All 5000 Images in Beeple’s $69M Magnum Opus:What I Found Isn’t So Pretty
news.artnet.com"We didn't need a preview": the content of the art isn't important. Like most NFTs, it's just a url that you can sign a hash of for dollars.
What's more interesting is the allegation that this is "tape painting": sold to an accomplice for the purpose of promoting the NFT "art" market.
In the art world it's a pretty straightforward formula: -Buy out the estate of a 3rd tier artist who once drank a beer with a famous artist -Created slick marketing materials written by an art critic who was paid a lot of money to hold their nose -Place several key pieces up for auction and an accomplice buys them at inflated prices -Market is cornered, established prices are high, nothing left to do but sell to buyers who are too lazy to form a critical opinion and who instead rely on the manufactured signals from steps 1, 2 and 3. -Once all the best pieces are picked through you still have a bunch of inflated junk that you can use as collateral for other nefarious schemes. Source: worked in a gallery for many years.
And, for the 'art investor', as long as other collectors don't sell for a lower price, it doesn't even matter. Many galleries will blacklist collectors who sell for lower prices. As long as there's someone to buy, you're fine.
Is it legal to exclude someone from a public auction?
And couldn't the person just hire someone to buy for them?
Most art sales don't happen through public auction. If you want to invest in more art, you'll have to go through galleries, which may choose whether or not to sell to you. And word does get around about who is bringing down the price of an artist.
The famous "bigger idiot" theory, so much in the economy depends on it, apparently.
This reads so spot on. Can you give some examples of recent artists who have had hype Manufactured for them in this manner?
> What's more interesting is the allegation that this is "tape painting": sold to an accomplice for the purpose of promoting the NFT "art" market.
That's literally how the non-digital art market works, as well.
Art is the prototypical intersubjective meme, isn't it? You know something is art iff you know there's plenty of other people who also believe it's art.
The quality of being art has some positive correlation with being aesthetically pleasing, and has some negative correlation with being useful for practical purposes, but the determining factor is whether you can reasonably expect other people to consider it art too.
Intersubjective memes have a bootstrap problem (the concept is a supertype of "network effects"). To make something art, you have to make people believe other people believe its art. A way to brute-force this is to get someone to visibly spend large amount of money (or other resources) on it, and proclaim their belief in the value of the thing.
So it's not just the NFT "art" market that's being promoted here; the work itself is being turned into art, and the author into artist.
One datapoint in your favor is that the price was, specifically, 69 million. The purchase is an act akin to the art itself - puerile content at impressive scale.
> That's literally how the non-digital art market works, as well.
Though there's a fraction of the non-digital art market that doesn't work like that. For NFTs, I wouldn't be surprised if "painting the tape" was pretty much the whole thing.
> What's more interesting is the allegation that this is "tape painting": sold to an accomplice for the purpose of promoting the NFT "art" market.
It seems like the more conventional term is "painting the tape." Googling for "tape painting" pretty much only gives results about painting with masking tape.
Painting the tape tends to relate to market trading activity, but the underlying ethos is the same in both markets. Make a public statement about price so oth
>the content of the art isn't important
But art critics have started to analyze it, so who knows.
Even if it’s painting the tape it’s an expensive proposition at close to $10 million in Christie’s fees.
10 million in ETH. How easy is it to exchange large sums like that? (Genuine question, I have no idea)
Christie's terms specified the fee was not payable in ETH, only in government currency.
If it's going to another Eth address then it's as simple as sending a transaction. Fees are a problem these days but they could've sent it for as little as 1-2usd to as high as 30-100usd. Higher fees mean faster processing.
Sounds like a tiny portion of ETH's daily volume ($23B). I'm not sure if it would even noticeably move the price.
Where did you hear about this allegation and is it credible
I think most of the news articles are based on this original reporting:
https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl...
I'm not sure I get this point of view. We know that famous artists did random rude and badly-satirical drawings for fun. Their dick drawings were contained in some old notebooks and trashed. But I bet someone would buy a preserved notebook of someone semi-famous with 5000 pages of drawings, mostly regardless of contents. This is pretty much the equivalent of that - daily fun which went to the internet bin rather than real one.
Some examples are really reaching too: "it’s fun to draw black people" - what is it an example for? What is the article author trying to point out there?
> I'm not sure I get this point of view.
I think that Beeple is basically just a rando-tier DeviantArt/Tumblr artist, and much of his art is cringe to boot. Since someone purportedly paid the equivalent of $69 million in ETH for it, it's noteworthy that there's no there there.
Cringe doesn't mean bad - I would say 90% of Jim'll paint it is cringe and awesome https://jimllpaintit.tumblr.com/ And having 5000 daily pieces is art by itself.
> Cringe doesn't mean bad - I would say 90% of Jim'll paint it is cringe and awesome https://jimllpaintit.tumblr.com/
There are different kinds of cringe though.
Also, Jim'll paint it definitely looks like he's more talented than Beeple.
> And having 5000 daily pieces is art by itself.
Quantity over quality?
> Quantity over quality?
No, performance art. The act of creating that many not-terrible pieces is meaningful on its own.
Well, "not-terrible" is not what I would use to describe this though. Then again I'm not a fan of "you just don't understand this random mix of poo and paint" kind of art. No, I don't get why for example 5000 digital scribbles are more valuable or meaningful than 5000 random posts from deviantart. Or Dilbert comic strips or most recent memes on Reddit, which at least are funny at times. How is this act of creating subpar images supposedly more meaningful than a hoarder's decades-long collection of stuff in their home?
Am I wrong to find creations less valuable when I cannot enjoy them? Call it performance art or whatever else you like, it's still nothing more than an overpriced collection of an artist's shitposts. But alright, it's not my money.
Except they are all pretty terrible.
Yes but they did grow into a hugely popular Instagram account so let’s let this age a bit. Frankly I find people with the assumption that it won’t age well to be the most pretentious in the room.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Whether I want to associate with said beholder is another question entirely.
> Quantity over quality?
Isn't focusing on quantity the only reliable way to improve quality? See also, the usual Ira Glass quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to....
Becoming a great artist usually means creating art every day. It depends on how you go about creating art though. You need focused studies. You need to push your boundaries. There's a shockingly low amount of technical improvement in this artist's work compared to other long-term online portfolios I've seen.
Focusing on quality is the only reliable way to improve quality. The use of quantity, in the "10,000 hours" or "2000 words a day, every day" style of formulation, is to provide ample opportunity for practice and improvement, but quantity alone never can suffice. With no focus on quality, all it gets you is the same work over and over.
If you throw a ball at a target 10,000 times you will get more accurate even if you don’t do any deliberate thinking about your mechanics.
Not everything is as easy as throwing a ball.
There's a writer who did a lot of short stories and I had read a couple of them decades ago and thought they were some of the best of all time. Also, they won awards and stuff. I really placed them on a pedestal.
But more recently, I found that a multivolume collection of all the short stories is available, and I started reading them. It was really disillusioning because it wasn't just that the average quality was a lot lower than the famous ones, the cringeworthiness started to extend to my image of the author.
It's possible that over time the later work ended up being uniformly brilliant, but I didn't finish.
Sure, but the point of the practice is to produce quality, and then display the good bits of your production because mixing the few good ones into the deludge of average works isn't very helpful for the audience.
It's just a fact that people sometimes are interested in artists as well as or more than the art they make. The not-so-great art may not be of interest to you, or some particular artist may not want to release it, but it seems to me that probably some people want something more comprehensive for similar reasons that they may read biographies.
I'm indifferent to Michelangelo's art, but I have read The Agony and the Ecstasy. In this particular case, a less filtered view of his art doesn't disillusion me because I'm not especially crazy about any of it. But he was famous, influential, and technically capable, so as a person was of interest to me.
Like no artists have released behind the scenes work or b-sides.
