Side note: in this case, ample following does not necessarily imply art value.
It’s easy to get stuck in wanting to create but fearing your art will not be as good as what pro artists produce, so you procrastinate on it forever. Folks start dailies (beeple is far from the only one) to force themselves to improve quality through sheer quantity. Other folks follow them to get inspired, and a major component of that is seeing that what a dailies guy makes is, to put it bluntly, not that good and you can picture yourself making something even better.
So, someone posts a daily -> people realize it’s not necessarily so great in absolute terms, but still they comment good things and encourage the artist -> people see that a mediocre work gets positive comments and feel safer creating and publishing something of their own, eventually perpetuating the loop.
As art communities grow, so do follower/like counts, and platform’s algorithms pick up on that and start promoting these to non-artists from the outside who can get mixed up in this mini-bubble: “who’s that with so many followers? I’ll join in, with that number of likes their artwork must be good.”
(To clarify, I don’t mean to say that any artist doing dailies is ultimately mediocre, just the very idea behind this method is such that you do one per day and can’t strive for perfection.)
I mean discussing this is going to be pointless because art is in the eye of the beholder. The fact that the author didn't even mention what their favorites were of beeple's work indicates pretty clearly to me that they're viewing his collection through a narrow, maybe ivory tower, potentially envious lens of what it means to be a "real artist", and instead they wrote this as a clickbait hit-piece for exposure. The armchair psychologist in me envisions a sense of insult to someone well educated in fine arts with numerous accolades that such a frivolous, amateur collection art could be rewarded so greatly.
At the end of the day, it's much easier to be a critic than an artist, and despite that fact, this is still a lazy ass critique, especially because it glosses almost entirely over the fact that beeple was precisely about creating SOMETHING every day. There has to be.. something that can be said about that, in the same way that people somehow find a reason for a canvas painted entirely one color worthy of being featured in the MOMA.
And even if the actual art won't "age well" (whatever that means to the author), beeple is going down in the art / history books ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think the art itself represents the 'ivory tower' in the art world more than this essay about it. Look at the past century in the art world... Duchamp's toilet, 'Piss Christ', Warhol's art films starring cross-dressers and druggies, Carolee Schneemann’s 'Interior Scroll', Maplethorpe's 'golden shower' photos. There's no shocking anyone now. Some Russian artist literally nailed his balls to Red Square a couple years back.
I think there are some decent points in your comment, but on a gut level I figure the author just found some of this artist's examples cringeworthy and I relate a little.
It’s easy to get stuck in wanting to create but fearing your art will not be as good as what pro artists produce, so you procrastinate on it forever. Folks start dailies (beeple is far from the only one) to force themselves to improve quality through sheer quantity. Other folks follow them to get inspired, and a major component of that is seeing that what a dailies guy makes is, to put it bluntly, not that good and you can picture yourself making something even better.
So, someone posts a daily -> people realize it’s not necessarily so great in absolute terms, but still they comment good things and encourage the artist -> people see that a mediocre work gets positive comments and feel safer creating and publishing something of their own, eventually perpetuating the loop.
As art communities grow, so do follower/like counts, and platform’s algorithms pick up on that and start promoting these to non-artists from the outside who can get mixed up in this mini-bubble: “who’s that with so many followers? I’ll join in, with that number of likes their artwork must be good.”