way. A Trump-themed NFT by Mr Winkelmann earned him $582,000 in December 2020 and resold for $6.6m at the end of February.^{4ForkLogBeeple's NFT sells at Christie's for $69.3 million11 Mar 2021} That was the previous record for an NFT, a 10-second video on Nifty Gateway.^{1The Art NewspaperWTAF? Beeple NFT work sells for astonishing $69.3m at Christie's after flurry of last-minute bids nearly crashes website11 Mar 2021} Within two weeks the record was beaten by a factor of ten. Prices that move that way are not discovering the value of art. They are discovering how many people expect to sell to someone else.

The sale also contained a small joke at the expense of its own premise. Bids could be made in Ether, but the buyer’s premium could not, so Christie’s will collect more than $9m in ordinary money.^{1The Art NewspaperWTAF? Beeple NFT work sells for astonishing $69.3m at Christie's after flurry of last-minute bids nearly crashes website11 Mar 2021} The auctioneers, it seems, are happy to take the crypto but prefer to be paid in dollars.

What should be done? Not much, by government; the buyers are consenting and, by their ages, mostly young, with millennials making up 58% of bidders.^{1The Art NewspaperWTAF? Beeple NFT work sells for astonishing $69.3m at Christie's after flurry of last-minute bids nearly crashes website11 Mar 2021} The remedy lies with the sellers. Christie’s and its rivals should publish, lot by lot, what a winner receives: the token, the file, the copyright and the licence, if any. Artists should be encouraged to say plainly what they are selling. A market that sells receipts ought to be clear about what they are for.

The record will be broken, or it will not. In either case the picture stays where it always was: one right-click away.