Digital artist Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann broke records in 2021 with the sale of its NFT “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days,” which sold at auction for $69.3 million.

Since then, the fervor around NFTs has cooled considerably, with trading volumes plunging more than 90%.

Speaking in an on-stage interview with Design Museum chief executive Tim Marlow OBE at London’s Royal Academy of Arts last week, Beeple said: “It’s crazy for me to think about that time , because NFTs have been hated for so many things. much longer than they have been loved.

“There was this very brief period where people were like, ‘Yes, this is the future,'” he said. “And then it came back to like, ‘Oh, holy shit, don’t put that evil on me.'”

“We lost a lot of people,” Beeple added, “but those people were never interested in art, and I could see that immediately.”

He said that at the time of the “Everydays” sale, he knew the market was “100 percent” a bubble.

“Before that, I was doing digital art for 20 years and seeing people buying shit,” he said. “It’s like, ‘There’s no way to retain value, this is absolute crap.’ And it just won’t last, you’ll understand that’s right.

While acknowledging that the NFT market was “going to come back to Earth” and that speculators “have moved on,” Beeple noted that “there’s still a lot of enthusiasm around this stuff.”

He emphasized multi-million dollar sales of CryptoPunks earlier this year, saying, “It’s crazy to me how much this has been normalized” and questioning how “it wasn’t news at all.” I mean, another massive sale in the art world.

Beeple’s own art sales are more tightly controlled than at the height of the NFT boom, he said, explaining that “we think about supply and demand and don’t do too much work” . He added that his team is now focusing on “private sales to people who play the role of the gallery”, to ensure that buyers are “serious collectors” who are not just going to “turn the tables”.

At the same time, he added, the secondary market for his work is unlicensed. “People can just go to websites and buy something now, put your MetaMask on, and off you go,” he said.

A fractured authenticity market

Beeple also highlighted “segmentation” in the NFT market, with some projects losing sight of the true vision of the technology.

“This technology, and a lot of the things it was used for and the people it was associated with, didn’t really look like art,” he said, noting the Bored Monkeys Yacht Club NFT collection. “Even they would say it’s on the collectibles side, and they’re trying to build a social club, and this and that,” he said, arguing that the different use cases for NFTs had become ” confused.”

NFT technology, he said, is “agnostic,” likening it to a web page. “A web page can contain many different things, and an NFT is a way to prove virtual ownership of many different things,” he explained.

“Personally, I think that in the future, every painting will have an NFT as a certificate of authenticity,” he said, adding: “It’s just a better way than a piece of paper to be able to prove ownership of these pieces, to be able to prove provenance, to be able to prove exposure Widespread adoption of NFTs to authenticate physical art, he added, requires an “agreed standard for that NFT.”

Dynamic NFT Art

Although the NFT market has since cooled, there remains a core of “passionate” NFT enthusiasts who “understand this technology and see it as a way to express artistic ideas in a way that simply wasn’t possible before,” Beeple said.

The technology has allowed him to create dynamic works of art in which changes to the piece are recorded on the blockchain. With his most recent works, Beeple moves away from the strictly digital space where he made his name, with two physical pieces:“The human” And “The Tree of Knowledge.”

Both consist of four video screens arranged in a rectangular pillar, displaying a dynamic digital artwork: a walking figure in the case of “Human One” and a tree intertwined with industrial elements in “The Tree of Knowledge”.

The dynamic changes in “Human One” are made by Beeple himself, who alters the landscape in which the titular character operates.

“When the work was sold at Christie’s, he was moving through these kinds of surreal landscapes; then at the exhibition at Costello he was walking through a Ukrainian war landscape,” he explained. “The war hadn’t even started when the person bought the work, so they couldn’t have known it would be a commentary on the war, just six months later.”

The Tree of Knowledge, meanwhile, extracts real-time data from feeds including news channels, stock and crypto headlines, environmental data and social media, with viewers able to dial in the proportion of “signal,” meaning order, versus “noise,” meaning chaos.

A further complication is that the viewer has the option to “choose violence”, which triggers a 10-minute animated sequence during which the tree is destroyed. “Every time you press it, it’s actually recorded on the blockchain,” explained Beeple, adding: “There are only 666 times you can press that button before it permanently destroys the work. “

Access to the button is controlled by a key held by the owner of the work, Beeple explained. “It’s an analogy that some people have the ability to press that button,” he said. “We don’t.” He added that the fixed limit gives “weight” to the work of art; it has consequences.

Museums have a hard time coming to terms with the idea of ​​dynamic artwork, he said. “Even the idea of ​​Human One changing,” he said, “I talk to people at museums and they’re like, ‘Wait, I don’t know what that’s going to say?’ » » He added that museums and collectors will eventually embrace the “new capabilities” of dynamic digital art.

“There will be a trust in the artist to continue to say new things through digital art and change it in ways that continue to bring new beauty and challenge the owner,” he said . “Time can be a component of it, in a way that physical art just can’t be in itself, because it’s a state frozen in time. This can be more like a conversation.

Edited by Sébastien Sinclair