Why a JPEG sold for $69 million

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Recode

Society & Culture, Science, Technology

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2021

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

From Jack Dorsey's tweets and NBA highlight reels to Beeple and Nyan Cat, digital art powered by cryptocurrency has exploded in value. Is it an artistic revolution, or a speculative bubble?Read Terry’s piece on NFTs at Vox.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	How much would you pay for a JPEG, maybe $69 million, because that's how much a digital
0:12.9	image sold for last week at Christie's, the big auction house.
0:17.2	It's the highest price ever paid for a digital work of art.
0:22.2	In fact, it's one of the highest prices paid at an auction house for any work of art
0:26.0	by a living artist.
0:27.0	That's all part of a broader craze for digital artwork you may have heard of recently,
0:31.8	called NFTs.
0:34.8	Vox's Terry Nehwin has been writing about NFTs.
0:36.8	Hey, Terry.
0:37.8	Hey, Teddy.
0:38.8	So, what is an NFT, and why is there so much buzz around them?
0:43.0	Yeah.
0:44.0	So, an NFT stands for a non-fungible token.
0:47.5	A non-fungible token, okay.
0:49.5	Yeah.
0:50.5	And pretty much it's a way for you to own something digital.
0:53.4	And anything that is a digital asset, whether that be an MP3 file, a JPEG, Twitter CEO,
0:59.9	Jack Dorsey, selling his first tweet as an NFT, it can be technically owned on the
1:05.4	blockchain through this technology.
1:07.7	Okay.
1:08.7	So, basically, it's like, here's a digital product, which is free and accessible to anybody,
1:15.3	right?
	...

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