My thoughts:
Look, I’m biased in this. I’ve known beeple for years as an artist, even so far as to reach out to him and buy licenses of some of his artwork for me to use as book cover art.
Yeah, those are mine. And the cover art is from beeple, I paid him a modest sum so I can use it. His art and his work ethic has been very inspiring for me. Even before I became a 3D artist, I was amazed by some of his work. As he says himself, this is beeple crap. Meaning he just puts out something Everyday, that last one being the key word. Most of it is average, some is crap. But some, like the ones I’ve decided to license and many others that you have seen over the internet, is truly amazing. And that’s what I admire, his work ethic of going at it every single day without pause, relentlessly chipping against something until you got a piece of art in your hands.
It was truly inspiring for me and when I started doing 3D art, I went at it at the same pace, creating almost one new piece per day. I managed to do around 200 in a year on a crappy computer that took 14 hours to make a noisy render, but I did it. You can find my art gallery on Artstation and my NFTs on OpenSea.
Now, I also wanted to bid on some of his NFT, but it quickly went out of my price range, so I’ll just applause from the back. As for the Infinite Money Glitch that is explained in this video, I like to think that Beeple wasn’t in on this. I’m tempted to call it a scam, but it’s really not. Like Andrej says, people do it in all parts of life, buy as much as they can from an artists, hype him up, build up scarcity and profit. It’s nothing that an art gallery wouldn’t do themselves. This is just some crypto geek MetaKovan who did the same thing, did it in a clever way, and drove up the price of the NFT for his Metapurse users and his own pocket. Beeple also got like 2% from the shares.
To be honest, when I heard the news I was elated for Beeple. He’s worth the hype, and if you’re gonna hype up any shitty artist out there for millions upon millions of dollars, it might as well be one who’s worth it.
But yeah, I kept looking for the catch in this 69 million dollar sale. MetaKovan kept saying that, oh, it represents time, and 5000 days or close to 15 years of creation and you can’t put a price on that, but apparently you pretty damn well can.
Anyway, this video did make a lightbulb light up in my mind. Yeah, the technique is apparent now. Not many can replicate it, and there will be only one digital artist such as beeple. But I don’t think it’s an argument against NFTs and eliminating the gatekeepers for artists to earn a living from their work. Because for every news story about some yet-another-hyped-up NFT sale, there are a thousand artists discovering this and getting direct with their fanbase, creating for fun and the amount of profit that they’re worth, and creating a new independent marketplace where you can truly earn a living with your art and the support of your fans.
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