In summary
- Digital artist Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann broke records in 2021 with the sale of his NFT artwork “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days,” which sold for $69.3 million at auction.
- Since then, the fervor around NFTs has decreased considerably, with trading volumes falling by more than 90%.
- Beeple reflected on the NFT market, noting that “there was this very brief window where people were like, ‘Yeah, this is the future,'” but then it went back to being hated.
Digital artist Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann broke records in 2021 with the sale of his NFT artwork “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days,” which sold for $69.3 million at auction.
Since then, the fervor around NFTs has decreased considerably, with trading volumes falling by more than 90%.
Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, and Tim Marlow OBE. Image: Decrypt
Speaking last week in an interview with Design Museum chief executive Tim Marlow OBE at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Beeple reflected, “I find it incredible to think back to those times, because NFTs have been hated for so long.” longer than they have been loved.”
“There was this very brief window where people were like, ‘Yes, this is the future,’” he said. “And then it was again like, ‘Oh, damn, don’t curse me.’”
“We lost a lot of people,” Beeple noted, “but those people were never in it for the art, and I could see that right away.”
He said that at the time of the “Everydays” sale, he knew the market was “100%” a bubble.
“I was doing digital art for 20 years before that, and I saw people buying crap,” he said. “It’s like, ‘There’s no way that’s going to hold its value, it’s absolute garbage.’ And it just won’t last, you’ll realize that’s right.”
While acknowledging that the NFT market was “going to come back to reality” and that speculators have “moved on to something else,” Beeple noted that “there is still a lot of excitement around this topic.”
He pointed to CryptoPunks’ multi-million-dollar sales earlier this year, saying, “I find it amazing how normalized it’s been,” and wondering about the fact that “It wasn’t news at all. I mean, a massive sell-out, still, in the art world.”
Beeple’s own art sales are more controlled than at the height of the NFT boom, he explained, saying “we’re thinking about supply and demand and not putting out too much work.” He added that his team is now focusing on “private sales to people who act as the gallery’s role,” to ensure buyers are “serious collectors” who aren’t just going to “resell this.”
At the same time, he stated that the secondary market for his work does not need permits. “People can just go to websites and buy something right now, enter their MetaMask, and that’s it,” he said.
A fractured market for authenticity
Beeple also pointed out a “segmentation” in the NFT market, with some projects losing 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, weren’t really like art,” he said, pointing to the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s 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 the different use cases for NFTs had become “confused.”
NFT technology is “agnostic,” Beeple said, likening it to a website. “A website can be many different things, and an NFT is a way to demonstrate virtual ownership of many different things,” he explained.
Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, and Tim Marlow OBE. Image: Decrypt
“I personally believe that in the future, every painting will have an NFT as a certificate of authenticity,” he said, adding that, “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 provenance, to be able to demonstrate the exhibition.” 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 cooled since then, there is still a core of “passionate” NFT enthusiasts who “understand this technology and understand it as a means to express artistic ideas in a way that simply wasn’t possible before,” Beeple said. .
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 has ventured into the physical space, where he has made two physical pieces—”Human One” and “The Tree of Knowledge.”
Both consist of four video screens arranged in a rectangular column, displaying a dynamic digital artwork: a moving figure in the case of “Human One” and a tree tangled with industrial elements in “The Tree of Knowledge.”
The dynamic changes in “Human One” are made by Beeple himself, who alters the landscape through which the titular figure advances.
“When the piece sold at Christie’s, he was walking through these surreal landscapes; and then at the exhibition at Costello, I was walking through a Ukrainian war landscape,” he explained. “The war hadn’t even started when the person bought the piece, so they couldn’t have known it would be a comment on the war, just six months later.”
Meanwhile, “The Tree of Knowledge” incorporates real-time data from sources such as news channels, stock and Cryptocurrency quotes, environmental data and social media, allowing viewers to adjust the proportion of “signal”, i.e. order, to “noise”, that is, chaos.
An additional complication is that the viewer has the option to “choose violence,” which triggers a 10-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 it permanently destroys the work.”
Access to the button is controlled by a key held by the owner of the work, Beeple explained. “It’s an analogy to the fact that certain people have the ability to press 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 a dynamic work of art, he said. “They even (fight) just the idea that Human One changes,” he said, “I talk to people in museums, and they’re, like, ‘Wait, I don’t know what he’s going to say?’” He added that museums and collectors will eventually accept the “new capabilities” of dynamic digital art.
“There will be a trust in the artist to continue to say new things through digital art and change it in ways that continue to bring new beauty and challenge to the owner,” he said. “Time can be this component of it, in a way that physical art just inherently can’t be, because it’s a state frozen in time. This may be more like a conversation.”
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair
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