Alex Hern 

Warhol-style 200 bitcoin print bought by anonymous buyer

The face value of 200 bitcoins may be higher than $200, but the artist isn't quite Warhol famous – yet. By Alex Hern
  
  

A close-up of 200 Bitcoins.
A close-up of 200 Bitcoins. Photograph: Kuno Goda Photograph: Kuno Goda

A bitcoin-themed take on Andy Warhols 200 One Dollar Bills has been sold to an anonymous Seattle businessman for an all-bitcoin fee.

The work, 200 Bitcoins, is by German artist Kuno Goda. It echoes Warhol's famous work, a screenprinted replica of 200 $1 bills, which recently sold for $43.8m at auction.

But while the face value of 200 bitcoins is quite a bit more than $200 (it currently stands at around $86,000), Goda's artwork didn't sell for quite as much as the Warhol. Goda has an agreement with the buyer not to reveal the sale price, but it was less than the $125,000 that 200 bitcoins were worth at the time of the sale.

"As a lifelong fan of Andy Warhol I knew that he connected money and art in his 1962 Dollar Bill series, which featured 200 one dollar bills," Goda told the Guardian. "I thought Bitcoin deserves the same and so I created '200 Bitcoins'. I think Warhol once said that one should rather frame and hang the money itself on the wall than buying art with it. I always liked that way of thinking."

"A banknote is a piece of paper we assign a certain value to," Goda said in an artist's statement. "So are artworks. So are bitcoins. Minus the paper."

Goda had attempted to sell 200 Bitcoins using BitPremier, a site which bills itself as "the bitcoin luxury marketplace" and sells items like a 1.77 carat diamond for 57.6 bitcoins. Eventually, the work was sold through a private sale, but the buyer still made the payment in bitcoin, which Goda said "was a flawless experience. International payments can be a real hassle. Not so with Bitcoin. It was just a matter of a few clicks."

With a degree in engineering, most of Goda's works relate to technology in some way. "My follow-up piece will be about value and money as well. But it won't be as much pro-Bitcoin as more critical of the USD."

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