Not as their main work no, the very concept of b-side implies there is an a-side that has been more carefully curated.
> Cringe doesn't mean bad
But “rando-tier” does; the description wasn't just “cringe”, but rando-tier and often cringe.
This is a great example showing what a coherent, relevant corpus of pop culture art is. Not Beeple’s.
Thanks for this! I really like his work, I think I'll buy a poster :-)
They didn't buy the art, they bought an NFT that represents a hash of the file containing all of the art in question.
This doesn't convey any property rights to the art's copyright, unless the purchase also included those separately from the NFT, which, of course, happens all of the time without the NFT silliness and doesn't require NFTs at all.
Wait... the only way this NFT stuff made any sense to me was if they were actually selling the copyrights via NFT... this was actually just a $69 million version of calling “dibs” like some kind of schoolchild? WTF!
Yes.
Buying an NFT isn't like buying a piece of art you can put on your wall, it's like buying a signed, numbered, limited edition card that has the address of where the actual owner has the art on his wall.
...except the address might be wrong. Or become wrong when the actual art changes hands, or the owner dies. Also nothing stops the artist from making a new print run of the cards. Or someone who isn't the artist making a print run of the cards.
But I mean, even if Beeple sells another thousand NFTs referencing the same artwork, and even if this NFT quickly ends up with a broken URL, and even if the buyer of the NFT didn't end up with any ownership rights to the artwork itself...
...at least they can feel pleased they bought the first NFT issued by Beeple with this particular URL on it. That's gotta be worth something! (...$69 million, apparently...)
Like bitcoin, the only way it makes sense is if you can trick someone else into buying it off you for more money later, thus you're incentivised to promote the idea everywhere.
Wrong. Don't bring Bitcoin into this. This is an Ethereum scam thing.
Or gold, or dollars, or art, etc.
Gold has a use, dollars are backed by a government. Owning original art is bragging/speculation. I read that the very expensive art that people buy isn't even hung on their walls to look at, they get a copy made for people to see, and put the original in a vault.
> Gold has a use
But I won't be happy if people stop buying gold and all I can do with it is sell it to some electronics manufacturer for 1% of the price I paid for it.
> dollars are backed by a government
Sounds great, what can I do if people stop accepting dollars in trade?
> Owning original art is bragging/speculation.
Agreed, so nothing new.
Its somewhat like paying a lot of money for a rare vinyl record when the mp3 can be downloaded for free
Even that’s not conveying how silly this is: in your analogy you’d at least have the option to natter on about how the vinyl sound was so much warmer and truer to the artist’s vision, as audiophiles have done for decades.
This is more or less you saying you paid for a receipt showing you paid to have a hash of the same MP3 everyone else is listening to.
It's one step beyond that; it's paying for some people on the internet to _pretend_ that you own the record. There is no actual literal transfer of ownership at all.
It's paying a lot of money for an unenforceable extra-legal claim to ownership of a slip of paper with directions to a building that may have once contained a not-at-all rare copy of a song that was only ever recorded as an mp3 to begin with.
It's more like paying a lot of money for a mp3 recording of a rare vinyl record.
It’s like buying a digital photo of lottery ticket that’s already been played but played by a celebrity, let’s say.
Buying an NFT (by itself) does not make you party to a legal contract or agreement, which is the only way to transfer ownership rights in IP. It just makes you the owner of the NFT.
This is why you see people making the comparison to sports trading cards. You're not buying the person, you're buying the piece of cardboard.
It's more like buying a receipt, not the good itself.
They can display the receipt but have no more right to the art than you or me.
I think in this case they did get property rights:
>NFT carries no rights, express or implied, other than property rights for the lot (specifically, digital artwork tokenized by the NFT.. https://www.christies.com/pdf/onlineonly/ECOMMERCE%20CONDITI...
So no rights apart from the property rights (Christies T&Cs)
The lot was the NFT. I don't believe that the text you quoted indicates that they get ownership of the copyright of the art. The art wasn't auctioned, the NFT was.
The catalogue says "EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS will be delivered directly from Beeple to the buyer, accompanied by a unique NFT"
So presumably an image file and the NFT. Bit vague on copyright.
Beeple is a modern master of his craft. He can host it on Deviant art, xvideos or bestgore if he so pleases. Doesn't take away the craft and the endless hours of sweat put into its mastery.
Even picasso was alleged to have told a diner to pay him an absurd amount of money for his napkin sketch - because it took him a few decades to get to draw like he did.
And I think Picasso's artworks are trash.
People make a big deal about frames and galleries. Maybe the hosting service isn't quite so important but it's not irrelevant.
Why yes ofcourse. Let's worry about the stuff that doesn't take years to master. Silly me.
Your observation:
> I bet someone would buy a preserved notebook of someone semi-famous with 5000 pages of drawings, mostly regardless of contents
...is, I think, kind of what the article author is trying to get at. Beeple is arguably semi-famous not for his art, but for getting a staggering price for these 5000 images. It's as if someone bought a preserved notebook with 5000 pages drawings for tens of millions of dollars, and the notebook belong to someone who is semi-famous because... they sold that notebook for tens of millions of dollars.
While I keep trying to give NFTs a benefit of the doubt -- I think it's great for creators to be paid for their work! -- I'm not convinced that introducing artificial scarcity is the way to go about it, and this sort of "it commanded a high price because it commanded a high price" recursiveness doesn't exactly give us a great example for why NFTs are not a peculiar techno-bubble.
They're a peculiar ART bubble. This is exactly how art galleries and fine art sales work. If this notebook was physical instead, nobody would be tremendously surprised -- if you were, you just don't get art.
Being one of the highest prices ever paid at auction for a piece of art, i think it would definitely raise a lot of eyebrows. If not more. At least as an nft, it can be attributed to the crypto bubble.
If an art book from a completely unknown artist sold his art at a Christie's auction for $69m, i think everyone would assume something nefarious was going on.
Beeple isn't a "complete unknown", pretty much every 3D artist knows him, he's produced and published more digital art than anyone else. He's arguably the Andy Warhol of 3D rendering.
It's only now that somehow people found a way to make money from all these 3D renderings that the general public pays attention.
> Beeple isn't a "complete unknown", pretty much every 3D artist knows him, he's produced and published more digital art than anyone else. He's arguably the Andy Warhol of 3D rendering.
I cannot stress enough how much of an overstatement that is. He's not the first, the biggest, the best, the most popular, or most prolific artist, he's not very well known in the space, and I think few, if any, professional 3D artists would hold him in high regard. And I would be surprised if, prior to the current media blitz, more than a small minority of 3D artists had actually even heard of him.
You're right, he's not a complete unknown, and he's certainly had some successes, but he's just one of an enormous number of artists working in that space. And by no means a standout along any metric.
He's definitely the most prolific 3D artist, ever. Nobody else even comes close.
As for being "the best" or "the biggest" or "the most popular", these terms don't make sense even in non-digital art. Indeed, he is not any of these things, but neither was Andy Warhol.
It's not a coincidence that he, of all people, managed to sell 69 million dollars worth of cookie-cutter crap. That's what makes him the Andy Warhol of digital art. That's how he earned his place in art history.
As for the "enormous number" of other 3D artists, most of them are busy creating escapist stuff that will never get the attention of the art scene. To that end, skill just doesn't matter.
> He's definitely the most prolific 3D artist, ever.
That is either false, or it's true in a way that is meaningless.
There are artists who have spent every day creating art. Daily art exercises and sketchbooks are commonplace. Some work in 3D, some have been working far longer than Beeple has.
If you mean "Beeple has been publishing a discrete piece of art, publicly, every day for longer than others", then I dunno, maybe? I'm not sure why that's anything to be proud of, or why anyone would aim to do that, but it might be true.
