Beeple said, “I am not a pure cryptographer,” nor does he accept the label “artist”. He said, “I think if I pretend I’m good at it, this thing will be ruined.”
Written by: Kyle Chayka, columnist of “The New Yorker” Compiler: Leo Young
Last October, nicknamed “Beeple” digital artists Mike Winkelmann noted that in his circle network, more and more people discuss called “non-homogeneity tokens” (non-fungible tokens, referred to NFT ) Technology.
In a nutshell, NFT is a tool to verify the ownership of digital assets . Like cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, NFT also uses blockchain technology to permanently store data in a decentralized network and cannot be changed. From MP3 to a JPEG picture, a tweet or a basketball video clip, anything can be turned into an NFT.
NFT has appeared in various forms and has a history of almost ten years. As early as 2017, ” crypto cats ” formed a cartoon cat picture trading market, some of which have risen all the way to hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can think of it as a digital version of Beanie Babies, but there is only one copy of each. NFT is a work of art, similar to a museum identifying the source of the artwork, stamping a proprietary time stamp for the artwork, and then continuing to spread it freely on the Internet. In new online markets such as Nifty Gateway, SuperRare, and Foundation, artists can upload or ” cast ” their own works as NFTs and sell them.
Winkelmann asked some friends in the circle about this emerging field, including the anonymous artist Pak, an NFT artist who specializes in geometric patterns. His works have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Winkelmann’s long-term daily art creation project ” Everydays ” was praised under the name of Beeple. In recent years, the works of “Everydays” have combined various social themes with dazzling cartoon expression, such as the Coronavirus conquering Disney, and Biden peeing on the Trump colossus in the wilderness. Beeple’s Instagram account has more than two million followers, and Winkelmann thinks that NFT can make him money.
“My reputation is greater than these artists. If they can earn so much, then I can’t make a profit.” Winkelmann said of his thoughts at the time, “Oh my god, this is too funny.”
On October 30, Winkelmann launched three art airdrops for the first time in the NFT market Nifty Gateway to verify its market acceptance. One of the works is called “Nonsense is Politics.” A bull with a half-length American flag has diarrhea in the rain of dollars.
One hundred pieces of this work were released, each one at one dollar. The core feature of blockchain technology is that it cannot be tampered with: all recorded transactions are permanently recorded, open and transparent, which means that NFT transactions are completely open. As of March 2021, these versions of works have been resold for more than 600,000 US dollars. (In the NFT market, art resale, artists can get a certain percentage of fees, generally 10%). In December, Winkelmann held another auction, which included the ” Everyday ” selection “The Complete MF Collection” as a single piece of NFT. There are zombies and giant Nintendo characters in the painting. This NFT comes with physical accessories, digital picture frames and so-called Beeple hair as verification. This work sold for $777777.
These are just the tip of Winkelmann’s commercial success in the NFT field. In early March, his jigsaw puzzle “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” was auctioned at Christie with a starting price of $100, and the estimated price was marked as “indeterminate”. On March 11, this work was sold for US$69 million.
This work made Winkelmann one of the top three artists in the auction price for a living artist’s work. The first two are “Rabbit” by Jeff Koons and “ Portrait of an Artist (Two People Pool)” by David Hockney , both of which were sold at Christie for US$90 million. If calculated by money, Winkelmann has become the world’s top contemporary artist, breaking the public’s perception of the value of digital art. The buyer was Metapurse , an NFT fund headed by Singaporean blockchain entrepreneur Vignesh Sundaresan.
After the auction, Anand Venkateswaran, another partner of Metapurse, told Artnet, “This work may become a generation of art.”
The sale of this work has historical significance, coupled with the accelerated development of the NFT market, the art market has set off waves: Can this kind of vulgar Internet work really compare with the works carefully selected by art critics and agents?
Time magazine published “Beeple Has Won. Here’s What We’ve Lost” (Beeple Has Won. Here’s What We’ve Lost), indifferent to the final price of NFT. As the saying goes, the value of art lies in how much someone is willing to pay. However, Time Magazine’s article denounced the tendency of Beeple’s works to “violently erase human values” and “intellectually entertaining”. Artnet’s Ben Davis also listed the crude political paintings in “Everydays”, believing that the “stupid, stupid, and Trump like Mussolini” genre works of art in the last few years will be short-lived.
