[chipotle_coyote]

Your observation:

> I bet someone would buy a preserved notebook of someone semi-famous with 5000 pages of drawings, mostly regardless of contents

...is, I think, kind of what the article author is trying to get at. Beeple is arguably semi-famous not for his art, but for getting a staggering price for these 5000 images. It's as if someone bought a preserved notebook with 5000 pages drawings for tens of millions of dollars, and the notebook belong to someone who is semi-famous because... they sold that notebook for tens of millions of dollars.

While I keep trying to give NFTs a benefit of the doubt -- I think it's great for creators to be paid for their work! -- I'm not convinced that introducing artificial scarcity is the way to go about it, and this sort of "it commanded a high price because it commanded a high price" recursiveness doesn't exactly give us a great example for why NFTs are not a peculiar techno-bubble.

[freeone3000]

They're a peculiar ART bubble. This is exactly how art galleries and fine art sales work. If this notebook was physical instead, nobody would be tremendously surprised -- if you were, you just don't get art.

[jjeaff]

Being one of the highest prices ever paid at auction for a piece of art, i think it would definitely raise a lot of eyebrows. If not more. At least as an nft, it can be attributed to the crypto bubble.

If an art book from a completely unknown artist sold his art at a Christie's auction for $69m, i think everyone would assume something nefarious was going on.

[incrudible]

Beeple isn't a "complete unknown", pretty much every 3D artist knows him, he's produced and published more digital art than anyone else. He's arguably the Andy Warhol of 3D rendering.

It's only now that somehow people found a way to make money from all these 3D renderings that the general public pays attention.

[Lazare]

> Beeple isn't a "complete unknown", pretty much every 3D artist knows him, he's produced and published more digital art than anyone else. He's arguably the Andy Warhol of 3D rendering.

I cannot stress enough how much of an overstatement that is. He's not the first, the biggest, the best, the most popular, or most prolific artist, he's not very well known in the space, and I think few, if any, professional 3D artists would hold him in high regard. And I would be surprised if, prior to the current media blitz, more than a small minority of 3D artists had actually even heard of him.

You're right, he's not a complete unknown, and he's certainly had some successes, but he's just one of an enormous number of artists working in that space. And by no means a standout along any metric.

[incrudible]

He's definitely the most prolific 3D artist, ever. Nobody else even comes close.

As for being "the best" or "the biggest" or "the most popular", these terms don't make sense even in non-digital art. Indeed, he is not any of these things, but neither was Andy Warhol.

It's not a coincidence that he, of all people, managed to sell 69 million dollars worth of cookie-cutter crap. That's what makes him the Andy Warhol of digital art. That's how he earned his place in art history.

As for the "enormous number" of other 3D artists, most of them are busy creating escapist stuff that will never get the attention of the art scene. To that end, skill just doesn't matter.

[Lazare]

> He's definitely the most prolific 3D artist, ever.

That is either false, or it's true in a way that is meaningless.

There are artists who have spent every day creating art. Daily art exercises and sketchbooks are commonplace. Some work in 3D, some have been working far longer than Beeple has.

If you mean "Beeple has been publishing a discrete piece of art, publicly, every day for longer than others", then I dunno, maybe? I'm not sure why that's anything to be proud of, or why anyone would aim to do that, but it might be true.

If you mean "he's created more pieces of 3D art than anyone else", then no, he's outstripped by literally thousands if not tens of thousands of people. The "winner" is probably some unknown previz animator working in an outsourced animation studio in India or China somewhere. :)

...of course, you might say "that doesn't count, I don't CARE about the stuff those guys do. Well, maybe I don't care about the stuff Beeple does.

> It's not a coincidence that he, of all people, managed to sell 69 million dollars worth of cookie-cutter crap.

It very likely isn't a coincidence. https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl...

> most of them are busy creating escapist stuff that will never get the attention of the art scene. To that end, skill just doesn't matter.

And I don't think the art scene thinks very much of Beeple, so I'm not sure what that proves.

