Everydays: The First 5000 Days Digital Collage

Everydays: The First 5000 Days is an NFT-based artwork created as a collage of digital works produced daily by American digital artist Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) from 1 May 2007 to 7 January 2021, sold for $69.3 million at Christie’s Auction House in 2021. This digital collage holds a significant place in the context of digital art’s boundaries.

Creation Process

Beeple established a rule on 1 May 2007 to produce one digital visual every day and maintained this practice without interruption for 13 years. All 5000 resulting images were combined into a single JPEG file measuring 21,069 by 21,069 pixels. The collection reflects a progression from the artist’s early simple drawings to complex visuals incorporating 3D technologies and social, political and cultural references. ^【1】

Form and Content

The collage consists of 5000 images arranged in chronological order. The artist’s early drawings are located in the upper left corner, while more complex 3D compositions responding to contemporary events are positioned in the lower right corner.

Everydays: The First 5000 Days (Beeple)

Recurring themes among the images include admiration and fear of technology, desire for wealth, political tensions and references to popular culture. The work is grounded both in the autonomy of individual images and in the temporal and aesthetic structure formed by the whole.

NFT and Blockchain Dimension

The artwork was minted as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain on 16 February 2021. The NFT is a digital asset created on the blockchain containing Beeple’s signature in cryptographic form. This method provides proof of uniqueness and ownership for digital artworks.

As a result of a collaboration between the artist Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) and Christie’s Auction House, the digital work was offered for sale as an NFT and accepted payment in Ethereum cryptocurrency. This marked a first for Christie’s Auction House.

The online auction took place between 25 February and 11 March 2021, opening with a starting bid of $100. Intense bidding in the final moments drove the final sale price to $69.3 million. This amount became the third-highest auction price for a work by a living artist. ^【2】 The buyer was Vignesh Sundaresan, known by the pseudonym Metakovan.

Criticism

Critics have offered varied assessments of the work’s content and form. Some have viewed it as a reflection of online visual flow, treating the individual images as a mosaic that subordinates their individual meaning to the overall composition. ^【3】

Other critiques have noted that politically satirical images may lose their relevance over time and questioned the work’s long-term artistic value. ^【4】

Everydays: The First 5000 Days is a digital collage composed of 5000 images produced daily by Beeple from 2007 to 2021. It was recorded on the Ethereum blockchain as an NFT and sold for $69.3 million at Christie’s Auction House in 2021. The work stands as a significant example in the technical and aesthetic development of digital art and in the NFT-based art market.