In a whirlwind seven-day period, which began with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey proving that almost anything can be tokenized — even his old tweets — and culminated on Thursday with a Christie’s art auction that brought a mind-boggling $69.3 million bid for a tokenized Beeple work — fetching more at an auction than pieces by George Seurat, Paul Gaugain or Salvador Dalí — some observers were asking: Are nonfungible tokens spiraling out of control?
Even before the storied auction house catapulted artist Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, into the rarified company of Jeff Coons and David Hockney — i.e., living artists able to command stratospheric prices for their works — some were questioning the market’s sanity. Marketing guru and author Seth Godin, for instance, wrote in a blog post, “NFTs are a dangerous trap,” and the current mania is “an unregulated, non-transparent hustle with ‘bubble’ written all over it.”