Would you pay $70 million for this digital file?
Is it the new pop art? Or is it the hoax of the century? Welcome to the mysterious, multimillion-dollar digital art world.
Beeple (b. 1981) Everydays: The First 5000 Days Digital collage
From the time early humans began daubing pictures of woolly mammoths on cave walls, art has remained a relatively simple business: someone creates it, someone buys it and the rest of us get to see it in galleries or museums. For decades, there have been long queues for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in Paris and Michelangelo’s David in Florence because the best way to truly appreciate these works is to turn up in person.
Not anymore. A revolution is sweeping the art world, up-ending centuries of cosy coexistence between dealers and collectors. In March this year, Christie’s – the venerable, 255-year-old London auction house – achieved the third-highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist. The winning bid of almost US$70 million was for a digital collage called Everydays: The First 5000 Days.
The artist was a 39-year-old graphic designer known as Beeple. Contacted at his modest suburban home in the US state of South Carolina, Beeple’s reaction was: “This is too goddamn awesome, man.”
Welcome to the world of crypto art. For $70 million, you could own a topnotch work by Picasso or Monet, and when the auctioneer’s hammer comes down, have your prize packaged up and delivered to your mansion, yacht or ski lodge, where you can gloat over it being entirely unique and all yours. But anyone can see Beeple’s work exactly as the buyer sees it. It exists only as a sequence of digital files, viewable on a screen, and infinitely replicable. So, why would a buyer spend so much money on something the rest of us can have for free?
“Why spend so much on something the rest of us can have for free?”
The world’s first billionaire artist
At this point, the world is divided between those who know what a ‘non-fungible token’ is and those of us who still think in terms of deeds and titles. In crypto-speak, an NFT is a kind of identifier, which indelibly links any digital work with the person who created it.
Imagine if, instead of signing his works with a brush, Rembrandt assigned each of them an ID number that could not be erased, altered or forged, and provided absolute proof that he had painted them. No more scholarly disputes over authenticity, or tales of crumpled canvases found in attics, and “thought to be” by Rembrandt. So, while the piece of crypto art can be viewed by anyone, the original file, identified by its NFT and registered on what is known as a blockchain – a global network of computer databases – belongs solely to its creator. Until he sells it.
What the buyer of Everydays was getting for his $70 million was not so much the free-to-anyone artwork
as the NFT. Still confused? “Think of it this way,” says Paris-based art critic Lucien de Farves: “You can cast a virtually perfect replica of Michelangelo’s David, but only Florence has the original.”
Beeple’s real name is Mike Winkelmann, and if your fond image of an artist is a man in a beret and paintflecked smock applying delicate brushstrokes to a canvas, Beeple is here to demolish it. He has no formal art training, doesn’t have a studio and can’t draw very well. All his work is done on computers using 3D software programs. It took Leonardo da Vinci around15 years to complete the Mona Lisa, but Beeple, in his spectacles and chain-store sweaters, knocks off at least one new work every day.
Before crypto art took off at a speed that has left the old order dizzy, Beeple’s life was nothing out of the ordinary. He was brought up in a small US town, became a typically computer-obsessed teen, then dropped out of the college programming course his parents had sent him to on the grounds that it was “boring as shit”.
He drifted into work as a website designer, married his girlfriend, Jen, had two children, and after moving to South Carolina – because he preferred the weather – he dabbled in graphic art. He slowly developed a following, sold a few pieces, then discovered NFTs, which are now set to make him the world’s first billionaire artist.
The digital revolution
Beeple isn’t alone in struggling to believe it. People have been creating pictures on computers for decades, but the art establishment – protective of what it sees as its standards and traditions – has paid little attention. With their clubby rules and customs, the big art houses have maintained a near-stranglehold on the market for centuries, and youngish artists with digital mindsets have been unwelcome.
A recent study showed that 96 per cent of art sold at auction is by men and that nearly half the profits come from less than one per cent of works – none of which are by women. Almost everything sold is physical art in the form of paintings, sculptures, tapestries and so on.
“It’s a very conservative, centralised market,” says Jason Bailey, an American curator and chronicler of digital art. “It’s always been very tough for artists who didn’t fit the traditional model to break in. That includes digital artists, but it’s starting to change. We’re seeing the field opening up to younger artists, women, people from different backgrounds. There’s a kind of forced recognition that digital art can be at the same level as physical art.”
