Five NFTs of Andy Warhol’s work have just sold for an eye-watering $3.4 million at auction.
Renowned auction company Christie’s has teamed up with The Andy Warhol Foundation to mint five non-fungible tokens from restored and preserved files of the artist’s 1985 collection, Andy Warhol: Machine Made, which were recovered from floppy disks in 2014.
According to Christie’s, the artworks “previously existed only as digital files unreadable by modern computers”, but have been “brought to life again” as NFTs.
Each artwork began at a starting bid of $10,000, with the sales attracting over 200 bidders. The pieces, created by Warhol in a paint programme on his computer, include two self-portrait NFTs, which sold for $870k and $562k respectively, his signature flower, which took $525k, an image of a banana, which sold for $250k, and his iconic Campbell’s soup can motif, which earned $1.17 million.
Proceeds from the works will go towards supporting the annual funding of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where Warhol was born, as well as to help the foundation in supporting artists across the US. Christie’s said profits will only be donated “after any appropriate offsets for carbon emissions associated with the minting process”.
“We are grateful for this opportunity to work with Christie’s on making a significant contribution to the foundation’s ongoing efforts to support artists,” Michael Dayton Hermann of The Andy Warhol Foundation said in a statement. “Warhol’s innovative vision and practice continues to enable the foundation’s unwavering commitment to artists by supporting small, community-oriented spaces, major museums, and everything in between.”
NFTs are the latest craze taking over the art world. Iconic memes have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, celebrities (including Grimes) have cashed in with their own crypto art, and Jack Dorsey auctioned off the first-ever NFT tweet... for over $2.9 million.
See the Andy Warhol NFTs in the gallery above, and look back at Dazed’s guide to NFTs here.
”. Executed circa 1985 and minted in 2021.)