Reference: ” I Looked Through All 5,000 Images in Beeple’s $69 Million Magnum Opus. What I Found Isn’t So Pretty “
It is not only art critics who have difficulty understanding the rise of Beeple’s work. Winkelmann is not a specialist in modern art. When I asked about the source of inspiration for an early work in “Everydays”, he replied: “To put it bluntly, what you say “abstract expressionism”, I don’t know what it is. “
Winkelmann is constantly being invited by the largest art galleries around the world. Just a few hours before the start of the interview, he received a message from Damien Hirst, an artist who has been challenging the world for more than a decade. He took his cellphone and read to me: “My fifteen-year-old son just showed me your work. It’s so damn praise, congratulations, it’s great.”
“Mike Pence: King of the Flies”, “Everydays”, October 7, 2020
“Next Chapter”, “Everydays”, March 11, 2021
Rather than saying that Winkelmann is an ideal record-breaking artist, he is more like a supporting role in the American drama “The Office.” Just two days before the end of the Christie’s auction, when we were chatting with Zoom, he had a clean shaved beard, he wore half-rim glasses, and his light brown hair was neat and tidy. Usually if well-known artists dress so carefully, it must be an international event. For Winkelmann, there are no idol traits, nor can they be modified. He is thirty-nine years old and lives with his wife and children in a family of four in an ordinary four-bedroom house on the outskirts of Charleston, Southern California. When we talked, we didn’t see a messy studio, no busy team or assistants. There was only one computer in the room, beige tapestries on the surrounding walls, bookshelves like Wal-Mart shelves, and a 65-inch TV. A live broadcast of CNN and Fox News. Winkelmann’s only unscrupulous thing is that he often speaks foul language, sometimes like a middle school student who has just learned to speak foul language.
Winkelmann grew up in a small town in Wisconsin and was exposed to technology at an early age. His father was an electronic engineer and taught him how to program. The only art class he took was in the first year of high school. A friend recommended him to the electronic music label Warp Records, and also introduced bands such as Aphex Twin (formerly Richard David James). “What can one person do with a computer?” Winkelmann said. “I always think this concept is cool, because a computer is an equalizer to some extent.”
Winkelmann then went to Purdue University (Purdue University) to study computers, but he finally felt lost. He said programming was boring. He switched to using a webcam to shoot self-described short films, learning digital design. Inspired by video artist Chris Cunningham and British studio Designers Republic , he created geometric animations with his own electronic music, and then posted them online.
In 2003, when he was 22 years old, he used the ancient Iwalker (Star Wars character) animal Beeple as his name. Now he collects Beeple figures from eBay. Then he picked up one from the table and showed it to me. Winkelmann covers the eyes of the plush doll and makes a beeping sound. He thinks the name is very good, and it matches the visual and sound effects of the videos he made.
He started creating the “Everydays” project in 2007, but his video works have become more famous for a long time. The loop animation he made quickly became a popular background for family gatherings and live concerts, and was constantly borrowed and remixed by other creators. Mark Costello, an interaction designer in Washington, told me: “My friends and I will use this as the main material and add personalization.” Winkelmann eventually developed a lucrative business model for Louis Vuitton, Apple, and Jass. Ding Bieber and other commercial clients do graphic design and animation design. In the 2020 Super Bowl halftime performance, he helped to produce performance projections (“It’s just white cube garbage,” he described it). And he never stopped making “Everydays”, which he posted on his blog, and then on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. On his personal website, the works are displayed in order, and the number of days displayed at the top of the page (as of Monday, it is 5,074 days, about 14 years).
At first “Everydays” was just a graffiti on paper: hands, cartoon characters, naked women. A year later, Winkelmann started using the 3D software suite Cinema 4D for digital creation . His most popular theme is technological utopia or dystopia, with machines made of shiny metal or dazzling crystal. His abstract style is similar to Suprematism in the Internet age (a movement initiated by the former Soviet artist Kazimir Malevich in the 20th century), and it also has similarities with graphic design.