If you mean "he's created more pieces of 3D art than anyone else", then no, he's outstripped by literally thousands if not tens of thousands of people. The "winner" is probably some unknown previz animator working in an outsourced animation studio in India or China somewhere. :)
...of course, you might say "that doesn't count, I don't CARE about the stuff those guys do. Well, maybe I don't care about the stuff Beeple does.
> It's not a coincidence that he, of all people, managed to sell 69 million dollars worth of cookie-cutter crap.
It very likely isn't a coincidence. https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl...
> most of them are busy creating escapist stuff that will never get the attention of the art scene. To that end, skill just doesn't matter.
And I don't think the art scene thinks very much of Beeple, so I'm not sure what that proves.
> That is either false, or it's true in a way that is meaningless.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/False-D...
> The "winner" is probably some unknown previz animator working in an outsourced animation studio in India or China somewhere. :)
I get it, you want have some sort of "justice" argument. I don't. Your winner's prize is getting to work overtime. Beeple's prize is 69 million dollars.
> It very likely isn't a coincidence. https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl...
The fact that this guy is shady doesn't really mean anything, there were other less shady bidders as well. This was a auction at Christie's, so it was about as legit as an art auction gets, whatever that means.
> And I don't think the art scene thinks very much of Beeple, so I'm not sure what that proves.
If there's anything the art scene respects, it's money.
> As for the "enormous number" of other 3D artists, most of them are busy creating escapist stuff that will never get the attention of the art scene. To that end, skill just doesn't matter.
Ah, yeah it does matter. That's why they are busy cultivating said skill, and the content does not matter much. Nor does the so called art scene.
In fact, if you knew the etymology of escapade, you might see how it is a polar opposite to control. And if you know anything about randomness and crypto, you know it takes skill to maximize randomness, and to constrain it.
Maybe I misunderstad what "escapist" means, but I don't expect you to explain it.
> Maybe I misunderstad what "escapist" means, but I don't expect you to explain it.
Calling him the Andy Warhol of 3d rendering is to not understand what Warhol did.
Beeple is indeed famous for his quantity: occasionally he puts out something good, but the fame is almost entirely for the pieces that are "crazy good for having been done in under a day".
What Warhol did?
Any situation where money meets art doesn't make any sense. Is the original of a Banksy painting any nicer to look at than a copy? Is a rare vinyl pressing of a record any nicer to listen to than an mp3 you can download for free?
The Banksy comparison puts this in an interesting light, actually. Someone like Banksy probably hates the idea of being enshrined in some wealthy person's gallery- in fact, when something he made did go on auction for $1.4m, it was rigged to shred itself afterward.
Beeple's art is similarly satirical (I'm not going to comment on its actual depth, but bear with me). What if Beeple were making a statement against rich-people-art-collection via the entire concept of NFTs? The sale itself is the parody.
I don't think that's what happened here, but it's interesting to think about
> Is a rare vinyl pressing of a record any nicer to listen to than an mp3 you can download for free?
I get your point but this isn't a particularly suitable example. Audiophiles have been arguing for ages that the quality of compressed mp3 and even CDs is not comparable to vinyl, that vinyl is "warmer", etc. Flamewars have been waged about this. So maybe not the best example?
MP3 is lossy by design but pretty good. FLAC is lossless. Same question by analogy.
Vinyl as a physical medium may be literally warm though, about room temperature. But swinging air waves are pretty much the definition of heat, so...
The point is that, for a lot of audiophiles, this question:
> Is a rare vinyl pressing of a record any nicer to listen to than an mp3 you can download for free?
is answered with a very loud "yes!". I thought this was common knowledge here at HN. I've certainly seen this debate multiple times here. You don't have to pick a side or argue technicalities, you just need to be aware that for many people one format is indeed nicer than the other.
Well a different sort of sense. Price is not just about how nice something is - it's about things like supply and demand too. There is a limited supply of original Banksys and an infinite supply of copies.
But why is the original special? Just because people choose to believe that it is.
Sure, there's a real sense in which that's absolutely true. What I think the article was eyebrow-raising at wasn't primarily the digital nature of this transaction as much as the extremely high price paid. An original by Picasso is going to be worth more -- orders of magnitude more -- than an original by, say, Joan Erbe, a painter who was very well known around the Baltimore area and is "notable" enough to have her own Wikipedia page. Erbe's originals seem to generally go for around $500–800.
I know people are saying "but Beeple is known!" -- and I'm sure he is! I hadn't heard of him, but the chances are you haven't heard of Joan Erbe. What I'm suggesting is that Beeple is, in the wider world, closer to Erbe than he is to Picasso. If this had been a $2-3M transaction rather than a $69M transaction, it would still be in the news and raising eyebrows because of the NFT nature, but it would seem a lot less... bubble-ish.
Oh yeah $69m is silly money, no doubt about it. Part bubble and part demonstrative crypto evangelism on the part of the bidders.
Well, because people think it is which comes down to psychology, culture etc.
It seems quite time honoured though. People probably thought an original cave painting was cooler than a copy of it.
Beeple was semi-famous long before he auctioned these images.
In the non-digital art world, "semi-famous" doesn't get you Picasso prices.
That the artist is a bit dim, I should think.What is the article author trying to point out there?Certainly. You can tell based on the complete lack of success and following they've had, plus some amateur / shitty work they did in the past.
Side note: in this case, ample following does not necessarily imply art value.
It’s easy to get stuck in wanting to create but fearing your art will not be as good as what pro artists produce, so you procrastinate on it forever. Folks start dailies (beeple is far from the only one) to force themselves to improve quality through sheer quantity. Other folks follow them to get inspired, and a major component of that is seeing that what a dailies guy makes is, to put it bluntly, not that good and you can picture yourself making something even better.
So, someone posts a daily -> people realize it’s not necessarily so great in absolute terms, but still they comment good things and encourage the artist -> people see that a mediocre work gets positive comments and feel safer creating and publishing something of their own, eventually perpetuating the loop.
As art communities grow, so do follower/like counts, and platform’s algorithms pick up on that and start promoting these to non-artists from the outside who can get mixed up in this mini-bubble: “who’s that with so many followers? I’ll join in, with that number of likes their artwork must be good.”
(To clarify, I don’t mean to say that any artist doing dailies is ultimately mediocre, just the very idea behind this method is such that you do one per day and can’t strive for perfection.)
If the world were a perfect meritocracy that would settle it.You can tell based on the complete lack of success and following they've hadI mean discussing this is going to be pointless because art is in the eye of the beholder. The fact that the author didn't even mention what their favorites were of beeple's work indicates pretty clearly to me that they're viewing his collection through a narrow, maybe ivory tower, potentially envious lens of what it means to be a "real artist", and instead they wrote this as a clickbait hit-piece for exposure. The armchair psychologist in me envisions a sense of insult to someone well educated in fine arts with numerous accolades that such a frivolous, amateur collection art could be rewarded so greatly.
At the end of the day, it's much easier to be a critic than an artist, and despite that fact, this is still a lazy ass critique, especially because it glosses almost entirely over the fact that beeple was precisely about creating SOMETHING every day. There has to be.. something that can be said about that, in the same way that people somehow find a reason for a canvas painted entirely one color worthy of being featured in the MOMA.
And even if the actual art won't "age well" (whatever that means to the author), beeple is going down in the art / history books ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think the art itself represents the 'ivory tower' in the art world more than this essay about it. Look at the past century in the art world... Duchamp's toilet, 'Piss Christ', Warhol's art films starring cross-dressers and druggies, Carolee Schneemann’s 'Interior Scroll', Maplethorpe's 'golden shower' photos. There's no shocking anyone now. Some Russian artist literally nailed his balls to Red Square a couple years back.
I think there are some decent points in your comment, but on a gut level I figure the author just found some of this artist's examples cringeworthy and I relate a little.
