How two friends made art history buying a $70M digital work

It took a few minutes for Vignesh Sundaresan and Anand Venkateswaran to realize that they’d parted with $69.3 million for a digital artwork stored in a JPEG file, coincidentally securing their place in art history.

“We weren’t sure we won,” said Venkateswaran, describing the nerve-wracking final moments of the online auction for a collage of 5,000 images by the artist known as Beeple. “We kept refreshing the page.” The March 11 auction at Christie’s in London immediately made Beeple’s artwork one of the most expensive pieces ever sold by living artists, joining a well-known swimming pool painting by David Hockney and an iconic stainless steel rabbit sculpture by Jeff Koons.