Why Beeple?

His NFT sold for $70 million. Is his art any good?

Much of Beeple’s recent work envisions a bizarre, dystopian fusing of technology, the body, nature, and pop cultural archetypes.

The digital artist Beeple became world-famous when he sold his NFT, “Everyday: The First 5,000 Days,” for nearly $70 million, or 42,329 Ether) at Christie’s last Spring. While this made him fabulously wealthy, it also gained him instant scorn from art world gatekeepers. New York Times art critic Jason Farago joined the disparaging chorus: “Even the gross-out images are not actually interested in the abjection of popular culture or American society, in the manner of Mike Kelley or Paul McCarthy. They’re just meant to signal a particular cultural and ideological disposition, where the get-rich-quick promise of cryptocurrency dovetails with a teenage aversion to authority…” 

In fact, poking around, I can’t seem to find any serious critical writing on Beeple at all. As a recovered art critic, I thought I might try to rectify that. I find Beeple’s project completely reasonable within the context of modern art history. But first, I want to consider some related thoughts and ideas.

Digital Meme Culture Versus the Traditional (or Commercial) Art World 

In his video presentation, “Replacement Theory: How Memes Rendered Commercial Art Obsolete” (behind a Paywall here) the artist Brad Troemel explores how the ubiquity of the digital sphere and social media continues to transform our relationship to art and visual culture. He looks at the reasons that the traditional or commercial art world — with its legacy institutions of museums, magazines, galleries, and so on — is increasingly irrelevant and outdated, while the vital stem of visual culture has shifted to memes. Memes are an instantaneous, decentralized, constantly changing, rapidly evolving form of popular art. They have become the primary visual language of our time. 

“We look to memes to interpret an increasingly fractured reality,” Troemel says. “Memes have become the artistic language used to reflect on our reality as well as the substance of our reality. But if you look into a commercial art gallery or museum today, you won’t find any trace of this.” 

The centralized structure of the traditional art world is sluggish and slow to change, controlled by a set of institutions meant to convey prestige. Historically, the art world fetishizes the unique, irreplaceable (sellable and collect-able) object. The contemporary art world must continually strive to stimulate the interest and cater to the tastes of the wealthy and privileged, who often use art as a status symbol to enhance their feeling of being special and important. Contemporary art does this by defining an obscure formal language —a set of aesthetic criteria that you can’t understand or care about unless you have an insider’s knowledge of recent art history, replete with hermetic in-jokes and references. The work is often surrounded by a pretentious critical discourse, another barrier preventing it from reaching mass appeal. 

One of Beeple’s images commenting on Cattelan’s Comedia.

While The Times castigates Beeple for making images that require a good deal of technical skill and that millions of people appreciate for good reasons, it celebrates Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedia, a banana attached to a wall by duct tape, that also sold for a high price (a comparatively meager $120,000). As Farago wrote back in 2019: “What makes Mr. Cattelan a compelling artist … is precisely Mr. Cattelan’s willingness to implicate himself within the economic, social and discursive systems that structure how we see and what we value.” But Cattelan is an insider, hence good, while Beeple is an interloper, therefore bad. 

I find Beeple’s project far more interesting than Cattelan’s, and I think that is the case even according to the art world’s own internal logic. In fact, avant-garde artists in the past always saw their work as something edge and dangerous—a rejection of history. But the art world institutionalized “avant-garde-ism” over the last thirty or so years. Artists like Cattelan keep repeating the old modernist avant-garde gestures and shticks. These seem more banal and barren with each repetition. But the traditional art world, incapable of embracing the visual language of our time, is stuck on repeat. 

Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, before the ascendency of digital art and social media, the art world made a habit, Troemel notes, of “co-opting individual artists as representative of memetic subcultures.” For example, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquait were street artists originally who broke through and became acclaimed by the art system. Today almost all of us primarily consume imagery digitally. We can access any image at any moment. People have little need for establishment gatekeepers telling them what is “important” according to some subjective view of art history skewed to favor the tastes of a wealthy elite. At the very least, if there are going to be gatekeepers of some sort, the role of the gatekeeper needs to change. 

A Dysmorphic Techno Dystopian Abyss

For the last 13 years, Beeple’s disciplined project has been to create an image every day. He passed through a number of phases in the process. His early works were unimpressive sketches. Eventually, he taught himself 4-D Cinema and began to make complex digital works, including video clips that he gave away for free on his site. These clips started to get used by DJs as well as in other contexts around the world. In Becoming Beeple, a short documentary, Beeple describes visiting Hong Kong where he was excited to see his work projected on the front of the Hard Rock Cafe. It was the first time he had seen his clips used by anyone.

For a number of years, Beeple produced vaguely sci fi landscapes for the Everyday series. Many of these would make decent record covers for ambient electronic music. It is only recently, since 2018 or so, that he turned to the work he is most known for now: Portrayals of a surrealistic technologically dystopian abyss, where figures like Donald Trump, King Jong-un, Mark Zuckerberg, Hilary Clinton, and Jeff Bezos often appear in monstrous, dysmorphic form, as if dredged up from a horror film. 

The speed and facility with which Beeple and other digital artists can produce images resembling photos or paintings that would have taken enormous investments of time and craft to make in the past is, in itself, extraordinary and still a bit dizzying. I am reminded of Roland Barthes’ thoughts on plastic, from Mythologies: “More than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation… it is ubiquity made visible.” Barthes goes on to note that, with plastic, “The age-old function of nature is modified: it is no longer the Idea, the pure Substance to be regained or imitated: an artificial Matter, more bountiful than all the natural deposits, is about to replace her, and to determine the very invention of forms.”

Beeple’s work comments on this increasing plasticity, which seems to be rapidly leaking from the purely virtual into the real world via artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and genetic engineering. A lot of his most startling images depict a Frankensteinian melding of technology with nature, with catastrophic results. There is, also, in many of these images, a depiction of a monstrous lactation, as if the maternal and natural are somehow turning diabolic and bizarre as we move into an increasingly posthuman or transhuman future. 

As a political commentator, Beeple reminds me a bit of George Grosz, a German artist from the 1930s whose political cartoons have stood the test of time as well as his paintings.

Like Grosz, Beeple seems to be implicitly warning us about or foreshadowing an impending totalitarianism. This was bad enough in the 1930s, but the new form of totalitarianism threatening humanity now is, somehow, far more subtle and pervasive. Beeple captures the anxious concern (which I personally feel) that our momentum toward a technocratic dystopia is beyond anyone’s control. He renders those people as well as other entities (cartoon characters, Emojis, brand logos) who appear to hold political, cultural, or economic power as cyborg-puppets, archetypal monstrosities, looming over the collective landscape of the Psyche. He is doing what art should do: Reflect upon and interpret our fractured moment, in real time.