Beeple
Beeple is the online name under which Mike Winkleman operates. He is an artist that is proficient in a wide range of image making software and he has an aesthetic to his work that could be described as post pop expressionist surrealist collage. I. e. a playful relationship with invention, that is fuelled by collage techniques. I think his work is interesting and worth looking at, but no more so than quite a few other artists. However he has come to be seen as a symbol for the continuing hold of capitalist ideals and the power of the investment market. Today Christie’s auction house will become the first to offer a purely digital artwork for sale. Beeple’s “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS,” is being offered as a unique NFT (non-fungible token) consisting of 5,000 individual images created every day between 2007 and 2021 and posted on the artist’s Instagram feed. Those of you that follow this blog will have become aware over time that I have serious worries about the art market, and have long thought that it skews meaning and value in such a way that it makes it extremely difficult to understand how art can be used to benefit society, or to be a communal resource, if the best of it is priced far beyond the means of the average person. For a while I naively thought that online work might open out a new 'money free' arena from within which artists could operate, but I was not aware of 'blockchain'.
Noah Davis, a specialist in Post-War & Contemporary Art at Christie’s in New York who is leading the sale, states that, "understanding NFTs is an exercise in abstraction, the actual NFT-based artwork is just a code. It doesn’t exist. It has no objecthood." So we are asked to see this as 'abstraction' and of course abstract art has remained a very good seller on the investment market, so why not attempt to link the abstract nature of code with that of abstract imagery, after all they are all symbolic languages.
Christie’s will also accept payment for the artwork in cryptocurrency, a coin known as Ether. (The buyer’s premium, a set of fees tacked on to the principal, must still be paid for in dollars.)
This is how Noah Davis describes the situation:
"It’s important to define the artwork itself and the symbol that represents the artwork, separately. The actual NFT-based artwork is truly just a non-fungible token — it’s a long series of letters and numbers that is dropped into a digital wallet. But the symbol that represents the token is the monumental collage that Beeple put together, and one could argue that the token basically implies that this is contained within it. It’s the first 5,000 images from his ongoing project The Everydays, in which every day he makes a new image. More recently, they have been very politically or pop-culturally inclined. But the actual NFT-based artwork is just a code. It doesn’t exist. It has no objecthood. We are not selling a painting to hang on your wall."
He goes on to state; "You could look at it on your phone, your computer, your tablet, or in virtual reality. Really, the only pre-requisite is a screen that has access to the image." Finally commenting, "There are people who are going to look at this as a volatile marketplace that represents an opportunity for speculation and potentially a windfall down the line. Even though this is probably going to command an extraordinary price, there are people out there who are looking at this as a potential investment opportunity. Then there are people who are looking at this as a radical declaration of philosophy or values or investments in the concept of a future where blockchain technology and NFTs and cryptocurrency become the norm for transacting in the financial marketplace."
So the market driven art world becomes ever more speculative, just like the futures markets that collapsed a few years ago we now enter a world of non-tangible investment, but for what purpose? While we all know that we are failing to look after the planet, we also distract ourselves from this very fact, still looking for investments that might mean that we can get 'loads a money' by being the first to invest in a fast rising stock.
I have been asked by several students lately as to how to save work if it is to be seen as saleable on line, well now I have the answer, when you have made your digital artwork, publish it directly onto a blockchain in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT). This makes the ownership, transfer and sale of your artwork possible in a cryptographically secure and verifiable manner.
Beeple set out to make an artwork that was about creativity itself. He was celebrating invention, demonstrating that he could renew himself through imaginative play everyday, and what a wonderful idea that was. But it has now been eaten and consumed by another idea, one that states that everything is subject to commodification and can be sold to the highest bidder. If only Beeple could have been content to gift his work to us as a celebration of our creative possibilities as humans. Not that I blame him, he has to make a living and this is an opportunity that few artists would turn their noses up at. I just feel deep down that it shows us that there is 'something nasty in the woodshed', a hidden something that keeps us from seeing clearly, that distracts us from the real business at hand.
It is now many years since Suzi Gablik wrote her powerful book 'Has Modernism Failed?' She stated that we needed a renewed moral, social and spiritual dimension to art, and argued for a commitment to socially relevant and spiritually informed art practices. Artists are still working to integrate and entangle the concerns of the environment with and into and alongside their various art practices, but as they do I hope this latest investment news doesn't dishearten them, or make them think that nothing changes. Beeple's patched up giant emoticon, sticks its tongue out in defiance, it rises up out of its construction site like Pieter Bruegel’s ‘Tower of Babel’, another monument to the hubris of humankind.
Pieter Bruegel ‘Tower of Babel’
Tower of Babel’ and Beeple details
It would seem that blockchain can prove that there is only one of something and it is that rare one off nature that gives the work its authenticity; even if when made the work was available in infinite variations to all who happened to click on Beeple's site. But Beeple's work is native to a computer screen, look at how easily you can see his image of the patched up giant emoticon, and compare the experience of looking at Bruegal on screen. The Bruegal image is much harder to read, it was designed to be seen as a painting, not as a digital image, so in many ways by showing Bruegal on screen I devalue it, but Beeple belongs on screen, his images' authenticity lies in their native digital construction, which is a process not an object and this is perhaps what annoys me most. Beeple's process is one of engagement with creation, but the selling of the final result as a commodity reduces the process to a thing, a thing that only has one use and that is as an investment opportunity for those already rich enough anyway.
As an image maker myself, I do though respect Beeple's inventiveness and the fact that his images are out in the world, does mean that others can make use of them. Whoever buys the 'original' can't take the images back out of people's minds. So maybe the most important issue here is that once an image is seen it will be consumed in another way, like food, it will be digested and ingested by all that encounter it, and as such its potential for use increases exponentially as each new viewer looks at it.
See also:
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