22/06/2021 Here Are the 14 Most Expensive NFTs Sold to Date, From Beeple to Mad Dog Jones and Beyond
Eight of the top 10 NFT art sales as of March 23 have been bumped from the list.
Paris Hilton and Blake Kathryn, ICONIC CRYPTO QUEEN. Courtesy of the artists.
In March, Artnet News published a list of the most expensive NFT artworks ever sold, topped by Beeple’s $69 million sale at Christie’s. That took place on March 11, catapulting the artist, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, to number three on the list of most expensive living artists at auction. But while that high-water mark still stands, the rest of the list quickly became outdated, with new NFT artworks continuing to sell for climbing prices in the hundreds of thousands.
But while the exponential growth in NFT sales has struck some as unsustainable, reports that the bubble has burst seem to be premature. Turnover in the all-time top 10 since we first compiled it in March supports that conclusion. The top two sales have retained their positions, but the other eight are all new, with the third, fourth, and fifth most-expensive works falling to 13th, 16th, and 17th places, in less than three months.
The Disaster Girl meme, featuring Zoe Roth, has become an NFT. Photo by Dave Roth.
Further bolstering the case for a continued NFT boom are major sales for a number of other NFTs that don’t quite qualify as artworks. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet, which launched the popular social media platform, as a $2.9 million NFT. The New York Times published an article, “Buy This Column on the Blockchain,” explaining the phenomenon and minted it as an NFT that went on to sell for $555,289.
Existing internet sensations have also done well for themselves, with memes like Disaster Girl and Overly Attached Girlfriend becoming $401,718 and $417,299.40 NFTs, respectively. The early YouTube hit Charlie Bit Me fetched $761,000 as an NFT.
Larva Labs, CryptoPunk #7523 (2017). Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
And then there are the CryptoPunks #7523, which have started selling at Christie’s and Sotheby’s—four have sold for millions of dollars, led by a masked alien punk that fetched $11.75 million at Sotheby’s first curated NFT sale earlier this month.
When we published our last list, only three NFT artworks had ever topped the million-dollar price point, two by Beeple’s, and Kevin Abosch’s Forever Rose, which sold for $1 million to a group of cryptocurrency investors in February 2018, before the term NFT was even really in use.
FEWOCiOUS, The EverLasting Beautiful by FEWOCiOUS. Courtesy of the artist.
As of June 16, cryptoart.io lists no fewer than 17 NFT artworks clocking in at $1 million or above (not including Forever Rose, which wasn’t sold on a platform tracked by the site). Teen NFT phenom FEWOCiOUS’s The EverLasting Beautiful by FEWOCiOUS, which rounded out our top 10 with a $550,000 sale, has fallen to number 31 there. (He’ll likely rebound with his upcoming Christie’s sale of NFT artworks inspired by his gender transition.)
Ranking NFT sales, however, is complicated by the fact that the value of Ethereum is constantly fluctuating—something that our initial list did not take into account. This time around, our list is based on the conversion value of Ether at the time of the sale.
With all that in mind, here is a list of every single-edition NFT artwork that has sold for at least $1 million to date.
14. Whisbe, Not Forgotten, But Gone
$1 million, March 2021
Perhaps the artist on the list with the most traditional art world presence—you may have spotted his gummy bear mug shots at art fairs like Scope—Whisbe made his biggest NFT sale with a riff on Damien Hirst’s golden mammoth skeleton sculpture, Gone but Not Forgotten, on view at Miami’s Faena Hotel.
13. Kevin Abosch, Forever Rose
$1 million, February 2018, GIFTO
Kevin Abosch, Forever Rose (2018). At the time of its $1 million sale on Valentine’s Day in 2018, the piece was the world’s most expensive piece of NFT art. Courtesy of the artist.
