Did an avant-garde French artist sell the first NFT?

Yves Klein sold Parisian air to eager collectors. Yet he might not have approved of non-fungible tokens

By Bo Franklin

In March the third-most-expensive work ever sold at auction by a living artist went for $69m. The sum was particularly striking because the artwork in question won’t hang in the buyer’s super-yacht, or even his hallway. It exists only online: anyone with an internet connection can see it, whenever and wherever they want. They can even copy it and share it with others. Free. So what was actually sold?

“Everydays: the First 5000 Days” was made by Mike Winkelmann, an American graphic artist who goes by the name of Beeple. It is a digital collage of 5,000 images Beeple has designed over the years, which together form a dizzying spectacle. Anyone can find this image on the internet, so the buyer of this item was not acquiring the artwork itself, but a receipt showing that he is the owner of the original digital file. These digital receipts, known as “non-fungible tokens” (NFTs), have now become the talk of the art world. Since the transaction occurred at Christie’s, a leading auction house, it carried special weight.

If this sounds absurd to you, you’re not alone. David Hockney, who painted the second-most-expensive artwork by a living artist ever sold at auction, expressed bemusement: “What is it they’re owning? I don’t really know.” Some in the art world sneered at Beeple. One critic described “Everydays” in the New York Times as “indiscriminately collated pictures of cartoon monsters, gross-out gags and a breastfeeding Donald Trump”. Many were simply confused about why anyone would pay so much to buy something that can never truly be theirs.

The art world has a history of subverting our understanding of art and beauty. When the Impressionists held their first exhibition in 1874, critics despaired at the paintings by Monet, Degas and others, calling them ugly and formless.

Yves Klein convinced an American couple to hand over 14 gold ingots worth around $2,000 today in exchange for nothing but fresh air

Beeple is not the first person to stretch the idea of what can be sold as art. In 1962 Yves Klein, a French avant-garde artist and former coach of the Spanish judo team, persuaded an American couple to hand over 14 gold ingots worth around $2,000 today in exchange for nothing but fresh air. The buyers, a screenwriter called Michael Blankfort and his wife, received a receipt confirming that they had bought a “Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility”. Klein then asked the Blankforts to burn the receipt, threw half the gold into the Seine and melted the rest to use in other works. An art dealer and a museum curator looked on, conferring a measure of artistic legitimacy on the proceedings.

Trickster or genius? Yves Klein, a French avant-garde artist, pictured in 1961 (opening image). Klein sold a “Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” to Michael Blankfort and his wife in 1962 (above)

French newspapers were incredulous at the sale, printing headlines such as “Sorcery at Notre Dame” and “Klein Sells Wind!” But this was not Klein’s first such stunt. In 1958 he emptied a Parisian gallery, white-washed the walls and invited people in to see his “immaterial” artwork. Guests at the exhibition, which was entitled “The Void”, were served a cocktail that turned their urine blue for a week. On opening night Klein reportedly sold two non-existent works of art.

Klein claimed that he wanted to challenge the idea of what art could be, by breaking the distinction between an artistic object and the world around it. The Blankforts did not buy an item that could be transported and sold on, but an experience. No physical artefact needed to exist for the “Zones” to be considered an artwork, Klein thought.

Some European intellectuals praised his ingenuity, but America had little time for such high-minded wackiness: Time magazine called him “a fad” when he visited New York in 1961. The city’s art crowd mostly steered clear of Klein’s shows.

The pursuit of nothingness One of the artworks at “The Void”, Klein’s exhibition of immaterial art, held in Paris in 1958 (above)

The Blankforts’ receipt, like the NFT issued for Beeple’s work, proved ownership of something that no one can exclusively possess. In Klein’s case this applied to fresh air; in Beeple’s it is a JPEG file that anyone with an internet connection can download.

So why buy it? The owner might claim that the $69m version of Beeple’s artwork has an authenticity that copies of the file do not. Buyers get bragging rights but also, some people have argued, a unique encounter that viewers of a mere copy do not. After buying Parisian air from Klein, Michael Blankfort wrote that there was “no other experience in art equal to the depth of feeling” caused by buying his “Zone”, and that he felt “an explosion of awareness of time and space”.

Yet there is an important difference between Klein and Beeple. Klein made his buyers burn their receipt. He wanted them to relinquish evidence of their claim to the work and prevent the receipt from itself becoming an art object, accruing value through its association with him. He threw away gold, which had been the ultimate store of value for millennia, showing that his art was not a financial asset to be sold for profit.

Eye-watering “Everydays: the First 5000 Days”, Beeple’s digital collage sold for $69.3m (top). One of the 5,000 works that formed “Everydays” (above)

Beeple has given his buyers no such encouragement to destroy the digital receipts. NFTs are stored on a blockchain, a digital database that publicly records online transactions, providing proof of ownership. A blockchain is impossible to tamper with because it is not controlled by a single entity, as a bank’s ledger is. This means that an NFT can never be deleted, but it can be transferred to another owner, as is already happening with other NFTs.

The buyer of “Everydays” seemed more interested in the work's financial potential than its artistic value. Vignesh Sundaresan, the cryptocurrency investor based in Singapore known as MetaKovan who bought “Everydays”, boasted that it is “going to be a billion-dollar piece someday”. He made little mention of its aesthetic qualities in interviews. MetaKovan runs an investment fund that has already bought up other NFTs, including many issued by Beeple. The high price MetaKovan paid for “Everydays” also pushed up the price of other Beeple NFTs. That made MetaKovan’s fund even more valuable. It just so happens that Beeple himself was given around 2% of that fund by MetaKovan.

Klein fleeced the art world in order to critique it, Beeple seems keen to cash in

MetaKovan is perhaps right not to lay stress on the power of the artwork itself. You can buy NFTs linked to any digital item, from a video clip to a music file. In March 2021 Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, sold an NFT linked to the first-ever tweet, which he sent in 2006, for almost $3m (he gave the money to charity). But the emphasis on commerce over content indicates an important difference between past and present.

Klein was often ridiculed during his lifetime. These days he is regarded as an influential avant-garde artist. In 2002 a receipt book for “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” sold at auction for £14,300; in 2015 a monochrome blue rectangle that Klein painted fetched £6.1m. Klein’s efforts to prevent his works being treated as commodities actually made them more valuable.

Beeple, by contrast, has embraced the commercial potential of his art. He was paid for “Everydays” in Ether, a volatile cryptocurrency, though quickly converted it into dollars after the sale. Klein fleeced the art world in order to critique it, Beeple seems keen to cash in.

Bo Franklin is The Economist’s Explainers editor

IMAGES: ©SUCCESSION YVES KLEIN C/O ADAGP, PARIS AND DACS, LONDON 2021. CHRISTIES’S/BEEPLE, CHARLES WILP, GIANCARLO BOTTI

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