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24 Sep, 2021 06:02

Traditional artists to embrace NFT: digital graphic designer Beeple

Digital art is rapidly grabbing the attention of not only tech enthusiasts but also venerable auction houses. Is the crypto art craze a bubble hyped by the pandemic, or is it the real deal and here to stay? We talk to one of the top-three most-bankable artists of the modern era: Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple.

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Sophie Shevardnadze: Digital artist Mike Winkelmann aka Beeple, great to have you with us, Mike. It's been a long road till I got you to talk to me, but I'm happy that you're here.

Mike Winkelmann: I'm happy to be here as well.

SS: Alright, so in March, Christie’s sold your work for almost $70 million and it's become the first purely digital work of art ever gone under the hammer at a major auction house. This made you the third most expensive living artist in the world. I mean, yet you don't like the term ‘artist’ deeming it too pretentious. But really? Why?

MW: Ah, I don't know. Do you find if some – If you were like out at like a party or something and somebody was like a digital artist, would you kind of think like, ‘Hm are you?’ Would you kind of find it a little pretentious maybe?

SS: Well, I suppose all great artists, all great professionals have that charlatan syndrome where they don't want to be called what they are. But it's actually a good thing, I think, no?

MW: Could be. I'm coming around to it, I guess.

SS: Yeah. I mean, if I sold my digital work for seventy million, I'll be coming around real quick. I'll tell you that, Mike.

MW: It helps’ it does not hurt, I will say that.

SS: Honestly speaking, it was your tremendous success at Christie's when I first heard about NFTs, and everybody's been talking about them since then. Can you explain for our audience in really simple terms, what is a non-fungible token?

MW: It's basically a digital proof of ownership, and that ownership can be over a bunch of different virtual things. In my case, it was digital art. Before this there was no way to collect, there was no way to truly prove that you are the owner of this piece of artwork that I've made. And this is work that I've made over the last 20 years. ‘The Everydays piece sold at Christie’s – that was made over the last 13 years. But this is work that myself and literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of other artists have been making over this time, and there was no way to really sort of own it. So that's what NFTs did for what I do. But NFTs are broader than that. It's really just proof of ownership. So it can be applied to and it will be applied to a bunch of different things from concert tickets to property to, you know, your car, like, there's a bunch of different things that eventually NFTs will most likely be used to transact with.

SS: Right, so if this is some sort of like a digital code, from what I understand, that is unique and unalterable, does this make the piece of digital art to which this code is assigned practically unforgeable?

MW: Exactly, you would have to sort of like – It's as strong as the blockchain, which right now, nobody's been able to sort of hack the blockchain, you're not seeing people being able to create Bitcoins. And so it's really the same sort of like underlying technology. So yeah, it's definitely by far the strongest sort of authentication we have as species, I guess.

SS: I’m sort of a practical person and I'm thinking, can an NFT be used as a collateral like a physical piece of art?

MW: Yeah, and a lot of the work that I do does have physical components, because I feel like that's a big sort of piece of this is, you're going to view the art somewhere. And so either you're going to view it on a phone or a tablet, and to me, that's not really that interesting. So the pieces that I've done in the past few months here have all had like a physical sort of like little sculpture, digital video frame that they come with, that you can just sort of put in your house to be like any other piece of art. It's something that you’re just passively enjoying, it's just like a painting on the wall. It's just in your house, in your environment all the time. And I feel like you're gonna start seeing that more and more with digital art coming into the home and being just like any other piece of art.

SS: You know, earlier this year, I've heard hackers stole digital artwork worth thousands of dollars from one of the biggest NFT marketplaces. Does that mean that despite all of these like cryptolocks, hackers will still find their ways around?

MW: So the way that they did it – I know exactly what you're talking about – the way that happened is they stole people's passwords kind of the old-fashioned way, and then they just logged in with their passwords. So it's one of these things where there's definitely the weakest point that’s us, in terms of keeping our information safe and keeping our stuff out of hackers’ hands, you know, everywhere; because that's a thing: when you get hacked, they can get into like anything you have then. So they were using sort of real credentials that, you know, they had gotten through other means.

SS: I still can't get my head around the following: what's the point of buying a file for the price of a Monet if it's still up for display in your Instagram, and absolutely everyone can enjoy, copy, share it for free?