As a consequence, a lot of crypto artists are now getting rich – and fast. With his record sale, Beeple ranks behind only Britain’s David Hockney and America’s Jeff Koons as the most expensive living artist. The buyer of Everydays, Singapore-based entrepreneur Vignesh Sundaresan, says he would have paid even more than US$70 million, and predicts that the NFT phenomenon will unleash a new boom in global art sales. “The art world has been pretty much the exclusive territory of western artists and collectors for centuries,” he says. “Now, artists in places like the Philippines and India – people no one’s heard of – can start using this technology and make a few thousand dollars that will change their lives.”
The flood of money is being felt everywhere. Ten years ago, Chris Torres, a 25-year-old Puerto Rican, created a popular moving image of a cat flying through the air, leaving a rainbow trail. The original file sold at auction this year for US$590,000.
A few weeks later, musician and artist Claire Boucher, aka Grimes, sold a collection of 10 crypto works for almost US$6 million.
Rising Australian crypto artist Marc-O-Matic, based in Victoria, says the crypto scene has brought him both freedom and rewards. “I wasn’t really involved in the conventional art field,” he says. “I’d sell artworks at the odd
art show, but the majority of my time involved juggling projects in things like advertising and animation.
“I only stumbled across the crypto art scene last year, when a lot of my projects were postponed or cancelled because of the pandemic. I fell down the rabbit hole, learning all I could. I didn’t think I’d get much interest, but I was shocked at how my creations were being auctioned off for hundreds, or even thousands of dollars to collectors online.”
Supporters of crypto art say the new money makes it possible for many artists, who might otherwise struggle, to support themselves. “It presents opportunities to break free from the shackles, bureaucracy and elitism of the traditional art space,” argues Marc. “For me personally, it has been overwhelmingly successful.”
The end of art?
Two pressing questions hang over the crypto boom: Will it last? And is the art any good? Many establishment art figures recoil from what they see as the violent, often obscene material that proliferates in digital art. In their keenness to make an impact, some artists find the temptation of shock value hard to resist.
At first viewing, Beeple’s Everydays looks like a merry patchwork of 5000 colourful panels, but critic Ben Davis, of Artnet magazine, explored the entire work and found such images as Hillary Clinton feeding Donald Trump from a tube attached to her crotch; dubious racial caricatures; and a mocked-up invitation to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton with a grotesquely tasteless caption. Such work, he suggested, “would have the shelf life of
Taco Bell leftovers”.
The influential New York Times critic Jason Farago, in a scathing assessment, accused digital art of “the violent erasure of human values”, adding: “A century ago, Andrew Carnegie and his ilk used their new money to buy the prizes of the past and fund the institutions of the present. Today’s new money prefers its own systems … where anarcho-libertarianism dovetails with certain boys’ amusements: the subliterate comedy of Salt
Bae and Boaty McBoatface, the penny-ante heroism of online role-playing games, and the stunted emotions of streaming porn.”
There are worries, too, that young artists in the traditional disciplines will give up on what can be a long road to success, and take the fast bucks of crypto. Some in the digital field openly declare physical art to be dead, and have radical ways of making the point.
In early March, a group of masked men set fire to a screenprint by the British graffiti artist Banksy at a secret location in New York. They had been hired by a company called Injective Protocol, which had bought the Banksy print for US$95,000, with the deliberate intention of destroying it, then replacing it with a digital facsimile. Their hunch that the crypto version would be worth more was borne out when the facsimile sold weeks later for US$380,000.
Yet, not everyone believes it’s the end of the road for the men (and women) with their paintbrushes. The NFT craze has spread into other digital fields, including music, videos, tweets (the first tweet from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold for almost US$3 million), and many believe the boom is headed for a bust.
Among them is Beeple himself. “I absolutely think it’s a bubble,” he said after the Everydays sale. “This is for people who are looking to take some risks, because a lot of this stuff will go to zero. If you look at art historically, blue-chip stuff does well over time, but most of it goes to zero. That’s just how it is. I believe NFTs will be no different. And I believe it’s in an irrational exuberance bubble … That is, we’re there.”