The Washington Post Magazine - USA (2022-03-27)

6 MARCH27, 2022

Just Asking

“This could be that moment for digital

art where people fully look at this stuff

as just another art form, like sculpture

or photography.”

INTERVIEW AND PHOTOGRAPH BY KK OTTESEN

Mike Winkelmann, 40, known professionally as Beeple, is a digital

artist whose work includes “ everydays,” a practice of creating a new

piece each day, which he has done for nearly 15 years. A compilation of

that work, “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” sold as an NFT, or non-

fungible token, at auction in 2021 for $69 million — one of the most

expensive NFTs sold and third-highest price paid for the work of any

living artist. He lives in Charleston, S.C., with his wife and children.

Let’s start with your NFT journey — from how you recently

first heard about NFTs to then selling one just a few months

later for tens of millions of dollars.

In the summer and early fall of 2020, my fans kept messaging

me saying, “You got to check out this NFT thing.” It seemed very

complicated at first because I wasn’t a crypto person. It was like,

“I don’t think this is for me; this is some weird crypto thing.”

Then I started to recognize names of artists that I knew and that,

to be quite honest, I was more popular than. And they were

selling things where it’s like: “Well, that is a surprising amount

of money for something that I didn’t think was worth any

money.” This is when it clicked that there would be a moment

where digital art was respected. Other art forms had gone

through the same process where they existed for a long time and

nobody really thought of them as art, and then they became art.

Banksy with graffiti: “That’s not art, it’s vandalism,” and then,

“Oh, yeah, I guess it is art.” Kaws with vinyl collectibles. This

could be that moment for digital art where people fully look at

this stuff as just another art form, like sculpture or photography.

Just another medium. S o I think it’s very interesting that there

was so much pushback like: “This is not art.”

Can you talk about some of that pushback?

I think what was tough for a lot of people is I seemed to come

out of nowhere and then sold this thing for a ridiculous sum of

money. Like: “We didn’t vet this person; we didn’t have any say

in whether this person should be allowed to sell something for

this amount of money.” Because to come up in the traditional art

world, you have to be vetted by a very small number of

gatekeepers. You really only had to convince maybe 50 to a

hundred people that your work was valuable, and if all those

people agreed, the sky is the limit. Versus I convinced 2 million

people that don’t really have that much power, in a way, that my

work was valuable. I had millions of followers before this, so

social media and word of mouth of, “Oh, this, guy is doing

something interesting” — that’s what caused it to happen.

Can you talk about your everyday series?

In early 2007 I saw another artist named Tom Judd, who is

an illustrator in the United Kingdom, and he was doing a sketch-

a-day in a notebook, so I could see the full kind of progression

and I could see, okay, you definitely got better. Really the only

secret, the real trick, to this everyday thing is it just gets you to

work way more. There’s no secret beyond that — just working

more. My view of a successful day is posting a JPEG on the

Internet. That’s it. Posting any picture of literally anything.

So going in with a realistic expectation that every day you are

not going to produce some masterpiece. Every day you are not

going to be inspired; most days I’m not. I’m a normal person and

I worked all day on other crap and now I come home and it’s

like, “Do I really want to spend two or three more hours on the

computer?” Not really. But when you have this project where you

have this momentum built up, that momentum really helps carry

you through those days, like, “Okay, guy, sit d own here, we’ve got

to do something.”

I would love for people to look at art as more like this daily

practice. Like exercise, where it is just something that you do

and there’s no pressure and you just have fun for a little bit. I t

doesn’t need to be loaded with so much: “What does this say

about me, and what are people going to think?” Art doesn’t need

to be that.

KK Ottesen is a contributor to the magazine. This interview has been

edited and condensed. For a longer version, visit wapo.st/magazine.

Mike Winkelmann