25/06/2021 Your NFT Sold for $69 Million—Now What? Beeple Turns to a New Project, and Old Masters.
Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, have exploded onto the digital art scene this past year. Proponents say they are a way to make digital assets scarce, and therefore more valuable. WSJ explains how they work, and why skeptics question whether they’re built to last.
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wsj-glossary/nfts-are-fueling-a-boom-in-digital-art-heres-how-they-work/F5BA93AD-3DCD-4EFA-B064-C9143C81CB88
Digital designer and artist Mike Winkelmann, who goes by Beeple, sparked a global frenzy for non fungible tokens, or NFTs, after Christie’s sold his digital collage for $69 million in March—but since then he’s maintained a relatively low profile, stoking curiosity about his next big move.
Now, Mr. Winkelman is opening up, revealing that he’s had a rocky entrée into the art establishment even though he currently ranks as the world’s third most-expensive living artist after Jeff Koons and David Hockney. Instead of chatting up the world top’s collectors and curators, he’s primarily focused on launching a new NFT venture next month that will seek to transform historic moments into collectible NFTs. He’s planning to start with tennis star Andy Murray’s 2013 Wimbledon win.
“I wouldn’t say the art world has been overly welcoming,” Mr. Winkelman said. “Everyone is taking a cautious approach toward me and NFTs, and I get it because it’s all happened so fast.”
Mr. Winkelman's blistering rise and bumpy aftermath echoes the entire NFT art phenomenon, which started gaining traction last fall as digital artists realized they could attach data already being used to track cryptocurrency onto their own pixelated images and sell one-of-a-kind work the way painters sell original canvases.
Immediately following Christie’s sale of Mr. Winkelman's “Everydays—The First 5000 Days,” a gold-rush atmosphere spread across the art market, with dozens of artists and galleries clamoring to sell NFT art. The early fever appears to have subsided, though pioneering and seminal NFT artworks created by digital artists including Pak, Mad Dog Jones and FEWOCiOUS continue to sell at auction houses such as Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips for record sums.
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wsj-glossary/nfts-are-fueling-a-boom-in-digital-art-heres-how-they-work/F5BA93AD-3DCD-4EFA-B064-C9143C81CB88
Digital designer and artist Mike Winkelmann, who goes by Beeple, sparked a global frenzy for non fungible tokens, or NFTs, after Christie’s sold his digital collage for $69 million in March—but since then he’s maintained a relatively low profile, stoking curiosity about his next big move.
Now, Mr. Winkelman is opening up, revealing that he’s had a rocky entrée into the art establishment even though he currently ranks as the world’s third most-expensive living artist after Jeff Koons and David Hockney. Instead of chatting up the world top’s collectors and curators, he’s primarily focused on launching a new NFT venture next month that will seek to transform historic moments into collectible NFTs. He’s planning to start with tennis star Andy Murray’s 2013 Wimbledon win.
“I wouldn’t say the art world has been overly welcoming,” Mr. Winkelman said. “Everyone is taking a cautious approach toward me and NFTs, and I get it because it’s all happened so fast.”
Mr. Winkelman's blistering rise and bumpy aftermath echoes the entire NFT art phenomenon, which started gaining traction last fall as digital artists realized they could attach data already being used to track cryptocurrency onto their own pixelated images and sell one-of-a-kind work the way painters sell original canvases.
Immediately following Christie’s sale of Mr. Winkelman's “Everydays—The First 5000 Days,” a gold-rush atmosphere spread across the art market, with dozens of artists and galleries clamoring to sell NFT art. The early fever appears to have subsided, though pioneering and seminal NFT artworks created by digital artists including Pak, Mad Dog Jones and FEWOCiOUS continue to sell at auction houses such as Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips for record sums.
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Interesting NFTs
King
Ugh! I'm King. I've never told anyone this, but I once bit a dog. I once bit a dolphin. I don't like to talk about it. Will you be the marmite to my ghost pepper hot sauce?
#8636
By
OthersideDeployer
The Pixel
The Pixel is a single pixel statement. It is created to validate.
The Pixel is a digitally native artwork visually represented by a single pixel (1x1). It is a token that signs the most basic unit of a digital image in a traditional global auction house. It is a tiny mark to carry digitally native art to a potential future history.
Magnetic Forces v3
"El imán humilla al hierro. Es una teoría sobre el amor. Magnets humiliate iron. It's a theory about love." --Marco Denevi
Alex in Wonderland
A figure, Alex, stands mostly naked in the midst of a physical and psychological maelstrom. He is clad only in nostalgic 80’s era socks, on a tenuous island between active waters and a variety of shark denizens. Sharks on the right side of the image are all beached, including a shark with a quartz crystal snout, an orange shark wrapped in a life buoy, and a shark further in the distance wearing an 80’s style shirt with the number “88”. On the left side is the largest shark, wearing bright glossy red lipstick and brandishing prominent teeth with braces. She is cordoned off from the figure by a roped float divider, and within her thought bubble is a warning symbol.
Behind the figure, hovering in the air, are Grey aliens emerging from the distance, out of a series of elliptical UFO shaped interdimensional membranes. The Greys take on the visual form of spermazoa ostensibly impregnating the interdimensional thresholds. As is typical, these Greys inhabit a zone just behind the unconscious topology of Alex’s dissociative mind.
Though Alex’s bottom half is representative, his top half mutates into a psychological cornucopia. In a manner akin to “Auto-Erotic Sphinx”, a predecessor work, the figure has self suctioned—an act of sensual infatuation, enjoyment, and exploration.
Upward exists the figure’s primary conscious eye, adorned with a revolutionary beret emblazoned with a Bitcoin badge. The figure’s summit features the nose of a fighter jet facing off against video game Bullet Bills, one of whom is marked by a communist North Korean star. A cropped section of a UFO observes the contest.
Alex’s mind branches both left and right. To the left is more singular embodied consciousness, manifesting two eyes and a Ganesh trunk grasping crayons. The right branch dissociates upward diagonally, emerging into an array of eyes, faces, teeth, tail, a unicorn horn, and much more—all of which participate in expressing his unconscious being; a democracy of psychic factions representing thought impressions and associations. All illumination and darkness– fernal, infernal, high consciousness and corporeal underbelly–reside in this realm.
In the distance are relatively languid, light clouds, and against the firmament hovers a colossal distant eye peering over the scene and far beyond.
This painting possesses underlying genetic traits with previous works such as “Auto-Erotic Sphinx with Toys”, “Dionysus”, and “Fuku-Shiva”. The work serves also as a nod to an earlier period of art inspiration during late teens and early twenties— born out of the nakedness, vulnerability, curiosity, and wonder inherent to coming of age and all subsequent psychedelic revelation.