What Kenzo Left Behind
An auction of the estate of Kenzo Takada, who died last year, was a lot more popular than anyone expected.
The fashion designer Kenzo Takada, who succumbed to the coronavirus, in the garden of his loft in Paris in 2009.Credit.Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters
By Tina Isaac-Goizé
May 13, 2021, 7:51 a.m. ET
This week, the vestiges of a colorful life went under the hammer in Paris. Just over six months after his death at the age of 81, the designer Kenzo Takada’s estate was auctioned, and it turned out the fashion pioneer the first Japanese designer to achieve success in the French capital was still a major draw.
A piece of digital artwork by Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, sold for nearly $70 million last week.
Digital art backed by non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are exploding in popularity and value, and Beeple is riding the wave.
In an exclusive interview, Beeple told Insider about his unexpected fortune and the future of NFTs.
Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, has sold the most expensive work of digital art in history.
It s part of an explosion in the market for NFTs, or non-fungible tokens digital tokens that prove ownership of things like Beeple s image that you can t even touch. I honestly, like, I never thought I could sell my work, Beeple said in an interview at his home in South Carolina. Kind of late September, early October, people kept hitting me on being like, Oh, you got to look at this NFT thing.
“I feel like I got a steal,” the buyer, who calls himself Metakovan, said in an interview about the “nonfungible token,” or NFT, he bought at an online auction.
It was already sold out. It couldn t have been more than 1 second.
The clock was ticking on the Open Editions and my sense of FOMO started to build. I had to decide if I really wanted this. $969 was a lot of money, but I d spent more than that on trips to Vegas. I figured this might be a better bet.
I clicked to purchase the Pikachu. The purchase didn t go through. I tried again and once again the transaction errored. The five-minute period was almost up. I clicked purchase a third time, and a spinning icon rotated for what seemed like more than a minute and the clock continued clicking down. Finally, the site confirmed the purchase and the screen filled with digital confetti and a congratulations message. I got #100/123.
Unfamiliar with Winkelmann s name? You might recognize his artist name, Beeple.
Beeple is generating Banksy-level hype in the digital art world; making headlines for the eye-watering sums of money his digital artwork is selling for.
Two weeks ago, Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile, who originally bought one of Beeple s artwork for $67,000 resold the piece for $6.6 million on the cryptocurrency art marketplace, Nifty Gateway, ahead of auction house Christie s, which made its first-ever sale of digital art - a collage of 5,000 everyday pictures, also by Beeple.
The auction closed on March 11 with a winning bid of $69 million. The price jumped from $15 million to $69 million in under an hour.