‘This Is Going to Be a Billion-Dollar Piece Someday’: The Buyer of the $69 Million Beeple NFT on Why It’s the Greatest Artwork in a Generation artnet news, march 12, 2021
It looks sorta like a flotilla of plastic refuge accumulating on the ocean or maybe a compacted street carnival, surely nothing very appealing and where is this thing? The last part is easy because it isn’t really anywhere and it’s not a thing, it exists as a digital conglomerate only. Imbedded in its grainy pixilation is an endless slide show of snapshots, a tar pit of blind associations. There’s only one thing interesting about it and that’s the humongous price tag, and ironically it's been paid for with crypto cash. It doesn’t resemble a work of art so much as a brazen swindle, and yet perhaps this transaction is not so different from the regular commerce in modern masters. Millions of dollars are assigned to replicated signature icons on a volatile and arbitrary, ethically-arid and opaque market. It’s all crypto.
This sordid media event isn’t really worth a busy person’s time and attention, and that’s the charm of it don’t you see? The image is so meaningless and the price so outrageous that the average person won’t notice the hand is really in their pocket and the art is being stolen from their wall. Just like your typical crime syndicate, the high-roller art market will eventually burn down the territory and rounders tend to abuse their golden goose if you know what I mean. Reckoning is in the air. The taxman has been sniffing around their phony philanthropy, and the dirty source of all that sanitized black-tie money, so civic minded, is also being questioned. As a sign of the panic that’s just around the corner, major museums have suddenly started casting excess modern masters overboard to lighten their liability. They call it ‘deaccessioning’ and over night multi-million dollar works of art, mostly by old white guys, start backing up on eBay.
They’ve finally reduced the notion of art to a financial feeding-frenzy over something with no material existence, so maybe it’s time to let multi-million dollar art just float away. Those huge paintings were meant for museum walls and not for houses, and their grandiose ambition comes through loud and clear despite otherwise meaningless drips and smears. Sometimes salaried artists at the university attempt to emulate some current trend and people who subscribe to art magazines may discuss, but self-supporting artists surviving out in the community don’t usually follow the trades, and there are reasons. For one thing those large over-powering abstractions in the museum look a lot less impressive room size, and there’s a museum in Ft Worth still trying to unload its easel-painted Pollocks, small, dark, and infinitely sad.
Any artist who makes the effort on their own, finds a room and buys their own supplies, most likely won’t have time to chase a mercurial sensibility in a luxury art market far away. If the artists working other jobs to support their art didn’t have a need and desire to say something to those around them they probably wouldn’t bother. With seventy million dollar bullshit being celebrated on the evening news it isn’t easy to even have their voices heard, but that’s changing. The artists have been here all along, but the public is seeing more of their work these days. At some point seventy million dollars for non-existing art won’t seem as relevant or as interesting as having a local artist or two up on the wall in houses all down the block.
