Beeple's digital collage titled 'Everydays – The First 5000 Days'
Credit: Christie’s
Campaigners have issued a warning over the environmental damage caused by digital art, following the record $70m (£50m) sale of a virtual collage earlier this week.
On Thursday, the artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, sold one of his pieces of art through an auction at Christie’s, earning him a place among the top three most valuable living artists, coming only behind David Hockney and Jeff Koons.
His artwork, titled, "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" and in a JPG file, was entirely digital, featuring fantastical and absurd images that Beeple had created on a daily basis for the last 14 years.
However, the sale has sparked fresh concern from campaigners who point to the huge environmental damage attached to these assets, known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
NFTs are unique and cannot be re-created on a like-for-like basis. They are authenticated via blockchain, a digital ledger technology which processes huge numbers of transactions, and is able to show who owns the "original" version of the work and verify that an item is real.
What is an NFT?
Most NFTs are authenticated on the Ethereum blockchain, where records are maintained through something known as mining — a process which requires thousands of computers to verify transactions and, so, needs enormous amounts of power.
According to estimates compiled by artist Memo Akten, an average NFT creates more carbon emissions than a 620-mile car trip.
Alex de Vries, the founder of blockchain energy consumption specialist website Digiconomist, said the Ethereum network was currently consuming around the same amount of electric energy as the whole of Ireland, or an eighth of the world’s total data centre electricity needs.
Demand for digital art is, however, spiking, with one marketplace for NFTs, OpenSea, reporting a jump in monthly sales of the items from $8m in January to $86.6m by the end of February.
Sales of crypto-art have surged
With current interest, Mr de Vries said "pretty soon, we’ll be using as much energy as a third of all data centres in the world for something that you’ve got to wonder, what are we really using it for?"
He added: "If you’re buying an NFT, what are you really getting? You don’t even get to own the actual thing. It’s a whole lot of energy for nothing."
Artists have also expressed concerns over the process, including Joanie Lemercier, who had been planning to release his own NFTs, ultimately deciding against it after calculating the environmental impact.
"I realised that the release of just six artworks would require the use of more electricity than my entire studio over the past three years."
He said much of the blame should be falling on the NFT trading platforms, which "are not being transparent with the artists" about the emissions generated by selling digital artwork.
Beeple is among the artists to suggest he is planning to offset his carbon emissions, telling Gizmodo that this was "obviously something important to everyone in the space including myself".
He said: "I can assure you that moving forward that all of my drops will not just be carbon neutral but carbon NEGATIVE. I will also be buying carbon credits for my past drops to not only completely offset those but also make them carbon negative as well.”
Mr Lemercier said he had also looked into offsetting the carbon emissions, but that "you cannot do the offsets without mitigating your own impact first".
"By reducing your impact in the first place, you’re taking the most significant step."
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