The $69 Million JPEG
Planet Money
NPR
4.6 • 30.5K Ratings
🗓️ 13 March 2021
⏱️ 22 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | This is Planet Money from NPR. |
| 0:04.2 | Mike Winkleman is a digital artist living in the suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina. |
| 0:11.8 | Among many other things, he makes a hot new kind of art investment object he may have heard |
| 0:16.6 | of, NFTs, non-fungible tokens. |
| 0:20.6 | And we'll get into the details about those a bit later. |
| 0:22.6 | Yeah, don't sweat it, we will unpack that. |
| 0:24.6 | And Mike is pretty famous at this point for making these weird dystopian internet art |
| 0:30.2 | things under the name People. |
| 0:32.9 | And he makes a lot of those. |
| 0:35.2 | Would you describe what the Beyond Meat image is? |
| 0:38.4 | Um, honestly, I don't even remember what that is to be quite honest. |
| 0:41.2 | You're ever going to have to describe it to me a little bit. |
| 0:44.0 | It looks like a kind of Martian lunar scape. |
| 0:46.7 | And it looks like they're kind of farming synthetic meat pigs with the head of Elon Musk. |
| 0:51.4 | Oh, with Elon heads, I mean, to be quite honest, some of it is just kind of like, I have no |
| 0:55.8 | idea what this even is. |
| 0:57.6 | And even though his work is super well known, Mike, aka Beeple had a problem that's common |
| 1:02.8 | to all artists who make digital work. |
| 1:05.4 | It is super hard to sell. |
| 1:07.8 | Beeple wasn't really able to participate in the traditional art market. |
| 1:12.0 | But a few months ago, Mike got a call from a guy named Noah Davis, who works at the esteemed |
| 1:16.8 | auction house Christie's of London. |
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