A digital outsider artist outgrossed a Pollock at auction in 2021

Evidence

On November 15, 2021, abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock’s monochromatic painting Number 17, 1951 sold for 61.6 million at Sotheby's New York, far exceeding its expected price of 35 million and setting an auction record for the artist. Yet even this landmark sale was eclipsed by a Christie’s auction earlier that year, where forty-year-old Wisconsin-born, South Carolina–based artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, sold his work Everydays: The First 5,000 Days for an astonishing $69.3 million. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 718

Categorization

• CANDY: Beeple’s NFT outselling a Pollock is a fun, tweetable absurdity of the crypto era.
• DEFINE: Establishes the market context where an art-world outsider’s NFT equals record prices.