See Beeple’s $69 million digital artwork for much less in a new book
Remember the non-fungible token (NFT) digital artwork that auction house Christie’s sold for more than $69 million?
Mike Winkelmann of North Fond du Lac, known professionally as Beeple, created that artwork, a digital collage called “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days.” NFT means that Christie’s winning bidder owns the original, authenticated digital artwork that Winklemann created.
But for the rest of us, there’s a new consolation prize: “Beeple: Everydays, the First 5000 Days,” a new art book from Abrams’ Cernunnos publishing house. It is listed at $65, a few orders of magnitude less than the singular NFT.
“Everydays” is a project that Winkelmann started in 2007: He created a new work of art every day, and posted it online. The digital NFT is a collage of all 5,000 images. The new book also collects all 5,000 images, a significant number of them in sizes larger than the cell phone screen-sized versions many people saw online.
So “Everydays” the book is a visual documentation of Winkelmann’s growth as an artist, as he challenged himself first to improve his drawing skills, and then to increase his mastery of various digital tools, such as OctaneRender. Many of the early images are simple (Winkelmann calls the 2007-’11 cohort “the REALLY crappy years”), but over time they grow in complexity. Around 2015, he began adding human figures to his fantasy scenes, initially for scale, but later sometimes as the primary visual interest. More recent satirical images feature a recurring cast including Kim Jong-un, Super Mario, Pikachu, “Star Wars” characters and Buzz Lightyear, which Winkelmann calls “an analogy for this American over-awareness and stupidity.”
If you want to try this at home, Winkelmann described his process this way in an interview included in the book:
“Usually when I sit down, I’ll look through images on the internet for maybe 10 minutes. I’ll look through them really quickly, looking for anything that might be the first spark. What is the first minimal viable product that’s different from What I’ve done before is something I might be interested in and is something I can spend some time on?”
Winkelmann now lives in South Carolina. He also makes short films and has worked on concert images for Justin Bieber, One Direction, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj and other artists.
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