“I want to be a machine,” said Andy Warhol once. Apparently, the public wouldn’t mind, either.
Recently, a South Carolina digital artist, known mononymously as Beeple, gained followers using 3-D rendering software to make colorful, digestible pastiches, which he now sells as authenticated files with a unique piece of code. On Thursday, a montage of these digital files, entitled “Everydays – The First 5000 Days,” went public at a single-lot online auction at Christie’s, where it became “What Does the Fox Say?” art sales. A crypto whale known only by the pseudonym Metakovan paid $ 69 million (with fees) for some indiscriminately grouped photos of cartoon monsters, disgusting jokes and a Donald Trump breastfeeding – which suddenly makes this computer illustrator the third most alive artist sold.
The purchase was made with a cryptocurrency called Ether, and Beeple’s connection to digital speculation is not accidental. Several of the images included in “Everydays” depict bulls carrying pieces of Bitcoin gold or cut to reveal precious metal; he recently released an image of two bulls fornicating on a gold pedestal, covered with a huge Bitcoin emblem in the shape of a rapper chain.
Welcome, users, to your new cultural settlement! A century ago, Andrew Carnegie and his gang used their new money to buy the prizes of the past and finance the institutions of the present. Today’s new money prefers its own systems of finance and culture, where cryptocurrency anarcho-libertarianism matches certain diversions for boys: the sublime comedy of Salt Bae and Boaty McBoatface, the low-cost heroism of online role-playing games and stunted emotions of streaming porn.
What Christie’s sold was not an object, but a “non-fungible token”, so it’s best to start with some definitions. “Token” is just bitcoinese for a single string of characters, registered in a blockchain (or decentralized database), which can be transferred and traded between users. Most tokens are fungible: that is, exchangeable, equal to equal, as with dollars or gold bars or GameStop shares.
A “non-fungible” token, on the other hand, is evaluated independently from all other tokens. It is, in this way, like a work of art – this Monet cannot be replaced by that Monet, and certainly cannot be replaced by that Warhol or that “Dogs Playing Poker”. The NFT produces what digital art has always lacked: limited editions.
The actual images remain in circulation and any citizen or curator can print or design them (unless Beeple, who remains the copyright holder, objects). What Christie’s sold was a related asset, which can be resold or even divided like many shares of Beeple.
Better not freak out with the price as such. Art prices have been speculative for decades. And for a century, artists have been selling abstract rights instead of objects. Marcel Duchamp’s “Monte Carlo Bond” transformed the artist’s person into a negotiable title; Tino Sehgal’s performances are sold and certified through oral contracts. At the very least, recourse to Christie’s and the introduction of blockchain “exclusivity” belie the techno-optimistic tone that NFTs allow the establishment of art to end. The aura of uniqueness and the legitimacy of the auction house serve, transparently, to top off the price of assets functionally equivalent to Beanie Babies or CryptoKitties.
(If NFTs bring something new to artistic speculation, it’s the terrible environmental price of blockchain transactions; artist Memo Akten calculated that the average NFT has a carbon footprint equal to a European citizen’s energy consumption for a month. Artists -activists who are irritated by the injustices of museum collections or the crimes of board members should be angered by NFTs, although it seems fitting that an art like this is literally accelerating the extinction of life on Earth.)
So, he freaks out with something else: the cultural trend that Beeple signals. NFT drivers like to say that a decentralized art market will allow creativity to flourish beyond the world of elitist art. This is not right. Museums, galleries, magazines and art schools have happily absorbed cultural production from far beyond its borders, from folk art to popular dances and memes themselves. What distinguishes Beeple’s digital images from other “non-established” arts is the violent erasure of the human values inherent in the photos and how happy his cryptographers are to see them go.
Look closely – anyone, however? – in the component images of “Everyday”. The NFT in question comprises thousands of images that the artist makes once a day with the Cinema 4D and Octane software, and that Beeple has posted publicly since 2007. They are etudes, I think. Many attribute the status of cartoon characters to politicians: Joe Biden as the character in “Toy Story” Buzz Lightyear; Kim Jong-un as one of the Transformers. In addition, mechanical regurgitation of the memes of the day: for example, a battery-acid scene of skateboarders drinking cranberry juice, named after a briefly viral TikTok starring an Idahoan drinking Ocean Spray. (Here, skaters sail under an Ocean Spray monolith, towering over a futuristic city.)
There are misty, techno-Japanese seascapes and icebergs for those who prefer “Final Fantasy” to Caspar David Friedrich. Strangely, many of Beeple’s daily images are based on slightly colored sexual jokes, some of which a high-waisted comic would consider degrading. Christmas brought Beeple’s “Santa Came Early”, which portrays an embarrassed Saint Nicholas in bed with his dissatisfied girlfriend after the titular sexual accident.
Visually, many of Beeple’s photos imitate Japanese Gothic fantasies from video games. Some resemble the art of the madman. (On the eve of Thanksgiving, he drew a man doing oral sex on a turkey.) Beeple has a talent for representing architecture, although he fights against meat; as in many video games, the skins look waxy and dehydrated. It is as if all the humans remaining in this cryptouniverse have scurvy, although perhaps that is what happens when you subordinate your flesh to the screen.
Like KAWS, the subject of a current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Beeple frequently reuses characters from Pixar, Disney, “Star Wars” and Pokémon in the same way that previous artists painted Christian saints or Greek deities. Unlike KAWS, who at least tried to produce his own artistic project, Beeple uses these cartoon characters as social media mnemonics; they are signs in the endless agitation of the flow of images, to confirm that you know what you are looking at, you already like it, you know that the artist is on your team.
Even crude images are not really interested in abjecting popular culture or American society, in the manner of Mike Kelley or Paul McCarthy. They serve only to signal a particular cultural and ideological disposition, in which the promise of quick enrichment of the cryptocurrency matches with an adolescent aversion to authority (petty critics of the Times among the latter).
“I see this as the next chapter in art history,” says Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann. He’s probably right – although what these chapters say may be of interest here. In a horrible coincidence, the digital artist shares his surname with the literal founder of art history: Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a scholar of the German Enlightenment, who at the end of the 18th century was the first to systematize the art of the past.
Winckelmann’s most fundamental insight was that a sculpture, a painting or a building was not just something beautiful; a work of art is a product of its time and expresses itself without trying anything about the place and culture from which it comes. It’s as true as ever, and certainly true about Beeple’s pictures of naked giantesses with Pikachu’s face. It is their culture now, ignorant but triumphant, where childish diversions can never be questioned and the Simpsons have replaced the gods.