I'm not sure this is a good metric ?
There are successful artists that you could say this of, and unsuccessful artists who are talented.
So like many of the world's most celebrated artists during their lifetime...
A ⊂ B doesn't imply B ⊂ A.
> a preserved notebook of someone semi-famous with 5000 pages of drawings
That is the crux of it - will Beeple be semi-famous in 200 years? Doubtful. There isn't anything here that is particularly noteworthy to stand the test of time... the unique difference in this work is its delivery, not its content. (In that sense, the buyers were correct to not care about the content.)
It does deserve some recognition for being the first of its kind. But just like the videos of people who took a picture of themselves every day for years were once new and innovative, they are now commonplace... so will works like this become commonplace. So the point is that there is no reason to expect this to appreciate in value and become worth a billion dollars.
> What is the article author trying to point out there?
That the artist is not PC enough, so his art must be valueless and he should probably be cancelled.
So any critique now is cancel culture?
This critique is clearly singling out a few of the 5000 images for lack of adherence to the current standard of PC. The headline is in line with this- who does seriously think that art should be "pretty"? What "is not so pretty" is supposed to mean, other than that there's some stuff in it we should disapprove?
Asking art- good or bad- to be politically correct is ridiculous; and anyway the "artwork" is a composition, not the sum of the individual images.
The critique is calling the art bad and sometimes mysoginistic. It is not, in any way, calling for the artist to be canceled.
And yes, art can be racist or misogynistic or problematic in other ways. There's nothing wrong with calling it that. Or do you think it's cancel culture to call "Birth of a Nation" racist?
> It is not, in any way, calling for the artist to be canceled.
Not explicitly, no. But it seems to me to follow the well known pattern of "hey, look, I've found something damning buried among X's old stuff".
Yes, art can be racist, it's just not the metre you use to judge it.
> look, I've found something damning buried among X's old stuff
Since this is specifically an auction of "old stuff" looking through it makes sense. And while the author is very critical of the work, the most significant criticism isn't that it's not PC. The article mostly complains that most of the art is shallow and won't age well.
Please re-read:
"We’ve passed through a racial uprising and a reckoning with sexism, and the cultural project of the moment is… innovating new ways to worship decade-old, BroBible-level brain farts? During a time of immiseration, investors are competing to throw tens of millions of dollars… at this?
These are the questions that go through my head. But that’s probably just “fancy-dancy elite art homo” thinking, right?"
How is this "cancelling" the artist?
It's just mocking people for paying millions for bad art.
People make fun of other people paying too much for art all the time.
And what does the politics fashionable at the moment ("We’ve passed through a racial uprising and a reckoning with sexism") has to do with art?
Are you actually being serious?
You think that art should not be political? You must have missed centuries of art as propoganda then.
What does the "fashionability" of politics mean? That people have political opinions that you dislike?
Especially when one of Beeple's pieces being critiqued is a drawing of a naked Hilary Clinton with a penis.
Do you want it both ways where there can be political artwork but people aren't allowed to criticise it?
> It is not, in any way, calling for the artist to be canceled.
Please. "I'm not saying we should do something about it, but oh my gosh, look how offensive it is".
I suppose all criticism is cancel culture if you just pretend the “cancel” part is there.
Criticism != What this article does.
Tone and style makes the difference between criticism and the works of the Schreibtischtäter. It's a great German compound word from Schreibtisch (=desk) and Täter (=perpetrator). It's the person sitting at a desk, keeping their hands clean, writing to make others do the dirty work.
What dirty work? Didn't this guy get $69 million dollars?
And you're using a word which from the wikipedia article is described as:
"The term "desk murderer" (German: Schreibtischtäter)[1] is attributed to Hannah Arendt and is used to describe state-employed mass murderers like Adolf Eichmann, who planned and organised the Holocaust without taking part in killings personally."
I'm amazed.
For real. Dude just made an enormous amount of money and was catapulted into broad fame by it. This is the opposite of being cancelled.
> What dirty work? Didn't this guy get $69 million dollars?
That was _before_ the article. Obviously you can't cancel people before you know about them.
> Trump-is-a-Poopy-Head/Cheeto Mussolini genre of art
This and other comments would seem to blow past the fact that the critique also pans the “pc” political commentary (see also the comment on the George Floyd piece).
Ironically it is people in this thread decrying cancel culture that are refusing to engage with anything that might possibly contradict their politics.
> "it’s fun to draw black people" - what is it an example for?
The author is oblivious to the fact that he can't think his way around his pangs of identity guilt. He doesn't realize the mere mention of black people isn't a taboo for most people.
>He doesn't realize the mere mention of black people isn't a taboo for most people.
I'd guess he realizes it and that's the point. A lot of his stuff has taboos.
I walked away from this thinking the $69M image was much cooler than I expected it to be.
Its like a representation of the artist's whole body of work, ~4000 lower quality sketches progressing into ~1000 in his current style.
I feel like this art critic is not in touch with meme culture. Many of the examples contained were quite striking and interesting, don't find drawings of dicks or naked people particularly shocking or objectionable.
Heck, I'd say his work is more interesting to look at than bowls of fruit and portraits of historical figures.
it's not shocking, it's mediocre renditions of things which were common art during the last 15 years and put together, the sum still really isn't worth more than the parts
people are willing to waste untold sums of money to feel sophisticated
Exactly. Instagram is literally flooded with art of this kind, very high in quality and creative as hell.
<snark> Maybe, if you don't grasp too much of a chaos of a modern world, you just want one piece of art from one artist to contemplate and discuss with your fellow travelers, behind closed doors of your castles. </snark>
If your idea of traditional art is "bowls of fruit and historical figures", then I'd respectfully suggest that you may not be hugely in touch with art....
Yeah, I think 90% of museum art was made for old dead barons and aristocrats to whom I share little similarity.
And 100% of that stuff takes the piss out of the people it was made for in subtle and clever ways. It's deeper than you think, but you have to read around rather than look at the art to get it.
Hmm, that sounds interesting.
Could you point me to a good example of art subverting its patron?
What you said may be true, but pop art that just regurgitates the standard cast of evening news characters (US presidents and presidential candidates and the royal family) usually, even if super well executed, comes off as low effort and uncreative. It’s the visual equivalent of a comic making jokes about airline food and the opposite sex.
None of the items highlighted by this article break that stereotype.
You'd have to have some serious Giger-level shit to make a digital painting involving H. Clinton and Trump remotely interesting in 2021. This is... not that.
In case anyone missed it, the artist was also double-dipping on the sale: https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl...
The article is baseless speculation, like this:
>>The name of this game is “number go up.” This is about pumping B20, so holders and Metapurse can benefit when they go to sell the token—i.e., get more ETH, buy more NFTs, rinse, repeat.
First of all, the buyer putting the art up on a digital museum is exactly what you'd expect from someone spending $70 million on an NFT. The author spins it as some scandalous revelation.
Similarly, the buyer selling tokenized shares in their art collections is being cynically spun as nothing more than a "number go up" game, which completely discounts the value this business model could provide, in democraticizing art ownership, enabling art to be more readily used as financial collateral to access liquidity, etc.
Might be worth noting that Amy Castor seems to have a pretty strong anti-crypto bias in general, though that of course doesn't necessarily mean what she has written here is counter-factual, but she does seem to have an agenda.
What are you suggesting, that we should ignore facts if they are highlighted by people whose views you don't like? Or that Amy is untrustworthy and lying? If that's the case, please point to some lies that she has told?
You can mislead people without using untruths, that is my main concern.
I generally prefer to consume content that isn't created by someone with a clear agenda pertaining to the topic at hand, because it's not so simple to separate fact from fiction, as you seem to want to believe.
I wouldn't call being against fraud "having an agenda" as much as "being a decent human being".