Kevin Abosch got some press for selling $1 million dirt-covered photograph of a potato in 2016, but no one in the Artnet News office knew quite what to make of the press release for his sale of a digital artwork of a rose on Valentine’s Day in 2018. Even crypto art’s early adopters weren’t using the term NFT yet! Today, the sale seems like it was a harbinger of things to come.
12. Paris Hilton and Blake Kathyn, ICONIC CRYPTO QUEEN
$1.111211 million, Nifty Gateway
Paris Hilton and Blake Kathryn had a sold-out NFT drop on Nifty Gateway, including ICONIC CRYPTO QUEEN. Courtesy of Nifty Gateway.
Heiress and former reality tv star Paris Hilton has become an unlikely but dedicated NFT evangelist, even supporting a foundation that provides grants to artists looking to break into the crypto art space. To sell her own NFT art—accompanied by the tag line “(Virtual) blondes have more fun, right?”—Hilton teamed up with Blake Kathryn, a leading female crypto artist, but still failed to crack the all-male top 10.
11.Don Diablo, DΞSTINATION HΞXAGONIA
$1.24 million, SuperRare
DΞSTINATION HΞXAGONIA is an hour-long “audio visual experience” that took 12 months to make, according to its SuperRare listing. The NFT of the sci fi-flavored piece came with hand-crafted box containing a hard drive that supposedly stores the only high-quality copy of a file of the film/concert, “making it a truly unique art piece.”
10. 3LAU , Gunky’s Uprising
$1.333333 million, Nifty Gateway
DJ and electronic musician Justin David Blau, stylized as 3LAU for his stage name, achieved $11 million in NFT sales in a March drop marking the three-year anniversary of his album Ultraviolet, led by the animated artwork and music video Gunky’s Uprising.
9. Pak, The Pixel
$1.355555 million, Sotheby’s and Nifty Gateway
Pak, The Pixel. Courtesy of Sotheby’s and the artist.
Before Beeple’s, there was Pak, the anonymous artist who began dropping NFTs in February 2020. When Sotheby’s looked to follow up Christie’s explosive Beeple’s sale, it turned to Pak, who didn’t disappoint. A 90-minute bidding war broke out over The Pixel, a literal one-by-one gray pixel—the most basic unit of a digital image—representing the arrival of digital art on the traditional auction house scene.
8. Pak, The Switch
$1.444444 million, Sotheby’s and Nifty Gateway
Pak's The Switch (2021) sold for $1.4 million with 10 bidders chasing. Courtesy of Sotheby’s and Pak.
Pak's most expensive work to date, also from his Sotheby’s sale, is meant to represent the way art is evolving in the digital realm. The owner has the option of triggering “the switch” to change the artwork to a new, unknown image—but doing so is irreversible.
7. Kevin McCoy, Quantum
$1.58 million, SuperRare
Kevin McCoy, Quantum (2014). Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
The first NFT ever minted, Kevin McCoy's Quantum came out of Rhizome’s Seven on Seven Conference in 2014, when the artist and technologist Anil Dash were the first to have the idea of putting unique digital artworks on the blockchain. Made entirely with code, the animated Quantum is a shapeshifter, generating new forms on its own.
6. XCOPY, Death Dip
$1.58 million, SuperRare
London-based crypto-art pioneer XCOPY has been minting NFTs on SuperRare since the platform’s earliest days in 2018. His piece Death Dip was only the 14th NFT offered on the site, and now stands as its most expensive. (XCOPY got 10 percent of the resale price per the SuperRare contract.) The buyer, who goes by the handle 4156 Collection, named after a CryptoPunk it owns, praised XCOPY on Twitter after the sale as “the most important living artist,” and plans to feature him heavily in a forthcoming crypto art website, according to Metaversal. XCOPY is also headlining an NFT auction at Bonham’s curated with SuperRare running June 21 to June 30, which is being billed as the first collaboration between a digital art platform and a traditional auction house.
