[tablespoon]

> I'm not sure I get this point of view.

I think that Beeple is basically just a rando-tier DeviantArt/Tumblr artist, and much of his art is cringe to boot. Since someone purportedly paid the equivalent of $69 million in ETH for it, it's noteworthy that there's no there there.

[viraptor]

Cringe doesn't mean bad - I would say 90% of Jim'll paint it is cringe and awesome https://jimllpaintit.tumblr.com/ And having 5000 daily pieces is art by itself.

[tablespoon]

> Cringe doesn't mean bad - I would say 90% of Jim'll paint it is cringe and awesome https://jimllpaintit.tumblr.com/

There are different kinds of cringe though.

Also, Jim'll paint it definitely looks like he's more talented than Beeple.

> And having 5000 daily pieces is art by itself.

Quantity over quality?

[viraptor]

> Quantity over quality?

No, performance art. The act of creating that many not-terrible pieces is meaningful on its own.

[alpaca128]

Well, "not-terrible" is not what I would use to describe this though. Then again I'm not a fan of "you just don't understand this random mix of poo and paint" kind of art. No, I don't get why for example 5000 digital scribbles are more valuable or meaningful than 5000 random posts from deviantart. Or Dilbert comic strips or most recent memes on Reddit, which at least are funny at times. How is this act of creating subpar images supposedly more meaningful than a hoarder's decades-long collection of stuff in their home?

Am I wrong to find creations less valuable when I cannot enjoy them? Call it performance art or whatever else you like, it's still nothing more than an overpriced collection of an artist's shitposts. But alright, it's not my money.

[jjeaff]

Except they are all pretty terrible.

[flycaliguy]

Yes but they did grow into a hugely popular Instagram account so let’s let this age a bit. Frankly I find people with the assumption that it won’t age well to be the most pretentious in the room.

[yellowapple]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Whether I want to associate with said beholder is another question entirely.

[TeMPOraL]

> Quantity over quality?

Isn't focusing on quantity the only reliable way to improve quality? See also, the usual Ira Glass quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to....

[chevill]

Becoming a great artist usually means creating art every day. It depends on how you go about creating art though. You need focused studies. You need to push your boundaries. There's a shockingly low amount of technical improvement in this artist's work compared to other long-term online portfolios I've seen.

[throwanem]

Focusing on quality is the only reliable way to improve quality. The use of quantity, in the "10,000 hours" or "2000 words a day, every day" style of formulation, is to provide ample opportunity for practice and improvement, but quantity alone never can suffice. With no focus on quality, all it gets you is the same work over and over.

[spoonjim]

If you throw a ball at a target 10,000 times you will get more accurate even if you don’t do any deliberate thinking about your mechanics.

[throwanem]

Not everything is as easy as throwing a ball.

[perl4ever]

There's a writer who did a lot of short stories and I had read a couple of them decades ago and thought they were some of the best of all time. Also, they won awards and stuff. I really placed them on a pedestal.

But more recently, I found that a multivolume collection of all the short stories is available, and I started reading them. It was really disillusioning because it wasn't just that the average quality was a lot lower than the famous ones, the cringeworthiness started to extend to my image of the author.

It's possible that over time the later work ended up being uniformly brilliant, but I didn't finish.

[SiempreViernes]

Sure, but the point of the practice is to produce quality, and then display the good bits of your production because mixing the few good ones into the deludge of average works isn't very helpful for the audience.

[perl4ever]

It's just a fact that people sometimes are interested in artists as well as or more than the art they make. The not-so-great art may not be of interest to you, or some particular artist may not want to release it, but it seems to me that probably some people want something more comprehensive for similar reasons that they may read biographies.

I'm indifferent to Michelangelo's art, but I have read The Agony and the Ecstasy. In this particular case, a less filtered view of his art doesn't disillusion me because I'm not especially crazy about any of it. But he was famous, influential, and technically capable, so as a person was of interest to me.

[scsilver]

Like no artists have released behind the scenes work or b-sides.

[SiempreViernes]

Not as their main work no, the very concept of b-side implies there is an a-side that has been more carefully curated.

[dragonwriter]

> Cringe doesn't mean bad

But “rando-tier” does; the description wasn't just “cringe”, but rando-tier and often cringe.

[camillomiller]

This is a great example showing what a coherent, relevant corpus of pop culture art is. Not Beeple’s.

[ghego1]

Thanks for this! I really like his work, I think I'll buy a poster :-)

[sneak]

They didn't buy the art, they bought an NFT that represents a hash of the file containing all of the art in question.