I would agree with you, but then I didn't say she was "against fraud". I said she was anti-crypto. Sure if you think all crypto is fraud then fair enough, but that's a pretty bold claim (and verifiably untrue).
As a first-order approximation, "all crypto is fraud" serves you very, very well.
Sometimes it's possible that it might not be fraud, but might instead be that you just lost your money because someone was incompetent instead. But then it's hard to tell when they are just lying about being incompetent to cover up the fraud.
The first widespread use of Bitcoin was not for fraud, so as an approximation it seems pretty poor.
You mean, buying drugs?
Yes. Using Bitcoin to buy drugs from other people is not fraud. It's transactional.
Here's the thing: While I have nothing against drugs, and think them being illegal is ridiculous, the fact that they ARE still illegal means that those who sell them are, by and large, not nice people. Giving them money is not a good thing.
She’s a journalist - that job is supposed to involve critical thinking, not regurgitating press releases. If your criticism is that she’s factually correct but not fawning it sounds like she’s doing her job well.
The problem is that I don't know whether or not she's factually correct in this case, that's kinda the issue with journalism. I can't just check some central database of reality to know if what she is saying is straight up true and accurate or completely false or somewhere in between. Even if you could do that, "facts" can be easily presented in a way that is misleading, as I'm sure you are aware.
What I have seen is that she has a clear anti-crypto agenda (not just "anti-fraud" as she claims, unless you define all crypto as fraud, in which case sure). So since I don't know the facts myself, I am more skeptical of the narrative she presents than I otherwise would be given her personal bias. Is that not reasonable?
If you are so bothered by her work, do your homework and critically examine it before posting. You would either find that your dislike is emotion not based in fact or you’d find real problems which you could point to — that’d be far more effective at convincing people.
I actually have seen real problems from her on Twitter and had a look, but her timeline is a bit of a mess and unfortunately I do not have the time at the moment to dig through 20k tweets.
I used to follow her on Twitter because I appreciated a critical voice about all the crypto shenanigans. But at some point I realized the stance was less "pro-truth" and more "anti-crypto", so I unfollowed for that reason. Actually reminds me of my own stance on Julian Assange – liked him when I thought he stood for truth, stopped when I realized it was less "pro-truth" and more "anti-America".
To my mind, being a journalist isn't about stating facts, it's about presenting an accurate picture of reality. You can state facts all day, but if you're cherry-picking them to paint a particular picture, I'm not a fan.
First I heard of Beeple was like a year ago, on Corridor Crew: https://youtu.be/_ul9jrCXhR4
So when I read about some NFT crypto art selling for 69 million, I was genuinely surprised that it was at least someone I had heard about before. It’s not exactly my cup of tea, but I respect Beeple’s dedication to his art.
When I read this article, it felt less a critique of the merits of Beeple’s art, and more like a hit piece on their character. Cherry-picked are examples of past artwork likely to offend somebody, somewhere. In my opinion, art critique isn’t that hard, I even wrote about it here, https://wndr.xyz/posts/9fjM1tOJO7MWX4fYw3AU2Q==/what-s-art-a....
This however is not an analysis of the artwork, but a meta-analysis of the subjects of Beeple’s art. If this qualifies someone a National Art Critic, then it probably is “fancy-dancy elite art homo” thinking. But hey, it got people to click and read their article I guess.
What? No, it's a critique of the art. It points out that the images are unfunny satire, or earnest political right-on-itude, or just trying out photoshop filters.
Honestly, they could have just posted the images and that would have been condemnation enough. I mean, good for him for making money, but let's not pretend this is interesting art for anyone over fifteen.
I appreciate the art critic posting this, because I wouldn,t have seen the images otherwise. I find them both hilarious and thought-provoking, as I do the writer's snobbish dry analysis.
> No, it's a critique of the art. It points out that the images are unfunny satire, or earnest political right-on-itude, or just trying out photoshop filters.
Humor is a matter of personal taste. Art isn't craft.
Sure! People who forward Facebook posts for their biting political wit will love this stuff, and who am I to disagree?
The artwork doesn't remotely strike me as the kind of thing one would typically see on Facebook. More 4chan, Tumblr, etc.
Didn't it come out that there was some pre-existing commercial relationship between buyer and seller? Was this a real transaction?
So if you buy two things from one vendor, where the first time you had a good experience, it’s now fake?
That’s like the core crux of SaaS!
I think that the point is that the price paid for transaction two might not reflect just the value of transaction two, but also part of transaction one. This would imply that the two parties are collaborating to inflate prices. Which in art is not difficult to imagine since both parties have a very strong interest to report inflated prices.
I typically launder large amounts of money through traditional art purchases. I store these assets at freeports throughout the world. Many of my friends do the same.
As an older, less tech-savvy gentleman, would you recommend NFT Art as a useful way to launder money?
The cut Christie's takes on my 'transactions' is borderline usurious.
There is surely more to this "sale" than meets the eye, pardon the pun.
Unless someone has billions and wants to just p*ss away money for laughs, there is no legitimate explanation for buying something like this for such a price. It is not an investment in any reasonable sense of the word.
This is what anti-crypto LARPing looks like.
Will the existing art money laundering industry move to crypto or will they see it as a threat and have it smashed?
Mediocre artist using cg as a crutch with a gimmick of making an image everyday- yeah that's called "work" and you are supposed to work everyday- I don't see what the big deal is. Don't we all work everyday?
Can I make a commit for 5000 days in a row then sell the text as an NFT? Probably not as I couldn't gain 2 million InstaZuck followers by creating commits with "trump sucks" and "whoa the future is crazy maaaan" as the description everyday.... or could I?
All the "political" art is lame. That's all future dustbin stuff. It panders to plebs who don't understand how the world really works to pay the bills, boring.
There isn't even any layers of abstraction like some of the animations by Svankmajer have, its just topical Murican dumb shit.
It's like bro art. You know those dudes...
Dude's who have "cool tattoo's" and pride themselves on the kind of micro-brew beer they drink and smoke hand rolled cigars cut with Damascus steel or some shit- those dudes like that kind of art- its embarrassing.
Also the Beeple dude owes the Cinema 4d and Octane render programmers some money- without their engineering his "art" would have remained like those lousy drawings.
If 5000 of those drawings is the requirement for making 70 million all the ten year olds out there are going to be rich.
I really like Ethereum too- makes me feel dirty when I interact with the chain now. We should ask Lord Vitalik to do a hard fork so this shitty art NFT thing never happened.
They can have a new fork for the crappy art- Pabst Blue Eth.
None of his art says anything other than "look at me", but then again he's a "designer". Graphic designers/Mograph artists have nothing to say other than "look at me" They are the narcissists of the art world. They are soulless.
If they had souls, and had something important to say they would make full length narrative works but they don't. They just make stupid faces and do the "hang loose" hands or whatever the fuck that hand thing is that people do when they don't know what to say but are trying to act cool.
They make lots of money though, but that is also boring on its own.
The future is so boring. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXrLA_P_q2c
Your point seems to be you don’t personally like this art, so other people shouldn’t like this art because it’s not the way you think art should be conceptualized and experienced.
By all means, choose not to like it as an individual...but spouting off some purity test for making and experiencing art is literally the opposite of making and experiencing art, and you sound exactly like the people you’re criticizing.
"His art is objectively bad because I do not like it" seems to be the takeaway here.
Also, your point about Cinema 4D is actually embarrassing. I suppose you'd say the same about brush companies being owed a percentage of the same of oil paintings, too? Without the brushes being manufactured the "art" would have remained those lousy images in their heads.
Love your rant, esp. when it gets to hard-forking ETH to fork out the beeple piece. That's a bit over the top, though, in the end, a blockchain is there for the uses it's users come up with. But you know this...