5. Mad Dog Jones, Replicator
$4.1 million, April 2021, Phillips
Michah “Mad Dog Jones” Dowbak became the most expensive living Canadian artist with his auction debut at Phillips earlier this year, marking the house’s first foray into the world of NFT art. His piece, Replicator, is unique in that it will generate new NFTs every 28 days—sort of like the old-school photocopier it depicts. The buyer could ultimately own between 180 and 220 unique NFTs, each of which has its own resale value.
4. Edward Snowden, Stay Free (Edward Snowden)
$5.4 million, April 2021, Foundation
Edward Snowden NFT artwork features the court documents deciding that the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance practice violated the law, with his portrait by Platon overlaid above the text. The proceeds went toward the whistleblower’s Freedom of the Press Foundation.
3. Beeple’s, Ocean Front
$6 million, Nifty Gateway, March 2021
Noted NFT collector Justin Sun just missed out on the Everydays auction as the lot’s underbidder, but snapped up this Beeple work mere weeks later. One of the drawings from Beeple’s “Everydays” series, Ocean Front is meant to be a warning of the dangers of climate change, with the artist promising to donate the proceeds to the charity the Open Earth Foundation.
2. Beeple, Crossroads
$6.6 million, February 2021, Nifty Gateway
Beeple, Crossroads (2020). Courtesy of the artist.
The original buyer didn’t know which work of art he would actually receive with his $66,666.66 purchase of Crossroads at Beeple first NFT sale, “The First Drop,” in October 2020. There were two possible images, depending on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. After the votes were tabulated and the piece was finalized, to show a defeated President Donald Trump lying naked and covered in graffiti on the roadside, the collector flipped it for 100 times more the original sale price.
1. Beeple, Everydays—The First 5000 Days
$69 million, March 2021, Christie’s
Beeple, Everydays—The First 5000 Days NFT, 21,069 pixels x 21,069 pixels (316,939,910 bytes). Image courtesy the artist and Christie’s.
It seems unlikely that other NFT artworks will be able to match the mammoth price point achieved by Beeple’s Everydays—The First 5000 Days at Christie’s, but if this volatile new marketplace has taught us anything, it’s to expect the unexpected.
Paris Hilton and Blake Kathryn, ICONIC CRYPTO QUEEN. Courtesy of the artists.
In March, Artnet News published a list of the most expensive NFT artworks ever sold, topped by Beeple’s $69 million sale at Christie’s. That took place on March 11, catapulting the artist, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, to number three on the list of most expensive living artists at auction. But while that high-water mark still stands, the rest of the list quickly became outdated, with new NFT artworks continuing to sell for climbing prices in the hundreds of thousands.
But while the exponential growth in NFT sales has struck some as unsustainable, reports that the bubble has burst seem to be premature. Turnover in the all-time top 10 since we first compiled it in March supports that conclusion. The top two sales have retained their positions, but the other eight are all new, with the third, fourth, and fifth most-expensive works falling to 13th, 16th, and 17th places, in less than three months.
The Disaster Girl meme, featuring Zoe Roth, has become an NFT. Photo by Dave Roth.
Further bolstering the case for a continued NFT boom are major sales for a number of other NFTs that don’t quite qualify as artworks. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet, which launched the popular social media platform, as a $2.9 million NFT. The New York Times published an article, “Buy This Column on the Blockchain,” explaining the phenomenon and minted it as an NFT that went on to sell for $555,289.
Existing internet sensations have also done well for themselves, with memes like Disaster Girl and Overly Attached Girlfriend becoming $401,718 and $417,299.40 NFTs, respectively. The early YouTube hit Charlie Bit Me fetched $761,000 as an NFT.
Larva Labs, CryptoPunk #7523 (2017). Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
And then there are the CryptoPunks #7523, which have started selling at Christie’s and Sotheby’s—four have sold for millions of dollars, led by a masked alien punk that fetched $11.75 million at Sotheby’s first curated NFT sale earlier this month.
