A 4chan post just got sold for $90,900

What is art? For this eBay seller it’s something as simple as a 4Chan post. Originally caught byArtnet, a vendor known only as “Artwork by Anonymous” turned the above piece of what would usually be everyday internet ephemera into a $90,900 masterpiece. The lucky buyer also gets free expedited shipping. The seller obviously had a high ticket price in mind since the bidding started at $500. But as Recode mentions, within 36 hours the price entered the five digits column. That kind of traction pretty much confirms the auction is fake, or at the very least, an elaborate joke. It’s pretty easy to inflate an eBay listing and you can always just, you know, not pay.

René Magritte would be proud. Just hours before the end of the potato salad Kickstarter last night, an eBay auction purporting to sell a framed screenshot from the message board 4chan finished with a winning bid of $90,900. The screenshot is, fittingly, of a post questioning the value of art. “Art used to be something to cherish,” the original anonymous 4chan poster wrote on Wednesday. “Now literally anything could be art. This post is art.” Bidding for “Artwork by Anonymous” started at $500 and, 36 hours later, had surpassed $10,000. A combination of human and automatic bids steadily pushed the price higher and higher on Friday to nearly $100,000. A slap in the face to more laborious artworks? Probably not. Commenters in this Reddit thread seem pretty convinced that the bids are “fake,” saying that bidders can elect after the end of the auction to just not pay, or the seller can call off the auction by not shipping the framed artwork. At the time of this writing, an even more meta eBay auction of a framed screenshot of the original screenshot auction is going for $2.75.