Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) — Everydays: The First 5000 Days at Christie's

2021

Artists: Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) · Year: 2021 · Medium: Composite JPEG of 5,000 daily images; NFT · Substrate: Ethereum, MakersPlace · Place: New York, USA (online auction) · Institution: Christie's Mike Winkelmann, who publishes as Beeple, had made one artwork every single day, without missing one, since May 1, 2007. The project was called Everydays. By early 2021 he had produced five thousand consecutive daily works — nearly fourteen years of uninterrupted daily discipline, which is, as a discipline, remarkable regardless of one's feelings about the work that discipline produced. On March 11, 2021, Christie's auctioned Everydays: The First 5000 Days — a composite JPEG of all five thousand works, tokenized as a single NFT. The sale closed at $69.3 million, a price that made Winkelmann, overnight, the third-most-expensive living artist at auction by work ever sold, behind Jeff Koons and David Hockney. The buyer was Vignesh Sundaresan, publishing under the alias MetaKovan. The payment was 42,329 ETH. It was the first time Christie's, a 255-year-old institution, had accepted cryptocurrency. The art-historical significance of the sale is not primarily about the work. The work is a composite of five thousand daily images of uneven quality; it is difficult to argue for its aesthetic value except at the scale of the project — the sheer accumulated discipline, the commitment, the thirteen and a half years of daily production without a gap. What the sale's art-historical significance is about is institutional realignment. Nearly every major auction house, museum, and gallery in the world took meetings about NFTs in the weeks following the sale. Many of those meetings produced strategies that are still in force in 2026. The NFT as an asset class ceased to be a niche concern for a crypto subculture and became, in a single week, a core concern for the global art market. The market that followed this event has contracted severely. The 2022–24 crypto winter reduced most NFT secondary markets to a fraction of their 2021 peaks. Beeple's own market has held up better than most. What has not reverted, and will not revert, is the institutional legitimacy the Christie's sale conferred on the form. That legitimacy is the thing this archive is cataloging. Whether it has aged well, or will age well, is a question the archive is not here to settle. Winkelmann is still producing Everydays. The accumulation continues. Lore Winkelmann had made one artwork every single day since May 1, 2007 — 5,000 consecutive days without missing one. He called the project 'Everydays.' On March 11, 2021, Christie's auctioned a single NFT containing all 5,000 images as a composite mosaic. It sold for $69.3M to Vignesh Sundaresan ('MetaKovan'), making Winkelmann — overnight — the third-most-expensive living artist at auction behind Jeff Koons and David Hockney. Christie's accepted cryptocurrency for the first time in its 255-year history; the payment was 42,329 ETH. The sale is the single inflection point that pulled traditional institutions into NFTs. Almost every museum director in the world took a meeting about it within the following week. Whatever the final art-historical judgment, the auction reorganized the field's incentive structure permanently. Sources • Christie's — Beeple: The First 5000 Days (sale catalog, March 2021) • The New York Times — coverage of the sale (March 11, 2021) • MakersPlace provenance record