When we published our last list, only three NFT artworks had ever topped the million-dollar price point, two by Beeple’s, and Kevin Abosch’s Forever Rose, which sold for $1 million to a group of cryptocurrency investors in February 2018, before the term NFT was even really in use.
FEWOCiOUS, The EverLasting Beautiful by FEWOCiOUS. Courtesy of the artist.
As of June 16, cryptoart.io lists no fewer than 17 NFT artworks clocking in at $1 million or above (not including Forever Rose, which wasn’t sold on a platform tracked by the site). Teen NFT phenom FEWOCiOUS’s The EverLasting Beautiful by FEWOCiOUS, which rounded out our top 10 with a $550,000 sale, has fallen to number 31 there. (He’ll likely rebound with his upcoming Christie’s sale of NFT artworks inspired by his gender transition.)
Ranking NFT sales, however, is complicated by the fact that the value of Ethereum is constantly fluctuating—something that our initial list did not take into account. This time around, our list is based on the conversion value of Ether at the time of the sale.
With all that in mind, here is a list of every single-edition NFT artwork that has sold for at least $1 million to date.
14. Whisbe, Not Forgotten, But Gone
$1 million, March 2021
Perhaps the artist on the list with the most traditional art world presence—you may have spotted his gummy bear mug shots at art fairs like Scope—Whisbe made his biggest NFT sale with a riff on Damien Hirst’s golden mammoth skeleton sculpture, Gone but Not Forgotten, on view at Miami’s Faena Hotel.
13. Kevin Abosch, Forever Rose
$1 million, February 2018, GIFTO
Kevin Abosch, Forever Rose (2018). At the time of its $1 million sale on Valentine’s Day in 2018, the piece was the world’s most expensive piece of NFT art. Courtesy of the artist.
Kevin Abosch got some press for selling $1 million dirt-covered photograph of a potato in 2016, but no one in the Artnet News office knew quite what to make of the press release for his sale of a digital artwork of a rose on Valentine’s Day in 2018. Even crypto art’s early adopters weren’t using the term NFT yet! Today, the sale seems like it was a harbinger of things to come.
12. Paris Hilton and Blake Kathyn, ICONIC CRYPTO QUEEN
$1.111211 million, Nifty Gateway
Paris Hilton and Blake Kathryn had a sold-out NFT drop on Nifty Gateway, including ICONIC CRYPTO QUEEN. Courtesy of Nifty Gateway.
Heiress and former reality tv star Paris Hilton has become an unlikely but dedicated NFT evangelist, even supporting a foundation that provides grants to artists looking to break into the crypto art space. To sell her own NFT art—accompanied by the tag line “(Virtual) blondes have more fun, right?”—Hilton teamed up with Blake Kathryn, a leading female crypto artist, but still failed to crack the all-male top 10.
11.Don Diablo, DΞSTINATION HΞXAGONIA
$1.24 million, SuperRare
DΞSTINATION HΞXAGONIA is an hour-long “audio visual experience” that took 12 months to make, according to its SuperRare listing. The NFT of the sci fi-flavored piece came with hand-crafted box containing a hard drive that supposedly stores the only high-quality copy of a file of the film/concert, “making it a truly unique art piece.”
10. 3LAU , Gunky’s Uprising
$1.333333 million, Nifty Gateway
DJ and electronic musician Justin David Blau, stylized as 3LAU for his stage name, achieved $11 million in NFT sales in a March drop marking the three-year anniversary of his album Ultraviolet, led by the animated artwork and music video Gunky’s Uprising.
9. Pak, The Pixel
$1.355555 million, Sotheby’s and Nifty Gateway
Pak, The Pixel. Courtesy of Sotheby’s and the artist.
Before Beeple’s, there was Pak, the anonymous artist who began dropping NFTs in February 2020. When Sotheby’s looked to follow up Christie’s explosive Beeple’s sale, it turned to Pak, who didn’t disappoint. A 90-minute bidding war broke out over The Pixel, a literal one-by-one gray pixel—the most basic unit of a digital image—representing the arrival of digital art on the traditional auction house scene.
