Gross profit Supporters say NFTs give creators better control over their work and more opportunities to make money. So why are many digital artists strongly against them, asks Gary Evans?

Digital artist Beeple sold a digital collage of his digital drawings for £50 million. The price paid at Christie’s auction house for Everydays – The First 5000 Days was the third-highest for work by a living artist. The buyer bought a nonfungible token – an NFT.

In May 2007, Beeple – aka Mike Winkelmann – started posting a daily drawing (“By posting the results online “I’m ‘less’ likely to throw down a big pile of ass-shit,” the American said). The collage sold in March 2021 is made of 5,000 images, which works out at about £10,000 per image. You can look at every one of these images (and right-click and save them, if you wanted to) on Beeple’s website (www.beeple-crap.com).

The NFT file doesn’t contain the collage itself. The NFT that the buyer purchased is similar to a contract or a certificate of ownership. Essentially, it says: “The owner of this NFT owns Everydays – The First 5000 Days.”

NEW KID ON THE BLOCK

A record of the buyer who bought this NFT is stored on a type of database called a blockchain. This is basically a big digital ledger, where any future changes of ownership will be publicly logged. This chain of ownership will be permanently marked in the file itself. You can right-click and save the collage Everydays – The First 5000 Days. You can right-click and save every last one of its individual images. But the NFT itself is pretty much impossible to copy or forge.