Jim Carrey secretly dropped NFTs under his Web3 alias
The Alpha:
- On May 9, 2022, iconic comedian, actor and producer Jim Carrey secretly dropped an NFT collection at the Foundation, according to information shared with nft now via Big Head Club, the Web3 studio behind NFTs.
- Carrey released the collection, called Germinations, under his Web3 alias Garden bean. It includes five animated, autobiographical paintings by Carrey, each featuring audio of the actor narrating the characters depicted in the pieces.
- The NFT collection experiments with how society perceives and interacts with fame, art and value. The collection’s reveal also hints at upcoming projects from Carrey under his String Bean alias.
Why it matters
While Jim Carrey publicly released his “first” NFTs at SuperRare in June and August, it turns out that he had actually already released an NFT collection at Foundation months before, titled Germinations.
Carrey has remained a cultural institution in his own right for decades, and Germinations is about that very fact.
“We tried to play with the crowd,” explained Mack Flavelle, CEO of the Big Head Club, in an interview with nft now. “You’re literally looking at Jim Carrey’s face. You hear Jim Carrey narrate [these paintings]. And you don’t know it’s Jim Carrey. It was part of the play. And it worked.”
The five animated paintings in the Germinations collection are 30 seconds to a minute long and feature audio from Carrey himself as he inhabits the role of each unique character. Some are gloomy, others are erratic, but each is arresting. To create the NFTs, Carrey recorded short videos of himself in character, froze the videos, and constructed paintings from these video stills. He then provided the visuals and audio to the Big Head Club team, who then animated the paintings.
“They’re literally the voices inside his head,” Flavelle continued. “They’re different characters he hears. So when you look at them, realize that each one of them is him painting himself. They’re all autobiographical paintings. They’re just isms of him.”
Flavelle, who co-founded massive Web3 successes like Dapper Labs and CryptoKitties before starting Big Head Club, noted that because Carrey is already an established public figure, they were free from the constraints of optimizing the project for financial gain. This allowed him and Carrey to explore project ideas that the two simply found compelling. After working together for several months, Flavelle said he came away from the project struck by Carrey’s intensity and drive for the creative process.
“He has an imperative, a need to create,” Flavelle said of Carrey. “He has a need to produce art. And this new medium became really interesting to him. [With NFTs], there were some new and interesting things happening in art that were not in his area before. He is a very skilled painter. But animation in painting is not something he had seen before.”
During project discussions, the two were ready to abandon the endeavor, as neither felt satisfied with where things were going creatively. Ironically, the idea of an anonymous release came out of this frustration.
“We started talking about how boring it is that Jim Carrey makes art and no one looks at the art,” Flavelle recalled. “All they’re doing is focusing on the fact that a celebrity made it. I asked [Carrey] if he had heard about the Washington DC subway experiment. I thought, let’s play with it. Let us explore you with art.”
Flavelle refers to a 2007 experiment in which world-renowned conductor and violinist Joshua Bell anonymously played the first movement of Bach’s Violin Concerto at Union Station in Washing DC for passersby during the morning rush hour.
The experiment has proven to be revealing. When Germinations dropped, Flavelle announced it to the Big Head Club community on Twitter and Discord as a unique project they supported and thought people would find interesting. The purpose was also to assess how the community would respond to an out-of-the-blue fundraising drop recommended by the Big Head Club team.
“We just put it there,” Flavelle explained. “With his image on every painting, with his voice on every single piece. We were featured on the Foundation so we could make sure a ton of people saw these. If no one knew it was Jim Carrey, but no one saw the art, it would not been a cool story.”
The two left subtle hints and clues to Carrey’s identity on both String Bean’s Twitter account and bio page on the Foundation. They present visitors with an acrostic where the first letter of each line spells out a sentence. In Carrey’s case, the biography reads as follows:
Joyful, immersive, manic,
Whimsical, asinine, underground.
Heretical, Eternal, Ramponcious, Expansive.
Jim Carrey as String Bean
At the time of writing, it was the best-selling piece in the collection The bottles that empty me, which a collector bought for 0.55 ETH. Carrey and Flavelle did not discuss revealing the secret for several years, but finally felt it was time to tell the world who was behind the project.
“It’s time for the world to know that Jim Carrey is String Bean,” Flavelle said, “And he’s excited about it.”
What will be next
When asked what’s next for Carrey’s String Bean explorations, Flavelle gave a cryptic answer. “There’s more to come from String Bean,” he said. “This isn’t the end. It’s a beginning. I don’t know if we’re going to explore [these new ideas] like Jim Carrey. I think “Jim Carrey” may expire and String Bean may be all that’s left. I think the acid of reality has dissolved what is Jim Carrey, the artist, and what remains is String Bean. That need to create is deep within him. And it’s not just a compliment. It is the blessing and the curse. He is obsessed with work. And most of the people I work with are not.”
The String Bean experiment provides some unique insight into how society chooses to value the fame that Flavelle speaks so soberly about. It is also a reminder that celebrity is perhaps less satisfying and rich than society makes it out to be. Speaking to nft now, Flavelle noted that he had never seen Carrey as “light and happy” as he did when they released Germinations, which is telling in itself.
How Carrey explores his creative energies in the sunset hours of a long Hollywood career will benefit anyone who appreciates his work. Hopefully his future projects in the NFT space will be as conceptually playful as Germinations was.
“My full name is Jim Eugene Carrey,” Carrey said in a written statement provided exclusively to nft now regarding the project. “Growing up, people called me Jimmy-Gene The String Bean because of my long thin and abnormally flexible build. People try to define and separate each other in many ways, some lovingly and some not [endearing] – but we are not separated. Each character we meet is another side of the same precious diamond. I try to find all those characters inside me. Someday I might release the vocal and facial character study videos that this group of NFTs are based on. I like to use original methods that don’t have a clear category yet…for better or for worse.”