Reference: ” The Prophet Malevich’s revolution “
To say that Beeple’s work is a bit kitsch, that is, it has a strong sense of repetition, it is because Winkelmann created this kitsch style. During the interview, he showed me the computer screen and opened Cinema 4D. This program is similar to the 3D version of Photoshop. There is a large space in the center: a blank canvas for a digital artist. I watched Winkelmann use the shortcut keys and slide the mouse to adjust the gray column. He operated quietly for a minute or two, contracted and expanded until it became the shape of a cyclist handle. “Looking at this for so long, it’s purely like shit,” he said.
In 2017, ten years after “Everydays” started, Winkelmann began to use the traditional 3D models of sites such as TurboSquid. This marked the beginning of Winkelman’s clearest personal style . Just a few keystrokes, you can enter characters, such as astronaut, roller coaster, Bart Simpson, Michael Jackson, and then merge them freely.
“To me, it’s like a giant toy collection,” he said. One of his more obscure works is that Mike Pence becomes a gladiator, standing on the burning White House, surrounded by giant flies (an allusion to the insect relief in the vice presidential debate)-this work took him about one and a half hours . He likes to draw daily news topics, memes and controversial topics on Twitter. (He said that he was anti-Trump, “but he usually took both parties to get rid of it.”) After the auction at Christie’s, he made another painting, Buzz Lightyear riding Jeff Kuhns’ balloon dog, and another Pixel version of Mona Lisa.
Winkelmann’s goal every day is to paint “the most damn cool painting”. He said to me, “I’ve never seen a painting.” Usually, this is a bit grandiose. He talked about a painting that was a Shrek-themed death metal band painted at the request of fans. The two Shrek figures in the painting have devilish red eyes, and the third stabs his donkey friend with a guitar. I’ve definitely never seen this kind of painting before, but it doesn’t mean that I will meditate on it.
Winkelmann is proud of his low-key keenness and bystander’s portrayal angle, and everyone can’t help but compare it with KAWS (KAWS is the pseudonym of American artist Brian Donnelly, and there is an exhibition of works at the Brooklyn Museum). KAWS material is commonly used in cartoon idols, including the jokes in “The Simpsons”. KAWS’s work is mainly a melancholy skeleton Mickey Mouse “companion” character. His works have attracted a lot of controversy, and there are many enthusiastic fans: KAWS’s giant sculptures are still attracting people to observe in museums. In 2019, he sold a painting for more than 1,400 US dollars. But Winkelmann told me that he has no contact with Donnelly. “You are doing one thing over and over again,” Winkelmann said. “Most artists have a distinctive style. They will be very dedicated, perhaps in their lifetime. But I am particularly disgusted with this.”
The style of “Everydays” is constantly evolving, but the tone is formed early. Beeple’s early works have a strong 4Chan style and a strong provocative meaning, involving obvious racial themes such as “art hormone” and “black penis”. (“I wouldn’t be involved in this now.” Winkelmann said when I asked about these works, “If that were the case, I would be “cancelled” a hundred times next week.”) Browse Twitter, look at these bones, anatomy The images of Hillary Clinton, the bionic monster and the dismembered Pikachu are fleeting and exhausting. Unlike Richard Prince’s Instagram copy, his work is not a calm explanation of the meaninglessness of social media content. His work is part of social media, and people can’t help but like and keep browsing. Their highest achievement is the digital time capsule , which uses pictures to record the over-stimulating and very barren internet honeycomb thinking.
Winkelmann’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” is the third most expensive artwork of a living artist
Young artists in the traditional art world unexpectedly get high income from auctions, which usually burdens the artists. Prices will attract speculators who are more concerned about making money, rather than nourish artists. This boom is short-lived, and prices drop with the heat. Galleries and agents carefully consider the artist’s work to be placed in the corresponding series. They use peer pressure to prevent artists from stagnating. In contrast, in the NFT market, apart from money, the operating rules are not clear . Anonymous collectors with unregulated digital currency purchase Xpress works, there are a lot of unknown millions encryption rich, but no place for direct consumption encryption assets.
