JPG sells for $69 million, eliciting least-nice "Nice" imaginable

In a story seemingly designed to give us a splitting headache from like four different angles at once, The New York Times reports tonight on a record-setting sale by Christie’s auction house, as a JPG titled Everydays—The First 5000 Days, by the digital artist Beeple, became the highest-selling digital artwork of all time. After a flurry of last-minute bids, the artwork—consisting of a collage of 5000 images Beeple (real name Matt Winkelmann) has made, one-a-day, for the last several years—sold for a reported $69 million. Which: Nice. But also: Gah, our heads.
And, look: If you thought you were going to get out of a Newswire about rampant digital art speculation in 2021 without reading the word “fungible,” your optimism is about to be sorely tested. Because Everydays is, indeed, backed up by an NFT (non-fungible token), the blockchain-backed crypto-certification that ensures that your incredibly expensive JPG of an image that literally anyone could send to anybody is the real incredibly expensive JPG of an image that literally anyone could send to anybody, because someone poured god knows how much electricity into a bunch of graphics cards to prove it.