MW: Yes, 100%. And that's the thing that I think is one of the hardest things for people to get their heads around because NFTs are not about restricting access. But that's actually a really good thing. Because the great thing about it being available to everybody, think of it more as like a public museum that this artwork is in and anybody in the world can view it for free. That's not the case with that Monet, you have to go to a very specific Museum, you have to see it if you want to see that painting. So it's very different. And that's the thing that I think could actually be a huge benefit that people are not recognizing with NFTs.

SS: But isn't the whole point of paying so much money for an art piece that, you know, you can choose who sees it or not, or like no one sees it except for you?

MW: But that's the thing, the more people who see it, the more popular it becomes, the more valuable it becomes. So you really do not want to restrict access to it, you want everybody to see it. And if everybody does see it, and it becomes the most popular image in the world, it will probably be the most valuable image in the world.

SS: So let's say if a Rembrandt gets stolen from a museum or destroyed by vandals, it's gone, it can be lost forever, nothing like this can ever happen to a digital piece of art...

MW: That's not true, that's not true. So you could transfer this, like into a wallet, and then you could lose control of that wallet. And that's happened with people with Bitcoin, they had their money in a hard, physical sort of like device, they forgot the password to the device, that's gone, nobody will ever get it back. And so it's again, it's up to humans to keep these things safe and sort of, you know, under control. So it's not again, 100% infallible.

SS: But I mean, you still have a copy.

MW: You will have the copy, but you don't have the original sort of like NFT. But yes, you have a copy of it, which again, is another sort of benefit of digital artwork over sort of like physical artwork. That Rembrandt gets burned, it's gone, you know, we'll have images of it, but we don't have the sort of original thing. With this, it sort of can like live on and I look at it as being able to take different physical forms over time. So like the ‘5000 days’ piece that was bought at Christie's, that could be turned into, you know, a giant print, it could be turned into a projection, it could be turned into a bunch of TV screens with, you know, an animated version of it, it can sort of live in the real world in a bunch of different forms and still have that native digital form that's unchanging and tied to the blockchain and secure.

SS: I mean, I'm a very tactile person. And there's something very kinesthetic about possessing physical art because you can touch the same thing that the great artist had touched and done, and you see the same thing they saw and you own it. Nothing like this is possible with digital art. So by buying it, do you basically buy the copyright, rather than the piece of art per se?

MW: No, most of the time you don’t. It's similar to a painting like if you buy a painting of, you know, a Monet or whatever this or that, I don't know about Monet. But if you buy a painting, you do not own the copyright, it's probably for a Monet as well, like you do not own the copyright, you just own that painting. And so it's very similar to that in terms of most NFTs. Some are starting to sort of dabble into that, because, again, you can programme anything into the rules of these as well. And so some people are starting to include copyright, so that might be a thing that becomes more standard in the future.

SS: But hear me out. I mean, there's still like, something less glamorous when the artwork I bought at Christie's is actually in my phone. People like owning things, right?

MW: A hundred per cent. I agree.

SS: Owning software, videogames, movies is also great. It's just not the same as owning stuff, right? Will owning a file be a less attractive option for let's say art collectors than owning like a physical piece just because of that?

MW: And that's where I am, that's where, again, I have been including physical pieces in like all the stuff that I've done recently, because I do feel like that is a big sort of like piece of it, you want to see that thing. I don't know whether that will become standard in the future, there's definitely a lot of – What I will say it does do is it creates friction of movement. Because if you have a purely digital thing, you can transfer it and, boom, it's gone, it's up, versus when you have this physical thing attached to it, you kind of have to sort of ship it to the next person. So there is some drawbacks, you know, to having physical components to these things. But to me, I think it's outweighed in that, you know, you're able to experience this. And again, like you said, people who are tactile, I think people want to see something that represents, you know, this thing that they in many cases paid a lot of money for, that they can kind of show off, and I think it's just a better way, too, to experience the art, the physical sculpture and the physical sort of screen that these things come in, that's a piece of the artwork. It's designed very much for the artwork, the digital artwork. And so I agree, I think having a physical component to me is very important. I think I can see both sides.

SS: Yeah, also, because in a physical world, you can see the craft, you can actually, you can say like, ‘Oh my God, this is an amazing master’ without even knowing who that is, and you can say, ‘this is crap’, you know, like ‘a five-year-old can do that.’ When I look at your works, you have this aesthetic about them, they're edgy, and oftentimes with commentary, beautiful, containing messages. Then when I see a cat meme going for $600,000, I'm thinking, ‘Has the world gone crazy?!’