This doesn't convey any property rights to the art's copyright, unless the purchase also included those separately from the NFT, which, of course, happens all of the time without the NFT silliness and doesn't require NFTs at all.

[techdragon]

Wait... the only way this NFT stuff made any sense to me was if they were actually selling the copyrights via NFT... this was actually just a $69 million version of calling “dibs” like some kind of schoolchild? WTF!

[Lazare]

Yes.

Buying an NFT isn't like buying a piece of art you can put on your wall, it's like buying a signed, numbered, limited edition card that has the address of where the actual owner has the art on his wall.

...except the address might be wrong. Or become wrong when the actual art changes hands, or the owner dies. Also nothing stops the artist from making a new print run of the cards. Or someone who isn't the artist making a print run of the cards.

But I mean, even if Beeple sells another thousand NFTs referencing the same artwork, and even if this NFT quickly ends up with a broken URL, and even if the buyer of the NFT didn't end up with any ownership rights to the artwork itself...

...at least they can feel pleased they bought the first NFT issued by Beeple with this particular URL on it. That's gotta be worth something! (...$69 million, apparently...)

[mavhc]

Like bitcoin, the only way it makes sense is if you can trick someone else into buying it off you for more money later, thus you're incentivised to promote the idea everywhere.

[BTCOG]

Wrong. Don't bring Bitcoin into this. This is an Ethereum scam thing.

[ric2b]

Or gold, or dollars, or art, etc.

[mavhc]

Gold has a use, dollars are backed by a government. Owning original art is bragging/speculation. I read that the very expensive art that people buy isn't even hung on their walls to look at, they get a copy made for people to see, and put the original in a vault.

[ric2b]

> Gold has a use

But I won't be happy if people stop buying gold and all I can do with it is sell it to some electronics manufacturer for 1% of the price I paid for it.

> dollars are backed by a government

Sounds great, what can I do if people stop accepting dollars in trade?

> Owning original art is bragging/speculation.

Agreed, so nothing new.

[codeulike]

Its somewhat like paying a lot of money for a rare vinyl record when the mp3 can be downloaded for free

[acdha]

Even that’s not conveying how silly this is: in your analogy you’d at least have the option to natter on about how the vinyl sound was so much warmer and truer to the artist’s vision, as audiophiles have done for decades.

This is more or less you saying you paid for a receipt showing you paid to have a hash of the same MP3 everyone else is listening to.

[rsynnott]

It's one step beyond that; it's paying for some people on the internet to _pretend_ that you own the record. There is no actual literal transfer of ownership at all.

[nonameiguess]

It's paying a lot of money for an unenforceable extra-legal claim to ownership of a slip of paper with directions to a building that may have once contained a not-at-all rare copy of a song that was only ever recorded as an mp3 to begin with.

[beckingz]

It's more like paying a lot of money for a mp3 recording of a rare vinyl record.

[mc32]

It’s like buying a digital photo of lottery ticket that’s already been played but played by a celebrity, let’s say.

[sneak]

Buying an NFT (by itself) does not make you party to a legal contract or agreement, which is the only way to transfer ownership rights in IP. It just makes you the owner of the NFT.

This is why you see people making the comparison to sports trading cards. You're not buying the person, you're buying the piece of cardboard.

[Hjfrf]

It's more like buying a receipt, not the good itself.

They can display the receipt but have no more right to the art than you or me.

[tim333]

I think in this case they did get property rights:

>NFT carries no rights, express or implied, other than property rights for the lot (specifically, digital artwork tokenized by the NFT.. https://www.christies.com/pdf/onlineonly/ECOMMERCE%20CONDITI...

So no rights apart from the property rights (Christies T&Cs)

[sneak]

The lot was the NFT. I don't believe that the text you quoted indicates that they get ownership of the copyright of the art. The art wasn't auctioned, the NFT was.

[tim333]

The catalogue says "EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS will be delivered directly from Beeple to the buyer, accompanied by a unique NFT"

So presumably an image file and the NFT. Bit vague on copyright.

[vagrantJin]

Beeple is a modern master of his craft. He can host it on Deviant art, xvideos or bestgore if he so pleases. Doesn't take away the craft and the endless hours of sweat put into its mastery.

Even picasso was alleged to have told a diner to pay him an absurd amount of money for his napkin sketch - because it took him a few decades to get to draw like he did.

And I think Picasso's artworks are trash.

[swiley]

People make a big deal about frames and galleries. Maybe the hosting service isn't quite so important but it's not irrelevant.

[vagrantJin]

Why yes ofcourse. Let's worry about the stuff that doesn't take years to master. Silly me.