Buying NFTs is a heterogeneous in heterogeneous investment . The work may increase with the price of cryptocurrency. The money that may be exchanged for fiat currency remains in the cryptocurrency system, and cryptocurrency optimists can interpret NFT buying and selling as verifying blockchain technology. Investors can now choose to buy NFT in the form of digital art, casting special tweets or metaphors.
In February, the animation influence of artist Grimes was sold at Nifty Gateway for $8 million. “These people can speculate on anything, but they have only just begun to speculate on my work, which is why my work is so fast,” Winkelmann said.
The common denominator for the success of NFT works is the popular creators on the Internet. Just like Instagram’s online celebrity selling sponsorship, NFT is also making money from reputation. Winkelmann treats his buyers as “investors, not collectors.” In the field of traditional art, this phenomenon is not necessarily different, but most artists will avoid being so outspoken.
The 28-year-old NFT collector Tim Kang paid $777,777 for “The Complete MF Collection”, which is an NFT work sold by Beeple last December.
Kang is clean and tidy, speaking softly. In a recent video interview, he wore a T-shirt with street pictures and kept smoking e-cigarettes during the conversation. He studied finance and computer science at the University of Northern California, and started investing in Ethereum in 2016. In November of last year, he bought Pak’s NFT work “Möbius Knot” (Möbius Knot) at SuperRare for US$42,000. At that time, he set the highest price in SuperRare.
Kang said that Winkelmann’s success confirmed his belief that NFT is the future . One day, everything we buy, whether digital or not, cars, bananas, and Netflix subscriptions will be recorded on the blockchain. I can feel his admiration for “The Complete MF Collection” in his words. “As soon as I saw it, I liked it immediately. I felt that no one had ever made this kind of thing,” he said. “I realized that legendary artists would emerge in this field.” Kang has collected 5 works of Beeple. The collections have appreciated in value since Christie’s auctioned them, but he said he has no plans to sell them. I asked him if he would buy other works of art. He said he also likes Japanese artist Takashi Murakami: “I spend a lot of money on NFT. I invest a lot in traditional art as well.”
Kang summarized the dilemma that NFT brought to the art world . Should curators change their aesthetic standards to cater to the surging crypto asset wealth? Or should I ignore NFT and take the risk to neglect new buyers who might be interested in collecting physical art? Prior to the Beeple auction, Christie’s had already auctioned several blockchain assets. Auction Robert Alice’s “Block 21” (Block 21) in October 2020. Noah Davis, a contemporary art expert at Christie’s, told me that he was concerned about Winkelmann’s early NFT sales. “People who rush to auction have no sense of the work. If you look at the numbers on the panel, they will pay more attention to this.” In January, Davis’s colleague Meghan Doyle asked him if he was interested in auctioning NFT works. After that, MakersPlace in the NFT market contacted Christie’s and Winkelmann to auction the works of Beeple.
Winkelmann initially suggested selling the 5,000th piece in the “Everydays” series. It was a self-portrait, with a child drawing in the front, and figures from the Beeple world gathered in the back: Trump and Mickey Mouse covered in blood, Kim Jong-un and Jackson, the saccharified Buzz Lightyear. For Christie’s, Davis felt that the painting was “not very representative.” After that, Winkelmann had the work “Everydays”, which was a pixel-spliced work of 5,000 pieces. This approach emphasizes the scale of the project and dilutes the details that make people uncomfortable. “For me, this is really an iconic moment, ” Davis said. “Every unique painting, Instagram is like Duchamp’s pre-ordered work.” People who can’t bear it may say that this concept is not It’s different from taking a bunch of sketches on display.
Davis compares the Beeple auction with other recent GameStop crazes. Traders on Reddit are vying to buy stocks in video game retailers, and there will be Elon Musk buying $1.5 billion in Bitcoin through Tesla. All of these are part of the meme economy, turning the Internet boom into big money.
Christie’s has determined to enter the emerging NFT market, the gains outweigh the losses. “There is no institution that can identify these artists before the auction. There are no top galleries to follow,” Davis said. Art critic Jerry Saltz said in an Instagram post that Christie’s decision to cooperate with Winkelmann was just speculation. He writes that Christie’s and Sosby cater to “like buying popular art in public, paying the highest price, and having the most tacky taste.”
