Beeple with his artwork On a chain.
Photo: Zachary Small
Deep in the swampland suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina, a road winds through palm trees and culminates at an unmarked industrial complex wedged between Budweiser and Walmart distribution centers. Inside is a 50,000-square-foot production studio with museum-quality galleries where more than a dozen employees frolic with doodads and dark hallways are lit by nearly 150 TV monitors. Ambient music blares through the speakers as the boss, Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, sits in his office with his back to six cable news channels playing on mute. The adjacent wall is decorated with a framed portrait of the video game character Mario undergoing a bloody C-section with a green 1-UP mushroom emerging from his uterus.
“It’s one of my favourites,” says the artist, patting the plumber’s bare chest.
This is Space, the crazy laboratory of the world’s richest digital artist. Beeple was able to afford a $10 million renovation after a compilation of 5,000 daily sketches, made over 14 years, sold at a March 2021 Christie’s auction for $69 million to an angel investor named Vignesh Sundaresan as a non-fungible token, or NFT, the blockchain darling turned speculative asset of crypto nouveaux riches. Within a year, the technology became a $40 billion industry, and Beeple was its talisman, hoping to shoot both the art world and the crypto-economy to the moon. “This has the potential to be this generation’s work of art,” Anand Venkateswaran, who runs the Metapurse crypto fund with Sundaresan, said shortly after Sundaresan’s purchase.
Now the crypto market is in tatters, with nearly $2 trillion removed from the market in the last few weeks, bringing the NFT market down with it. But Winkelmann has no regrets. “I was never an NFT evangelist,” he tells me. “What I am is an evangelist for digital art. The sales aspect is a means to an end. I would like not to sell because that is the least fun part, although it is necessary. But I’m not a crypto bro, because there’s actually substance to what I’ve done.” Whether Winkelmann creates works of substance or glorified JPEGS, as his critics claim, is the question that hangs over him as he moves to another speculative arena, this one in the midst of a decade-long boom: the traditional art market.
Blockchain messiah was always an odd position to occupy for a fiscally conservative, middle-aged graphic designer from Wisconsin who never traded anything but stocks and who made his living as a freelancer helping produce Super Bowl halftime shows and concerts. Winkelmann, now 41, still has that Midwestern charm, though it’s often punctuated by the kind of profanity you’d expect from a teenage boy. Still, it’s perfect casting. “The guy looks like a high school math teacher who plays on his computer every single day,” says Meghan Doyle, an auction cataloger who helped organize the deal when she was at Christie’s. “Buyers could respect that kind of persistence and diligence.”
Winkelmann, who had previously sold his art for $100 a pop, auctioned NFTs for millions of dollars just months after learning about the technology. But he also warned that most tokens were risky bets that could easily fall to zero. The summer of his breakthrough, Winkelmann gave his NFT collectors underwear packaged for “mid-adult anus,” and prepared them to shit. By the time the market closed, Winkelmann, who has only bought about ten NFTs for himself, was ready to move on. “Kubben is a shrewd businessman,” says Noah Davis, the former Christie’s digital specialist responsible for turning Winkelmann into a movement.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who is the director of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin, Italy, has become Beeple’s guru. “Carolyn got in touch shortly after the auction. She thought I was an algorithm, Winkelmann says with a laugh. “Instantly we clicked.” She led the artist on a grand European tour this spring and summer, introducing him to an art world that he hopes will form a new base of collectors. They partied across the continent, first at the Venice Biennale, then Documenta Fifteen in Germany and Art Basel in Switzerland.
The daily sketches, which are known as All days, has its appeal. They are like portals into a subconscious overloaded with mass media, most of them created in a couple of hours using ready-made assets in the digital modeling program Cinema 4D. Look long enough at these ruins of video game characters and penis pumps and you can find messages about gun violence, authoritarianism, billionaire hubris and the dystopian promises of tech companies.
Not everyone is convinced of their merit. Writes in New York Times, Jason Farago declared the battle of good taste over. Beeple had won: “It is his culture now, dejected but triumphant, where childish pleasures can never be questioned.” When I read this quote to Winkelmann, he simply throws up his hands and laughs.
Winkelmann chooses his subjects as a tabloid editor. “I’ve always been a big news junkie,” he says. During my visit, Boris Johnson announced his resignation as UK Prime Minister. “I thought, Hmmm, maybe I’ll make a cross of someone’s head,says Winkelmann. So he constructs a crucifix on a lawn made up of about five dozen versions of Johnson’s face. Pray for Bojo becomes the title, which refers to a The Simpsons episode where Homer gets a monkey helper named Mojo who becomes lazy and overweight. It’s classic Beeple, both bracing and a bit on the nose.
Winkelmann recently created his first physical work, human one, a video sculpture. It is a rotating box that houses an astronaut walking across an imagined world on a 24-hour loop that will be continuously updated by the artist throughout his life. A new scene recently placed the astronaut (a Beeple avatar), glowing with the colors of the Ukrainian flag, in a war zone. The sculpture was purchased at a November auction by Switzerland-based collector Ryan Zurrer for nearly $29 million; it is currently displayed at the Christov-Bakargiev Museum opposite a painting by Francis Bacon. He has bigger projects planned. The huge hangar in his studio complex will become a stage for immersive art installations. “I would love for the room to feel like you’re walking into a video game,” he says. “What would the room look like if it was hell? If you were to walk in and there were piles of corpses on the screens? Then you can immediately flip a switch and make it feel like heaven.”
Charleston is the incubation site for these projects. During my visit there are at least five sculptures that can be compared to Human One as well as a giant emoji chained to a wooden pallet and a rubber baby pickled inside a large jar. Winkelmann walks into the conference room and talks about the dangers of government surveillance online and the spread of misinformation by extremist groups. A father of two young children, he is concerned with the future as well as being more than a flash in the crypto pan.
“I’m focused on legacy now,” he says. “It’s about the real crap that people will care about 200 years from now. Who cares about a stupid auction anymore? I do not care.”