MW: No, I think it hasn't, because, again –

SS: Does the line between good art and bad art even exist in the digital realm?

MW: So I guess I personally don't look at that as art per se, I would look at it as sort of like a collectible. And it's a collectible of sort of like Internet culture, again, because that image became very, very popular. Like, that's why it has that value. It exactly proves what I was saying before, there is nothing great about that image, it just became very, very popular, and was used in a billion things and toys and T-shirts and video games and whatever and everything, TV shows, you know. It became worth $600,000 because that many people knew about it. And we're like, ‘Yeah, no, this is a piece of culture and a piece of Internet history.’ And so I look at those as sort of like collectibles, a little different from digital art, more like a baseball card type thing, a baseball card for the internet, if you will.

SS: So even though the NFT is hailed as the new big thing, and though art powerhouses like Christie's and Sotheby's are on board with promoting digital art, there's still a lot of scepticism about it and you know it, in the traditional art world.

MW: Yes, 100%.

SS: Some say the whole NFT-blockchain business is very dodgy, others question the artistic value of crypto art. Does all that affect you?

MW: Yes, definitely, I would say it would be sort of naive to be like, ‘Yeah, I don't know about that’, or I'm, like, aware of it. So yeah, I definitely think it affects me. But I think it's something that I'm seeing people come around very quickly to it to be quite honest. And I think, as people come to know more about this, because the worlds were just very separate. My digital art world knew nothing of the traditional world, and the traditional world knew nothing of the digital art world. And so it's only been a couple of months, you know, what I mean, in the scope of art history, and how long these that sort of things take to evolve and understand what happened and what's going on? I think it's very quick, but I'm seeing people sort of come around to it very, very quickly. And so I think it's going to be sort of assimilated into the broader conversation of fine art very quickly, to be honest.

SS: Okay. So you famously said that the craze that the NFT digital art created is a bubble. When will it burst? Are you saying –

MW: That was a little out of context, it's more so, I think it's going to go up and down just like, again, you look at Bitcoin. It didn't go straight up, it went up, and then went way down, and it went down like 80%. And then it came way back up. And so I think you're gonna see this same sort of thing happened with NFTs. It's one of these things where it's going to go through depths but it's – The technology itself is so sort of simple, just proving digital ownership. I don't see that going away, I see that just being more and more useful and sort of being able to apply to a bunch of different use cases over time. And I think digital art, again, will continue to be sort of like assimilated into the regular conversation of art. So you will see a selection of people have their stuff retained value over time, but just like a lot of traditional art, not all of it sort of retains value over time. So you do need to be sort of very cognizant of what you're buying. Because just because something's in NFT, just like with like websites, it's very analogous to like the early web, just because you make a web page doesn't mean it has any value. And just like because you make something in NFT doesn't automatically give it a value. You just made it into an NFT and put it on the blockchain.

SS: Your work gets reviews from art experts and appraisals from celebrated modern artists. I mean, I've heard Damien Hirst, he got impressed after his teenage son showed him your work on Instagram. So to me, this is the essence, you know, of the glory of digital art, it is grabbing the attention of Instagram- and TikTok-raised tech-savvy young people. Do you view digital art as an art for the new generation?

MW: To be honest, yes, and I've actually talked to Damien Hirst quite a bit since then. And he really likes, understands this and gets it and he actually just did an NFT project just recently, which was super cool. But it's one of these things where I do think the younger generation will get this first. And I think it'll be something that, you know, older people will get, I'm 40, myself, I'm not like super young. And so it's one of these things where I think they're just more used to sort of virtual ownership and their virtual sort of like self. And so I don't think it's a huge stretch for them to understand and internalise sort of digital ownership like this. And so I think, also a lot of the culture of the work that I do specifically and many other digital artists very much speaks to the internet and the language of how these people make money and just sort of exist.

SS: You know, what I see is people buying crypto art for cryptocurrency, and I'm thinking, 10 years ago, something like that would have been a fantasy. Is this what art patronage now is going to look like?

MW: Well, not really, I think, yes, and no. I think it's going to be sort of divorced from crypto very quickly, because again, NFTs should all be able to be just bought cash because it doesn't really have anything to do with crypto, it's just a sort of underlying blockchain technology that they both use, but it doesn't really have anything to do with like Bitcoin or Ethereum, like, you know, it should be able to be – it and it will, – it will be able to be bought with just everything regular, like credit cards. But at the same time, it does, to your point of patronage, sort of remove the middleman a bit, because people are able to go directly to their fans, instead of having to go through a gallery or having you go through even sort of like an auction house, and they're able to much more easily sort of directly connect to the following that they built online through social media.