[posterboy]

> As for the "enormous number" of other 3D artists, most of them are busy creating escapist stuff that will never get the attention of the art scene. To that end, skill just doesn't matter.

Ah, yeah it does matter. That's why they are busy cultivating said skill, and the content does not matter much. Nor does the so called art scene.

In fact, if you knew the etymology of escapade, you might see how it is a polar opposite to control. And if you know anything about randomness and crypto, you know it takes skill to maximize randomness, and to constrain it.

Maybe I misunderstad what "escapist" means, but I don't expect you to explain it.

[SiempreViernes]

Calling him the Andy Warhol of 3d rendering is to not understand what Warhol did.

Beeple is indeed famous for his quantity: occasionally he puts out something good, but the fame is almost entirely for the pieces that are "crazy good for having been done in under a day".

[pas]

What Warhol did?

[codeulike]

Any situation where money meets art doesn't make any sense. Is the original of a Banksy painting any nicer to look at than a copy? Is a rare vinyl pressing of a record any nicer to listen to than an mp3 you can download for free?

[brundolf]

The Banksy comparison puts this in an interesting light, actually. Someone like Banksy probably hates the idea of being enshrined in some wealthy person's gallery- in fact, when something he made did go on auction for $1.4m, it was rigged to shred itself afterward.

Beeple's art is similarly satirical (I'm not going to comment on its actual depth, but bear with me). What if Beeple were making a statement against rich-people-art-collection via the entire concept of NFTs? The sale itself is the parody.

I don't think that's what happened here, but it's interesting to think about

[the_af]

> Is a rare vinyl pressing of a record any nicer to listen to than an mp3 you can download for free?

I get your point but this isn't a particularly suitable example. Audiophiles have been arguing for ages that the quality of compressed mp3 and even CDs is not comparable to vinyl, that vinyl is "warmer", etc. Flamewars have been waged about this. So maybe not the best example?

[posterboy]

MP3 is lossy by design but pretty good. FLAC is lossless. Same question by analogy.

Vinyl as a physical medium may be literally warm though, about room temperature. But swinging air waves are pretty much the definition of heat, so...

[the_af]

The point is that, for a lot of audiophiles, this question:

> Is a rare vinyl pressing of a record any nicer to listen to than an mp3 you can download for free?

is answered with a very loud "yes!". I thought this was common knowledge here at HN. I've certainly seen this debate multiple times here. You don't have to pick a side or argue technicalities, you just need to be aware that for many people one format is indeed nicer than the other.

[tim333]

Well a different sort of sense. Price is not just about how nice something is - it's about things like supply and demand too. There is a limited supply of original Banksys and an infinite supply of copies.

[codeulike]

But why is the original special? Just because people choose to believe that it is.

[chipotle_coyote]

Sure, there's a real sense in which that's absolutely true. What I think the article was eyebrow-raising at wasn't primarily the digital nature of this transaction as much as the extremely high price paid. An original by Picasso is going to be worth more -- orders of magnitude more -- than an original by, say, Joan Erbe, a painter who was very well known around the Baltimore area and is "notable" enough to have her own Wikipedia page. Erbe's originals seem to generally go for around $500–800.

I know people are saying "but Beeple is known!" -- and I'm sure he is! I hadn't heard of him, but the chances are you haven't heard of Joan Erbe. What I'm suggesting is that Beeple is, in the wider world, closer to Erbe than he is to Picasso. If this had been a $2-3M transaction rather than a $69M transaction, it would still be in the news and raising eyebrows because of the NFT nature, but it would seem a lot less... bubble-ish.

[codeulike]

Oh yeah $69m is silly money, no doubt about it. Part bubble and part demonstrative crypto evangelism on the part of the bidders.

[tim333]

Well, because people think it is which comes down to psychology, culture etc.

It seems quite time honoured though. People probably thought an original cave painting was cooler than a copy of it.

[selfhoster11]

Beeple was semi-famous long before he auctioned these images.

[chipotle_coyote]

In the non-digital art world, "semi-famous" doesn't get you Picasso prices.