You bought a pixel for $1.4 million

Yesterday, a Sotheby’s auction for a single gray pixel ended with a winning bid of $1,355,555. I have some bad news for the buyer.

Dear etyoung,

You bought into the hype. You thought, “A single pixel? That has to be the most meta artwork in history. Backed by NFTs? Color me RGB. And also, in. Color me in.” You bid and won and I mean, who can blame you when faced with an artist’s statement like this:

The Pixel is a single pixel statement. It is created to validate.

The Pixel is a digitally native artwork visually represented by a single pixel (1x1). It is a token that signs the most basic unit of a digital image in a traditional global auction house. It is a tiny mark to carry digitally native art to a potential future history.

Those certainly are words.

Here’s the thing, though: you didn’t buy the most meta artwork in history. How do I know? Because I’m one of the creators of the most meta artworks in history, and I have no plans to sell it.

The creator of the gray pixel was pretty clever, but not that clever. Or, maybe just not old enough to know about the early Web. Because a gray pixel, while meta, is not that meta.