New York auction house Christie's sold HUMAN ONE, a 3-D video sculpture by Beeple, for US$28.9 million to an online bidder in Switzerland on Tuesday night. (November 9, 2021).
Just over three minutes after it went up for auction, a sculpture depicting dystopian imagery accessed through the Ethereum blockchain sold for $25 million to a buyer from New York and Hong Kong on the phone.
An estimated US$15 million was nearly doubled by the ultimate price, which was nearly twice as much as predicted. Human One, in 2021, had an auction house guarantee.
With an accompanying NFT, the video sculpture is a combination of digital and physical technologies. It depicts a person in silver clothing walking with what appears to be a space helmet on their head. The four walls of the 4-foot-by-4-foot box are filled with shifting sceneries projected by a single figure.
Beeple, the artist's alias, describes it as "the first portrait of a human born in the metaverse." Beeple's work is based on a random selection of one-minute video snippets from a data pool set up by Winkelmann and accessed using Ethereum, Christie's said.
Selena Mattei