>Dude's who have "cool tattoo's" and pride themselves on the kind of micro-brew beer they drink and smoke hand rolled cigars cut with Damascus steel or some shit- those dudes like that kind of art- its embarrassing. I don't "get" modern art. Everything is ugly and has "deep" meaning in the sense a 16yo would consider deep. And the art crows is too scared to call the artists out. So yeah, I do agree, but it's not just this beeple guy, it's basically the last 50y of art history, give or take.
But then, those young, white, male hipster dudes have money to spend, so why should the art market not cater to them?
>Can I make a commit for 5000 days in a row
Can you, though?
It's so easy to shit on someone's work... I personally have set a goal for myself to do at least one commit to my project's repo per day, no matter how minute, even a change in todo.txt counts, and have repeatedly failed to meet the goal, for various reasons.
I have good streaks for weeks and months at a time, but 5000 days in a row is fucking impressive in its own right, regardless of the quality.
I thought most of the ,,crappy,, pieces given as example in the article to be at minimum thought-provoking and better than I can create, and pretty hilarious in several cases. At 5000 days in a row, they can,t all be winners, but they are from what I,ve seen.
I think most of the time millions are paid for art it,s shady as fuck, and I don,t know if this one is any different, but the art holds up imo. GP reeks of envy, which is also normal to experience and a valid feeling to have and express.
I find your extreme negative reaction to his success kind of amusing.
I assume that being outrageous must be part of what Beeple and the buyer are going for. To that end, I think the most outrageous thing to do would be for Beeple to make another NFT of the same artwork and sell it as the first time that an artwork has been sold for the second time. When that also sells for several million people will go mad.
Ha! That'd actually be a good performance :D
Long after we’re all dead this work will be reviewed by historians for it’s significance. Mocked by present day critics, reviled by many. Nonetheless a curated work that defined the times that we lived through, in a series of pictures.
He’s an Artist. It’s his chosen vector of expression.
Leave him be.
His work will be discussed long after we’ve become worm farmers.
> His work will be discussed long after we’ve become worm farmers.
Perhaps, but likely as a footnote to the footnote that was NFT mania, not as an artist in his own right.
I think that was intended as sarcasm
> I think that was intended as sarcasm
It's really hard to tell with NFTs, sometimes.
I think this is right. I remember in various art history courses certain pieces were described as causing a huge uproar not only in the art world but within the general public of its era. I’d sit there wondering just how or why, not fully appreciating the context of the time it was made.
I think this “piece” if you will follows that. It’s super controversial because of what it claims as fine art - an NFT of crude imagery in meme form valued at ungodly sums of crypto currency during these days when a large part of the population is desperate for stimulus checks. (Talk about the current human condition in the era of hypermodernity!)
It’s genius. I could also be blowing smoke up my own ass.
I don’t “get it” like I think people 50 years from now will (when the conventional wisdom is it was a radical departure that opened new ground in the stagnant art world - the first hypermodern masterpiece, or whatever the tastemakers of the time decree) but that gives me the advantage, living through it, of seeing this as something completely preposterous, absurd, and “not art!”.
The NFT art movement in general makes you think about what art means and as much as other art movements from worlds ago did to the people of that time.
The content quality of the imagery hardly matters. Sort of. It’s crude, political, cheap, unaffordable, and outrageously offensive to some.
It is us in this time and we hate to see it.
If you’re curious about how Beeple works, Corridor Crew invited him to their offices to work on 1 of these 5000 daily productions. https://youtu.be/_ul9jrCXhR4
if anyone’s curious, here’s the exact jpeg that was sold by christie’s (319.2MB): https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmXkxpwAHCtDXbbZHUw...
they could have at least put up a png ;)
the worst part about arguing the worth of things like this is one side has a strong financial/emotional motive to be hostile and disingenuous. so it’s best not to engage what’s clearly a scam. it’s like trying to tell someone who is in an MLM that it’s a pyramid scheme
Come on...this is just money laundering...right?
I chunk of it has to be. One money laundering idea I had a while back was to set up an "App Store", where certain organizations could publish real apps. You could fill it with "Yoga zen sounds", "Daily bible quote" and astrology apps and maybe allow the publishers to generate them by having templates where only the names are changed. They could then "buy" their own apps anonymously and have a legit stream of cash that way. The store would take 0.5% commission.
This is obviously a bad idea for all kinds of reasons, and I would never do it, but once I had the idea it's kinda hard to imagine that someone else is not already doing it. Fun to think about non the less.
Anyway, this art trading stuff seams way easier.
Modern “art” is very often offensive, but usually that is seen as a good thing. It’s “irreverent”, it “challenges norms”. I suppose the problem is that this particular hack challenges the wrong norms?
I don't see him challenging the norms, so I'm gonna guess "no". It seems to be that his art is a dime a dozen sort of low quality crap. Crap is in itself unsurprising -- most of everything is, see Sturgeon's Law -- but what's surprising is the amount paid for such low quality, low effort crap.
No sign of norms being challenged here.
Of course it’s low quality, but so is Pussy Riot or any equivalent leftist “art”.
Surely the author of the article felt that drawing a “black dude” etc was un-woke?
I'm not sure what you mean by leftist art but, in general, I'm going to disagree with you.
I think the author of the article felt the art was generally crap and that the amount paid for it was surprising, a sentiment with which I agree.
You can find largely equivalent content and messaging in political comics sections of a daily newspaper. What norms is this work challenging?
Apparently the author of this article felt that he challenged PC norms.
Not really. The author points out some misogyny in the work. That's a pretty common analysis point and is certainly not sufficient to "cancel" an artist (de Kooning is extremely famous and his pieces sell for gazillions despite some criticism here). That is different than "challenging PC norms".
No, the author felt the art was crap. Anything else seems to be your own projection.
I doubt this will be worth billions one day but who knows? Andy Warhol is still around.
Seems like a giant middle finger to the art world. The backlash speaks volumes too.
“By posting the results online I’m ‘less’ likely to throw down a big pile of ass-shit,” the artist explains of the impetus behind the daily creative exercise on his website, “even though most of the time I still do because I suck ass.”
I understand that art shouldn’t be solely be judged by the medium. It’s just that young artists see this kind of high fidelity output and get the impression that their art must be even worse if this isn’t good enough. IMO the only thing amateur about Beeple is his attitude.
I take a different perspective. If my expectations are set too high then I'm practically unable to attempt doing new, challenging things. I can understand that sentiment of trying to be humble, even if screaming to the world that you're "trash" isn't terribly productive.
And it's not like I expect someone who's an artist of all people to remain upstanding in all their communications. I'd rather just hope they can keep honing their talents, of whatever subjective skill level.
The fact that the collection is literally a log of daily practice is very upfront. This is his daily sketchbook done in public starting from his very beginning of his journey creating art. Every single one of these was done in a day and are going to be rough ideas. To act all snooty about it is disingenuous and sounds like jealousy.
I also read that Beeple has shares of the company which bought his art. And artistic works are valued based on their affect to culture. Beeple has none other than this elaborate NTF marketing scheme.
You might want to read this -> https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl...
and this -> https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/03/11/nfts-crypto-...
I think this is what Glenn Greenwald calls "hall monitor journalism":
"A new and rapidly growing journalistic “beat” has arisen over the last several years that can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. It is half adolescent and half malevolent. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power. Though its epicenter is the largest corporate media outlets, it is the very antithesis of journalism."
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale...
If it makes everyone feel better, they didn't pay almost $70M for the art. The buyer paid almost $70M to post their id, a guid, some metadata and a link to a site neither the buyer or the seller controls.
What a world.
Yes, I made a comment explaining how to check this out yourself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26459621
A Twitter thread explaining how absurd this is: https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372163423446917122
There's already URL rot going on: https://twitter.com/CheckMyNFT/status/1372253288863825925
I still don't get why this is a scam, there is a SHA-256 hash of the whole image in that token, complete with timestamp and a buyer signature - the buyer can certainly prove he was first (or Nth) to buy this exact thing anytime he wants (if he doesn't lose his private key ofc). Who cares if some URLs included do rot?