8. Pak, The Switch
$1.444444 million, Sotheby’s and Nifty Gateway
Pak's The Switch (2021) sold for $1.4 million with 10 bidders chasing. Courtesy of Sotheby’s and Pak.
Pak's most expensive work to date, also from his Sotheby’s sale, is meant to represent the way art is evolving in the digital realm. The owner has the option of triggering “the switch” to change the artwork to a new, unknown image—but doing so is irreversible.
7. Kevin McCoy, Quantum
$1.58 million, SuperRare
Kevin McCoy, Quantum (2014). Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
The first NFT ever minted, Kevin McCoy's Quantum came out of Rhizome’s Seven on Seven Conference in 2014, when the artist and technologist Anil Dash were the first to have the idea of putting unique digital artworks on the blockchain. Made entirely with code, the animated Quantum is a shapeshifter, generating new forms on its own.
6. XCOPY, Death Dip
$1.58 million, SuperRare
London-based crypto-art pioneer XCOPY has been minting NFTs on SuperRare since the platform’s earliest days in 2018. His piece Death Dip was only the 14th NFT offered on the site, and now stands as its most expensive. (XCOPY got 10 percent of the resale price per the SuperRare contract.) The buyer, who goes by the handle 4156 Collection, named after a CryptoPunk it owns, praised XCOPY on Twitter after the sale as “the most important living artist,” and plans to feature him heavily in a forthcoming crypto art website, according to Metaversal. XCOPY is also headlining an NFT auction at Bonham’s curated with SuperRare running June 21 to June 30, which is being billed as the first collaboration between a digital art platform and a traditional auction house.
5. Mad Dog Jones, Replicator
$4.1 million, April 2021, Phillips
Michah “Mad Dog Jones” Dowbak became the most expensive living Canadian artist with his auction debut at Phillips earlier this year, marking the house’s first foray into the world of NFT art. His piece, Replicator, is unique in that it will generate new NFTs every 28 days—sort of like the old-school photocopier it depicts. The buyer could ultimately own between 180 and 220 unique NFTs, each of which has its own resale value.
4. Edward Snowden, Stay Free (Edward Snowden)
$5.4 million, April 2021, Foundation
Edward Snowden NFT artwork features the court documents deciding that the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance practice violated the law, with his portrait by Platon overlaid above the text. The proceeds went toward the whistleblower’s Freedom of the Press Foundation.
3. Beeple’s, Ocean Front
$6 million, Nifty Gateway, March 2021
Noted NFT collector Justin Sun just missed out on the Everydays auction as the lot’s underbidder, but snapped up this Beeple work mere weeks later. One of the drawings from Beeple’s “Everydays” series, Ocean Front is meant to be a warning of the dangers of climate change, with the artist promising to donate the proceeds to the charity the Open Earth Foundation.
2. Beeple, Crossroads
$6.6 million, February 2021, Nifty Gateway
Beeple, Crossroads (2020). Courtesy of the artist.
The original buyer didn’t know which work of art he would actually receive with his $66,666.66 purchase of Crossroads at Beeple first NFT sale, “The First Drop,” in October 2020. There were two possible images, depending on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. After the votes were tabulated and the piece was finalized, to show a defeated President Donald Trump lying naked and covered in graffiti on the roadside, the collector flipped it for 100 times more the original sale price.
1. Beeple, Everydays—The First 5000 Days
$69 million, March 2021, Christie’s
Beeple, Everydays—The First 5000 Days NFT, 21,069 pixels x 21,069 pixels (316,939,910 bytes). Image courtesy the artist and Christie’s.
It seems unlikely that other NFT artworks will be able to match the mammoth price point achieved by Beeple’s Everydays—The First 5000 Days at Christie’s, but if this volatile new marketplace has taught us anything, it’s to expect the unexpected.
