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Planet Money

The $69 Million JPEG

Planet Money

NPR

News, Business

4.630.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2021

⏱️ 22 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

An artist called Beeple just sold a piece at Christie's for millions. But it wasn't a painting... it was a kind of crypto. We speak with him and the others behind the first NFT auction. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Transcript

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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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