SS: You know, the art market is like a finicky thing. Art doesn't only exist for our dealers, people need to see it. Do you see a future for digital art and digital art exhibits?

MW: Yeah, 100%. I think you're gonna see that. I think, you know, again, it's only been three or four months here. So if museums are usually planning shows out two years in advance, and obviously, with Covid, everything got super messed up, and most museums aren't even fully open. But I think it's something you're going to see very quickly in these art exhibits. And I think there again, there's this massive benefit of, you could have the same piece of art up at five museums at one time. That's not the case with traditional art, you have one painting, it's got to move around to all these places created up, moving to the next place. Digital art is able to exist in multiple places at one time and be able to be reached by a bigger community potentially.

SS: But I guess like the question there would be: will moving art exhibits to the digital realm like Instagram or something dilute the importance of art? What I'm saying is like going to Tate to see Rothko is an experience in itself. And I feel that sort of thing does create like a richer context for art perception. Internet doesn't like attention focus, you know...

MW: That's true, that is very true, it is definitely, you know, when you go and see something in person, and you've taken the time to be there, and have a much more obviously singular experience like that, that was very much, you know, a choice and had a cost, because, again, museums are not free, it costs and especially if you have like a family, it can be quite expensive. It's one of these things where most people don't have that opportunity. And so it's sort of like, if they can see it online, it's like, well, I'm in Indonesia. So now that my choices, not see the Rothko, or see, you know, a version online, of course, they're gonna take the version online. And so just by pure numbers, most people will see things online, versus seeing it in sort of a space. And so I think just kind of recognising it is what it is in terms of that that's a good thing, because again, that kid in Indonesia couldn't see it at all, if it wasn't for the internet, he would even know what it is. And so I think that, again, is something that – Everything's a trade-off with digital art and sort of physical presence and not having it. But I think there's definitely a huge amount of benefits to things being virtual and being able to be accessible all over the world.

SS: So when you create art for a small screen because, you know, we all use smaller screens most of the time these days, do you feel limited by that in your self-expression?

MW: There are absolutely limitations. Like, for instance, most of the vast majority of the pictures that I create are portrait, because that sort of Instagrams, you know, what they like the size they like, or whatever, that aspect ratio. And so I do that, but I kind of look at that stuff as not like a negative. Having limitations, I've always kind of viewed that as sort of a positive, because they give you a framework, in which you want to build something, instead of it being just totally blue sky, you can make anything. So I actually view that as sort of a good thing, to be honest. But it absolutely is a, you know, – If you want to be able to succeed in the social media landscape, it is something that you do honestly need to take into account these sort of rules and metrics and ways to format your work, to have it seen by a bunch of people.

SS: Isn’t there, in your mind a competition of sorts between digital and non-digital art at all? Are these two methods going to coexist in parallel without affecting each other at all?

MW: No, I don't think it's a competition, because it's just another art form, just like, it's not really a competition between painting and sculpture, they're just two things that exist. And I also don't think they're going to just exist in parallel, I think they're going to be intertwined very much in the future. And I think to be quite honest, you'll see, in the future, I think all paintings will have an NFT with them. And it will just be a proof of ownership just to sort of track that physical object, and it won't be something that, you know, sometimes it will add a lot of value and sometimes it won't add much value at all, it's just literally, you know, a piece of paper that basically says, you know, the provenance of the piece. And so I think that the two worlds are going to merge, and I think you're going to see more digital artists coming into the physical realm, much like myself, never pictured myself making physical art and now that's like it, you know, a huge part of what I do. So I think you're gonna see a bunch of people coming over like that. And I think you're going see a bunch of the traditional art people embracing this digital technology – Damien Hirst, there you go, a traditional art person coming into the NFT world. So I think you're going to see both of them just mix together and just be another art form just like graffiti or street art or sort of painting, sculptures, whatever. I think it's just going to be another art form.

SS: Oh, Mike, thanks a lot for this wonderful insight into the world of NFT. I wish you all the best of luck with all your future endeavours. It's been great talking to you.

MW: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you, I very much appreciate it.

SS: Thanks a lot. Take care and I hope we met in person once.

MW: Yes. Awesome. Are we good here?

SS: We’re perfect. Have a great day.

MW: Thank you, guys.

SS: Bye-bye.

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