My mom likes to read a lot of news. Grappling with the passing of her mother, my grandmother, from a few months ago, she has found it especially hard to connect with her immediate surroundings and so looks to the news to provide herself with some sort of connection to the world around her, lest it leaves her behind. Being the only child in the house now, I am the main confidant of her findings, and knowing about my beloved Doodle column, she called me a few mornings ago to discuss one particular finding which had been reported by The New York Times: the sale of a JPG art piece for $69 million.
It’s no secret the digital age is fast upon us and the advent of COVID-19 has all but turned us into extensions of our mobile devices rather than the other way around (which was scary enough to begin with if you think about it). But did any of us really think that we were at the point where digital artworks were selling for tens of millions of dollars? When I was looking up the JPG file that broke records to verify with my mom that that was the one she had read about, I figured there’s no way what I’m looking at is recognizable enough for her to check without having the NYT article up herself. But surely enough, she took one look at the picture I had brought up on my phone and nodded in amusement. I asked her how she recognized it. She said, “it’s not so hard to remember a picture that looks like someone vomited thousands of pixels onto a page.” She’s not wrong. The zoomed out picture itself, not to be rude, really looks like what would happen if you were to fill your entire computer background with hundreds of little icons. And yet a buyer looked at it, gave it a *chef’s kiss* and said, “ah yes, this is worth more than half a billion dollars?”
The JPG, called Everydays — The First 5000 Days, by an artist known as Beeple, is not the only artist to have sold digital paintings for exorbitant prices. Plenty of artists entering the digital art scene are flocking to what is known as NFT’s: non fungible tokens. These ensure that buyers can retain proof of authenticity of their purchase. NFT’s are also currently crypto-traded and can vary from the sort of collage of different digital pieces that comprise Beeple’s work to videos that have sold up to $6.6 million. The high volume, high frequency trading which relies on the current value of NFT’s, which can fluctuate widely based on the market, have been deemed damaging to the world of digital art by many in the field, who claim that this road will surely emphasize the salability of art over its intrinsic value. To this, I would argue, there is no artist who utilizes any medium that does not expect to be paid for their efforts, yet I can understand the fear that NFT’s push digital art to be something of value only to traders rather than to collectors.
As for myself, I’m amused. Although I will never have access to the thousands upon thousands of paintings that Beeple’s artwork displays (or at least until someone inevitably figures out how to zoom into his seemingly pixelated mess without blurring the icons and then everyone can view it, and all the buyer has is proof of authenticity to an illustration available to everyone), I am happy to know that there are still pieces of news that keep my mom laughing when she decides she wants to reconnect with the world.
The Doodling Duck is an Opinion culture column written and created by Pooja Rajadurai to discuss art as it relates to pop culture, trends, and students.
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