It’s a very old-world idea, wanting to hold something in your hand, as if the intangible or the immaterial doesn’t have value.”Īn NFT auction works much like an online auction on platforms like eBay. “But people of a younger generation don’t struggle with it.

“Some people struggle with this idea because they want to know, what is it you actually own?” he said. When he spoke to the Guardian on the eve of the sale in March, he said the idea that a piece of art must be a physical purchase that can be displayed somewhere is quickly becoming outdated. It made him the most successful NFT artist on the OpenSea platform. Months later, he made a profit of $2m from the series, all art that cannot be physically transported to a gallery or hung on a wall. He plotted to auction them on OpenSea, the largest marketplace for the tokens, which sees 1.5 million weekly visitors and facilitated $95m in sales in February 2021 alone.

After several of his in-person shows were cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Abosch decided now was the perfect opportunity to sell his work as NFTs. In 2020, Abosch started working on a series of images that tackled themes of cryptography and alphanumeric codes. The seemingly meteoric rise of NFTs has many wondering why any collector would want to buy one, but for artists like Abosch, NFTs are helping to solve problems that have long been central to digital art: how do you claim ownership of something that can be easily and endlessly duplicated? And what does ownership of art mean in the first place? Photograph: Christie's auction house/AFP/Getty Images Beeple’s digital art collage Everydays: The First 5,000 Days sold at Christie’s for a record $69.3m.

Nft 3d artist