Even well-known art galleries that are most tolerant of digital technology can hardly persuade collectors to buy digital works. Many people get a paper contract and use hard disk or USB storage to be at ease. Several young digital artists have successfully sold physical works of art. For example, Petra Cortright and Cory Arcangel’s large-scale printed artworks have earned five or six figures. However, non-art NFTs such as GIF images cannot get such a high price, because they will not attract a group of radical encrypted art collectors.
Kelani Nichole, the founder of the digital art gallery TRANSFER, told me that in the NFT art market, only the name Beeple is well-known, and his works can at least be regarded as political satire. This is his unique artistic symbol. Many other works she’s seen didn’t have such an impact. “These stupid meme or algorithmic art, Manfred Mohr did a lot more cool than these decades ago,” Nichole said, “It is to claim rights. There is no beauty at all, no content.”
NFTs also have big ethical issues . The computer network running the blockchain infrastructure consumes a lot of electricity. London artist and engineer Memo Akten calculated that an NFT transaction on Ethereum is equivalent to four days of electricity consumption by European residents. In this way, casting artworks on the blockchain is not conducive to the sustainable development system. Artists including Winkelmann are already trying to make up for the loss by purchasing carbon offsets. “Everything I do is not friendly to carbon emissions. If there is a coefficient, it should be ten.” He told me.
Reference: ” The Unreasonable Ecological Cost of #CryptoArt (Part 1) “
In fact, it has long been pointed out that no matter whether the artist uses the blockchain or not, it will consume resources. In addition, the transportation of all kinds of physical works of art to global art exhibitions is not particularly friendly to the environment. New Mexico artist Sara Ludy told me in early March that she was hesitant to create NFT works. “I am very concerned about my impact on the environment,” she said. After that, she made the first NFT work, which was auctioned for the ” No Carbon ” charity auction.
She told me that the NFT market is very attractive to traditional artists who have not achieved financial stability . Ludy is a representative of Bitforms, one of the well-known technology-focused art galleries. She creates abstract perspective virtual reality environments with historical themes. In the eight years of working with Bitforms, the gallery only sold one of her works. “It would be great if my friends can avoid being terminated, support themselves and their family, and have medical insurance,” she said. After that, she devoted herself to NFT creation.
Cryptocurrency enthusiasts like to talk about NFT as a fair force in creative culture . On the blockchain, there is no authoritative organization that stipulates who can buy what and what cannot buy. But at present, it seems that the NFT market is still copying the existing art world level. Many people participate in it, and only a few are famous.
Winkelmann said that he wanted to use the money he earned from selling NFTs to make large-scale works: physical installations , interactive technology , and more works that no one had seen before . Despite this, his lifestyle has not changed much. Luxury goods are not attractive to him. He said, “Perhaps I have never seen a fucking Ferrari or Lamborghini, but I know what it is, and that is something that has been invented.” Even before the epidemic, he did. Will stay home for a few days. He has no relatives in the Charleston area, except for his brother who is an engineer who quit his job at Boeing in December and now works for Winkelmann. There are some expenses now. “Now there will be armed guards outside our house,” to protect people from breaking in, Winkelmann told me last week.
After the auction at Christie’s, he asked his brother to book a private jet to fly to Miami to celebrate. They booked Airbnb. The auction payment was sent to his account: “Bang, my account has 53 million. My response is, what is the situation.” The payment was paid in Ethereum , and the value immediately began to fluctuate. Winkelmann was frightened by this volatility and immediately changed Ethereum to US dollars.
“I’m not a pure cryptocurrency,” he told me. “I was doing art before this thing, and if something like NFT disappears tomorrow, I’m still doing digital art.”
Until now, Winkelmann said that he still treats himself purely as a designer, experimenting with different corporate propaganda. He simply accepts the label ” artist “. “I think if I pretend I’m good at it, this thing will be ruined,” he said.
I pointed out that his speech is a very characteristic artist: self-driven to do his own thing, no matter how much money he earns, chase his own vision. “Now I am very interested in art history,” he said, “We are complete. I am going to get a degree in art history. Because I am in this state, oh wait, what has happened in the past few hundred years (in the art world) ?”
Original link: ” How Beeple Crashed the Art World “
Comments
Post a Comment