It's almost the same idea [0] Galileo used 400 years ago to prove he was first to see Saturn rings by hashing the image description and distributing the hash.
But presumably you could create an identical image with a different hash by changing 1 pixel? I'm not sure what trust problem the NFT solves.
What would that achieve? If you're late to the blockchain (or really any other distribution channel, like https://truetimestamp.org/ or something like this) your timestamp is greater than original and you own nothing. I don't really know how selling 2nd place works with NFTs but I assume you only can get it from 1st place owner (he has to sign it with his private key), so the scheme is solid. You cannot change a pixel and claim something.
The only problem I see is how the 1st buyer knows the seller is the artist not some random dude who changed 1 pixel (or even didnt). You actually cannot reliably sell something that has been published before cause everyone and their mom can claim ownership before 1st token.
I guess I'm misunderstanding what value people see in the NFT. If they really are paying for the right to claim the first entry in some blockchain then I guess it works as intended.
Or indeed changing some irrelevant metadata that would have precisely no impact on what's rendered on the screen.
Because that doesn't make the image in question scarcer? I just went to Christie's site and copied it by just viewing the page.
Well, physical art reproductions are high quality already (I have some Van Gogh canvas prints I bought for like 50$ a piece on my walls). So you can't really say traditional art images are scarce too.
The thing is whoever is owns the original in some sense, even if you eventually cannot discern it with a microscope.
How can you compare this Beepis stuff to Galileo being the first human to lay eyes on a closeup of Saturn's rings....
Its $70M to post "first!" Maybe scam isn't the right word but its certainly strange to me.
Since the buyer is in the NFT business, it seems obvious to me that what they paid for was marketing for themselves and their space. I'm not sure $70M on advertising would be better spent. As the old adage goes, "you can't buy publicity like this".
I can’t be the only one who knew about beeple before this. And I enjoy his art.
I personally gave up on understanding and forming an opinion on modern art because I don't get it. That being said a lot of things from the article (written by an actual critic) seem mostly to be complaining about political things or saying that some of the drawing are low quality.
I don't see it. This is 11 years of evolution and development of someone's art, it is cringe because when you don't cherrypick your best work you always end up bad or even cringy but that's also part of the story that this piece tells.
A small tangent, I don't get NFTs, what's stopping me from creating a new NFT with beeples image, or if there is hashing involved with beeples image and a couple of pixels changed?
There is nothing stopping you from making a new lithography series of Picasso’s sketches, but they won’t be worth nearly the same as the originals.
The utility provided by the NFTs is in actually owning the “original”, not that it is not reproducible.
But the lack of reproducability is what makes Picassos's sketches be worth more than 0, or not? I can get a copy of those sketches for a few bucks as a high quality print, but not the original. In the NFT case, there is no original.
It reminds me of that story where someone got in trouble for issuing his own currency at school.
Things aren't given fundamental value by being an NFT so its weird to expect anything other than the value of ownership of what your NFT gives you. If people are buying NFTs thinking they have value simply because they are NFTs they are going to lose money. What an NFT provides is effectively a way to guarantee the artist - in this case. Think of it like a signed original print from an artist - what an NFT does is effectively similar.
Nothing is stopping you from creating a new cryptocurrency either. That doesn't mean other people will give you $60k for your custom bitcoins.
Only the original NFT (which has a unique address) is cautioned by the artist, that's what gives it value.
Nothing and there's no hashing involved. The token just contains a URL to the hosted image. You can even point it to the image in this article.
> The token just contains a URL to the hosted image.
That sounds... just insane. Content under an URL can and does change. URLs themselves are not even under full control of the seller. I could get signing data itself, but signing a pointer?
EDIT: but the URL contains an IPFS hash, assuming it's not the mutable kind, maybe this is not completely crazy (or at least wouldn't be, if they included just the hash, without the gateway URL part)?
EDIT2: nevermind, I saw your other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26500542, which links to a Twitter thread that explains the scam in details.
I know it is hard to wrap your head around, but really, the link does not fundamentally matter. Cryptopunks are just a hash of all the images. The whole point of an NFT token is to be a digital signature, essentially. It is just a shared agreement between buyer and seller to value that signature, and as long as we know that it represents the Beeple artwork, then the fact that the technical implementation points to a porn url, who cares - that is just an aide.
In fact, the original art could even be lost (as much physical art is). People could still value the signature!
Felix Salmon gets it:
I see. But to that, I can counter: described like this, it won't scale past a small group of acquaintances. The same reasoning can be applied to a verbal agreement - I can pay you for "that thing we both know", and it'll work the same... until one of us changes their mind and declares the transaction invalid. And the arguments we may have will look completely unsubstantiated to any third party we'd like to involve in it.
A lot of formalism around real laws and real money exist to make word of mouth scale. It's why people pay money accepted by everyone in their society, why they enter written contracts - of the type they can expect the court of law to treat as valid, if a dispute escalates to the point of involving third parties.
Can't shake the feeling it's just the next chapter in the story of cryptocurrencies rediscovering the hard way the last 10 000 years of social development.
Yeah, and regarding using just raw IPFS hashes there's this comment further down the thread indicating not even that is enough (I know too little of IPFS to verify but seems legit): https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372169695277760519
I'm two years out of date on what's going on with IPFS, but assuming the core ideas didn't change: that Twitter comment is technically right, but with caveats.
IPFS, as a P2P system, only contains the files individual users are hosting. There's no fundamental obligation to rehost other people's content - but there are various incentive schemes[0]. The address itself is a hash of file contents, so if someone were to reupload the exact same (bit-level identical) file to IPFS again, it would appear on the network with the same hash. The limit to long-term availability of any given file is whether anyone who has it is willing to keep it in the network.
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[0] - For one, IIRC, there was some automated caching/mirroring of the files you pull using an IPFS client (not IPFS->HTTP gateway), to ensure popular files will get mirrored around the network for a while. Secondly, the team also started developing FileCoin, whose purpose was to create a scheme in which people could get paid for putting their spare storage on the network, which would be used to replicate files on IPFS. I don't know if they managed to get it to work.
My interest in IPFS started to diminish after I saw the team getting very involved in cryptocurrency world. I only care about IPFS for the P2P, content-addressable storage layer - and they kept talking about things related to Ethereum. So I stopped paying attention.
Moving IPFS to the crypto world has made it more of a success. I need distributed storage for an app I'm developing and I'm far more comfortable paying people to host the content instead of relying on goodwill.
Think its interesting seeing how the algorithms and Twitter feedback loop have affected his work over time. Kinda went from eyecandy to the 3D equivalent of a low level political comics but 3D.
Although as someone working in the same sphere the "Everydays" idea has been quite a negative influence on the quality of work you see out there and the work has taken on a lot of similarities.
>the "Everydays" idea has been quite a negative influence on the quality of work you see out there and the work has taken on a lot of similarities.
Yeah I agree, it's nice to have a window into the process at first but eventually it's worthless spam on a feed that becomes really grating over time. It becomes tiring to witness every possible permutation of a shader that one person's working on. It starts to all feel like a big homogeneous soup of algorithmic content production just for the sake of the platform's own growth. I forget there's supposed to be a complete, detailed, complex thought in the form of the final piece at the end of the road, usually... which at this rate exists less and less as social media feeds dominate how we experience the web more and more.
I haven't been following this too closely, but is this whole thing some kind of generalization of the milliondollarpage idea?
I see it as a type of performance art to put all of your work out there (even the really bad stuff you did as a teenager) and preserving that in a time where you can easily delete stuff online (I know it can't really be deleted but probably nobody would start to dig). I still think the 69M deal was a sham (as described in the other article).
If anyone would like their own full size copy of the work to do their own analysis on, here you go: https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmXkxpwAHCtDXbbZHUw...
One of these days I’m going to photocopy my butt, name it “tax shelter” and sell it for a hundred million dollars. Hey, they buy because the price is high, right?
Next up: a review of Mozart first piece from when he was 3 years old.
Spoiler alert: it's a stinker showing that Mozart is overrated!
Well, obviously the Trump/Clinton work is a reference to the Socialist Fraternal Kiss. Not obvious to the layman but clear to anyone with experience critiquing art.
Haha, this is fun. I can see why art critics like doing it.
What's the point of this article? Toddler ranting about disliking the beeple style?
I follow him everyday and half the stuff he does makes me cringe and that's a good thing. It makes me question the very simple question of what is art, what is taste, why we even care. All in all, beeple is a terrific artist. If you wanted 5000 Mona Lisa, copy paste its image 5000 times.
As one with no information about Beeple or this artwork other than the headline, I found the article informative. I appreciate someone taking the time to find higher resolution individual images, not to mention attempting to identify themes and styles.
From the article, Beeple’s work doesn’t do much for me, but nor does most other art. My tastes are unrefined and primitive.
But my tastes are completely my own. I am happy for those who get something out of pondering questions like “what is art?” It’s great that you enjoy Beeple. Don’t let this article bum you out.
Crypto nouveau riche... somehow worse than the real thing.
At least when someone puts pink velour seats in their Bentley they don’t claim it’s a revolution.
the art perfectly captures someone desperately trying to be relevant despite having nothing to say.
That doesn’t really match reality though. He did the vast majority of this work when he wasn’t relevant in any way. It’s not like he became famous in 2007 and continued publishing to milk the cow. For a decade almost nobody cared, then he became a meme artist.
But there's not really anything being said in the art despite adopting the facade of political commentary. I think the parent commenter was correct in this respect.
These are hilarious!
Where's my outrage?
People seem to say it’s not good art/drawing/rendering, I personally love that kind of punk-ish style. I grew up reading all the graphic novels I could find during the 90s and early 2000s, with a lot of punk-inspired themes, and that’s the same vibe I see here. It’s gross, dark, morbid, cringy, ugly, trashy, and unnecessarily provocative. That’s not for everybody but some of us like that type of stuff.
The bernie-monster is fantastic IMHO, and I have nothing against Bernie Sanders.
It's the fact, he knocks one of these out every day that's great.
Watching his workflow, and seeing them get slicker is a part of it too.
Pure strain ressentiment.
A baseball card is ink on cardboard. Its intrinsic value is a few pennies at most. The value is what it represents, the story behind it (and the stories we tell each other), the rarity, the brand, and so on. A physical collectible is a conversation piece and only has meaning because some people agree it does.
An NFT is no different. The more people talk about the Beeple work, analyze it, critique it, teach it in schools, write about it on websites, the more its legend and cachet will grow. That is why it has value - it represents the same things the baseball card does. Except an NFT can trade and move much quicker, given the internet and its digital nature.
I think people are just confused. Like, I didn’t know if who Beeple was and after seeing their work I can say it’s pretty offensive. So why is it worth anything? Is it because it’s a great work of art or did somebody with too much money take a gamble on Vaporware?
What about the art offended you?
Did you read the article? Sexist, racist, and bigoted content.
I read the article and the critic is obviously trying to do a takedown, but none of the examples appear racist or sexist to me.
Do you agree with everything the critic said?
Really? Because they made posts using the word homo, a picture of Hilary Clinton naked with a penis, Dalai Lama performing sexual acts...
Yeah, the "homo" caption seems in poor taste if Beeple is straight.
The other two are crude, but I don't think I'd call them sexist.
Why is this worth $85mil? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprematist_Composition
Honestly looks like a piece of shit to me, something my child could do. Value of art doesn't have to do with skill.
Sure.
But usually a piece like this goes for 85m long after the artist has achieved major notoriety in the art community and their work has been a clear influence on later art. In this case the 85m sale was 100 years after the creation of this piece.
That may be a stupid reason, but it isn't a circular reason. Beeple, on the other hand, appears to be famous for selling art at ridiculous prices through NFTs.
The value of art is dictated by only a few players (really rich people). Generally, expensive art is from an influential artist; specifically, the pieces that were atypical or experimental.
As someone who enjoys abstract art, I'd like to have a print of this. It's very pleasant.
But I'm pretty sure most art dealings are just money laundering.
Is there a painting you think is worth 85 million?
Anything Leonardo even touched should be worth at least that.
Is there a reason why the painting I linked is $85mil, and the Beeple NFT isn't? My argument is that the value of a collectible (NFT, painting, baseball card) is actually because of what it represents, rather than the object itself.
> Is there a reason why the painting I linked is $85mil, and the Beeple NFT isn't? My argument is that the value of a collectible (NFT, painting, baseball card) is actually because of what it represents, rather than the object itself.
Probably because that artist and his work were actually influential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimir_Malevich
When looked at as an artist, Beeple appears to be the digital art equivalent of some forgettable late-Rococo painter.
> My argument is that the value of a collectible (NFT, painting, baseball card) is actually because of what it represents, rather than the object itself.
Well... yeah?
Has anyone ever argued that the Mona Lisa is worth whatever its raw materials are worth?
The real question is if the Beeple work is interesting as art or is if just a speculative bubble. https://www.ft.com/content/1563d643-332f-3887-8c6e-caf7435f3...
Many would argue that the Mona Lisa required an immense amount of skill and technique, and is a very high quality piece of art. Modern art (squares and circles) that anyone can make, I just don't see why it has the same value.
But it does! And that's my point about NFTs.
> Many would argue that the Mona Lisa required an immense amount of skill and technique, and is a very high quality piece of art. Modern art (squares and circles) that anyone can make, I just don't see why it has the same value.
No art critic or collector makes that argument, and it's an uniformed position to take. People don't pay for the skill - there is no shortage of (very poorly paid) people who can do a convincing forgery of a daVinci.
Something to consider.
Just noting that someone on HN says that considering the Mona Lisa a better piece of art than squares-and-circles nonsense "an uniformed position to take". Art people have been a consistent source of absurdity in my life!
This is quite possibly the most uptight, smug and creepily personal critique of a piece of art I've ever seen.
It goes so low as to try to paint Beeple as a racist because he had the cheek to... draw a black person?
Honestly, the art world is poison. What a horrible article.
Criticizes heavily his earliest works being included, which would be absolutely fine only the entire point of the artwork is something is created every day - yet this reviewer seems to insist on reviewing each individual work as if it had been a long term project in its own right.
I don't usually like to get personal, but I'm absolutely sure the person who wrote this is an insufferable snob.
btw, I'm not saying you cant say his art is bad, they just did it in an incredibly poor way.
Only in 2021 can a man go from art sensation to what appears to be on his way to being cancelled inn like 3 days.
I don't care, personally, but man oh man this year isn't gonna be much more normal than last.
I actually think it's interesting to see his advances in skill, not bad for effectively a satire artist.
So any criticism is now cancelling?
Art should only get praise?
What I'm saying is this specific article seemed to be trying to point at the pieces which could be seen as racist or sexist or whatever. I'm saying this is art and saying it sucks is one thing, but this is another kind of takedown, to me. I have no dog in the show, so I don't care personally, but it's interesting that this guy was so revered at first and now he's getting pummeled.
I think maybe you just zoomed in on the word cancel, but I didn't even say anything negative about cancel culture, which you seem to want to defend, so don't bother here, I was commenting on the meteoric rise and fall of beeple, not on the act of cancelling or anything. Chill.
I'm pretty sure his bread and butter has been detailed sci-fi images that were commissioned.