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Interesting NFTs
Tactical Cats
Tactical Cats
Practical cats, dramatical cats.. Experience the lighthearted inner smile when you are purrfectly purrrple. The cat's meow of pick-me-up paints with swirling tails of joy as vivid as the swirling magentas, blues and purple.
I was able to with this work quietly paint a tribute to memories of meeting fans and revisiting "old friends" within the paint itself. All while pretending to paint a version of catwoman for the audience. More on that in bonus material.
This is an alternate animation made specifically for crypto art collectors. This NFT depicts the rare, unused in media: verified image.
Mixed Media: Bio/Digital. Glycerin on 5'9" human skin 10-14 hours Performance art. Shot on Canon EOS RP. 16 + hours Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve.
All Works are SFW. Art has been Seen on the front page of Reddit, Featured in the New York Times, Galileo.tv, and multiple other promotions including Twitch.tv, Disney Interactive, RIOT games, WB games, AMD and more! More on how this art is unique and potentially explosive in the NFT world: https://youtu.be/CXbNF2Y6srs
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The purchase of this NFT Grants the buyer unique bonus material.
Physical mail Bonus Package: A Physical Art Print. Autographed from the Artist in 12x16. Please allow a few weeks for Delivery.
Digital Bonus Package: This image in .mp4. An "About the Art" Video and an "From the Artist" introduction. A README.txt about the artwork with some personal notes and Links relevant to the artwork.
Alex in Wonderland
A figure, Alex, stands mostly naked in the midst of a physical and psychological maelstrom. He is clad only in nostalgic 80’s era socks, on a tenuous island between active waters and a variety of shark denizens. Sharks on the right side of the image are all beached, including a shark with a quartz crystal snout, an orange shark wrapped in a life buoy, and a shark further in the distance wearing an 80’s style shirt with the number “88”. On the left side is the largest shark, wearing bright glossy red lipstick and brandishing prominent teeth with braces. She is cordoned off from the figure by a roped float divider, and within her thought bubble is a warning symbol.
Behind the figure, hovering in the air, are Grey aliens emerging from the distance, out of a series of elliptical UFO shaped interdimensional membranes. The Greys take on the visual form of spermazoa ostensibly impregnating the interdimensional thresholds. As is typical, these Greys inhabit a zone just behind the unconscious topology of Alex’s dissociative mind.
Though Alex’s bottom half is representative, his top half mutates into a psychological cornucopia. In a manner akin to “Auto-Erotic Sphinx”, a predecessor work, the figure has self suctioned—an act of sensual infatuation, enjoyment, and exploration.
Upward exists the figure’s primary conscious eye, adorned with a revolutionary beret emblazoned with a Bitcoin badge. The figure’s summit features the nose of a fighter jet facing off against video game Bullet Bills, one of whom is marked by a communist North Korean star. A cropped section of a UFO observes the contest.
Alex’s mind branches both left and right. To the left is more singular embodied consciousness, manifesting two eyes and a Ganesh trunk grasping crayons. The right branch dissociates upward diagonally, emerging into an array of eyes, faces, teeth, tail, a unicorn horn, and much more—all of which participate in expressing his unconscious being; a democracy of psychic factions representing thought impressions and associations. All illumination and darkness– fernal, infernal, high consciousness and corporeal underbelly–reside in this realm.
In the distance are relatively languid, light clouds, and against the firmament hovers a colossal distant eye peering over the scene and far beyond.
This painting possesses underlying genetic traits with previous works such as “Auto-Erotic Sphinx with Toys”, “Dionysus”, and “Fuku-Shiva”. The work serves also as a nod to an earlier period of art inspiration during late teens and early twenties— born out of the nakedness, vulnerability, curiosity, and wonder inherent to coming of age and all subsequent psychedelic revelation.
Really Remote Working Part 2
The second imagined space in the series. Created during the lockdown period whilst being confined to the same place every day, this piece is part of a series of imaginary places that I dreamed of being able to work from.
Valentine #86
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