Digital artist Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann broke records in 2021 with sales of his NFT artwork “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days,” which sold at auction for $69.3 million.
Since then, interest around NFTs has waned significantly, with trading volumes falling by more than 90%.
Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, and Tim Marlow OBE. Image: decrypt
Last week, during an on-stage interview with Design Museum CEO Tim Marlow OBE, of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Beeple said: “It’s crazy to think back to that time because NFTs are so hated. much longer than they loved.”
“There was a very brief moment where people said, ‘Yes, this is the future,’” he said. “And then it went right back to, ‘Oh, you fucking piece of shit, don’t put that evil on me.’”
“We lost a lot of people,” Beeple added, “but those people were never interested in the art, and I saw that right away.”
He said he knew at the time of the “Everydays” sale that the market was “100%” a bubble.
“I was making digital art for 20 years before that and I saw people buying things,” he said. “It’s like, ‘There’s no way to hold value, that’s absolute nonsense.’ And it just won’t last, you’ll realize that’s right.”
While he acknowledged that the NFT market would “come back to earth” and that speculators have “moved on,” Beeple noted that “there’s still a lot of excitement around this stuff.”
Pointing to the multi-million dollar sale of CryptoPunks earlier this year, he said, “I think it’s crazy how normalized it’s been,” and wondered about the fact that “it wasn’t news at all. I mean, yet always a huge sell-out in the art world.
Beeple’s own art sales are more tightly controlled than at the height of the NFT boom, he said, explaining that “we think about supply and demand and don’t put out too much work.” He added that his team is now focusing on “private sales to people who fill the role of the gallery,” to ensure buyers are “serious collectors” who won’t just “turn this around.”
At the same time, he said, the secondary market for his work is permissionless. “People can just go to websites and buy something right away, put your MetaMask in and be done,” he said.
A fragmented market of authenticity
Beeple also pointed to a “segmentation” in the NFT market, where some projects have lost sight of the true vision of the technology.
“This technology, a lot of the things it was used for and the people it was associated with didn’t really look like art,” he said, pointing to the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection. “Even they would say this is on the collectible side, and they’re trying to build a social club, and this and that,” he said, arguing that several use cases for NFTs had become “merged.”
NFT technology, he said, is “agnostic,” likening it to a web page. “A web page can be made up of many different things, and an NFT is a way to prove virtual ownership of many different things,” he explained.
Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, and Tim Marlow OBE. Image: decrypt
“Personally, I think that every painting in the future will have an NFT as a certificate of authenticity,” he said, adding: “It’s just a better way than a piece of paper to be able to prove ownership of these pieces, to be able to prove the provenance, be able to prove the exhibition.” The widespread adoption of NFTs to authenticate physical art, he added, requires an agreed-upon “standard for that NFT.”
Dynamic NFT art
Although the NFT market has since cooled, there remains a core of “passionate” NFT enthusiasts who “understand this technology and understand it as a medium to express artistic ideas in a way that simply wasn’t possible before,” Beeple said .
The technology has allowed him to create dynamic works of art where changes to the piece are recorded on the blockchain. With his most recent works, Beeple leaves the strictly digital space where he made his name, with two physical pieces: ‘Human One’ and ‘The Tree of Knowledge’.
Both consist of four video screens, arranged in a rectangular pillar, displaying a dynamic digital artwork: a striding figure in the case of ‘Human One’ and a tree interwoven with industrial elements in ‘The Tree of Knowledge’.
The dynamic changes of “Human One” are made by Beeple himself, who alters the landscape through which the titular figure walks.
“When the piece was sold at Christie’s, he was moving through this kind of surreal landscape; and then during the show at Costello he walked through a Ukrainian war landscape,” he explained. “The war hadn’t even started when the person bought the piece, so they couldn’t possibly have known that this would be a commentary on the war just six months later.”
The Tree of Knowledge, meanwhile, pulls in real-time data from feeds including news channels, stock and crypto tickers, environmental data and social media, allowing viewers to determine the ratio between ‘signal’, i.e. order, and ‘noise’. ‘ means chaos.
A further complication is that the viewer has the option to ‘choose violence’, which triggers a ten-minute animated sequence in which the tree is destroyed. “Every time you press that, it’s actually recorded on the blockchain,” Beeple explained, adding: “There are only 666 times you can press that button before the work is permanently destroyed.”
Access to the button is controlled by a key held by the artwork’s owner, Beeple explains. “It’s an analogy to certain people having the ability to push that button,” he said. “Not us.” He added that the fixed limit gives the artwork “weight”; it has consequences.”
Museums struggle with the idea of dynamic artwork, he said. “Even just the idea of Human One changing,” he said, “I talk to people in museums, and they say, ‘Wait, I don’t know what it’s going to say?’” He added that museums and collectors will ultimately to embrace ‘new possibilities’ of dynamic digital art.
“There will be confidence in the artist to continue to say new things through digital art, and to change it in ways that continue to bring new beauty and challenge the owner,” he said. “Time can be a part of that in a way that physical art inherently cannot be, because it is a state frozen in time. This is more like a conversation.”
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair