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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I get this point of view. We know that famous artists did random rude and badly-satirical drawings for fun. Their dick drawings were contained in some old notebooks and trashed. But I bet someone would buy a preserved notebook of someone semi-famous with 5000 pages of drawings, mostly regardless of contents. This is pretty much the equivalent of that - daily fun which went to the internet bin rather than real one.

Some examples are really reaching too: "it’s fun to draw black people" - what is it an example for? What is the article author trying to point out there?

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> 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.

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.

> 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?

> Quantity over quality?

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

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.

Except they are all pretty terrible.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

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

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.

> 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....

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Not everything is as easy as throwing a ball.

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.

> Cringe doesn't mean bad

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

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Or gold, or dollars, or art, etc.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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...)

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)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

What Warhol did?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escapist_fiction

https://www.artstation.com/?sort_by=community

> 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.

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

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/False-D...

> The "winner" is probably some unknown previz animator working in an outsourced animation studio in India or China somewhere. :)

I get it, you want have some sort of "justice" argument. I don't. Your winner's prize is getting to work overtime. Beeple's prize is 69 million dollars.

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

The fact that this guy is shady doesn't really mean anything, there were other less shady bidders as well. This was a auction at Christie's, so it was about as legit as an art auction gets, whatever that means.

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

If there's anything the art scene respects, it's money.

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?

> 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?

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

  What is the article author trying to point out there?

That the artist is a bit dim, I should think.

Certainly. You can tell based on the complete lack of success and following they've had, plus some amateur / shitty work they did in the past.

  You can tell based on the complete lack of success 
  and following they've had

If the world were a perfect meritocracy that would settle it.

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.

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.)

So like many of the world's most celebrated artists during their lifetime...

A ⊂ B doesn't imply B ⊂ A.

I'm not sure this is a good metric ?

There are successful artists that you could say this of, and unsuccessful artists who are talented.

> a preserved notebook of someone semi-famous with 5000 pages of drawings

That is the crux of it - will Beeple be semi-famous in 200 years? Doubtful. There isn't anything here that is particularly noteworthy to stand the test of time... the unique difference in this work is its delivery, not its content. (In that sense, the buyers were correct to not care about the content.)

It does deserve some recognition for being the first of its kind. But just like the videos of people who took a picture of themselves every day for years were once new and innovative, they are now commonplace... so will works like this become commonplace. So the point is that there is no reason to expect this to appreciate in value and become worth a billion dollars.

> What is the article author trying to point out there?

That the artist is not PC enough, so his art must be valueless and he should probably be cancelled.

So any critique now is cancel culture?

This critique is clearly singling out a few of the 5000 images for lack of adherence to the current standard of PC. The headline is in line with this- who does seriously think that art should be "pretty"? What "is not so pretty" is supposed to mean, other than that there's some stuff in it we should disapprove?

Asking art- good or bad- to be politically correct is ridiculous; and anyway the "artwork" is a composition, not the sum of the individual images.

The critique is calling the art bad and sometimes mysoginistic. It is not, in any way, calling for the artist to be canceled.

And yes, art can be racist or misogynistic or problematic in other ways. There's nothing wrong with calling it that. Or do you think it's cancel culture to call "Birth of a Nation" racist?

> It is not, in any way, calling for the artist to be canceled.

Please. "I'm not saying we should do something about it, but oh my gosh, look how offensive it is".

I suppose all criticism is cancel culture if you just pretend the “cancel” part is there.

Criticism != What this article does.

Tone and style makes the difference between criticism and the works of the Schreibtischtäter. It's a great German compound word from Schreibtisch (=desk) and Täter (=perpetrator). It's the person sitting at a desk, keeping their hands clean, writing to make others do the dirty work.

What dirty work? Didn't this guy get $69 million dollars?

And you're using a word which from the wikipedia article is described as:

"The term "desk murderer" (German: Schreibtischtäter)[1] is attributed to Hannah Arendt and is used to describe state-employed mass murderers like Adolf Eichmann, who planned and organised the Holocaust without taking part in killings personally."

I'm amazed.

For real. Dude just made an enormous amount of money and was catapulted into broad fame by it. This is the opposite of being cancelled.

> What dirty work? Didn't this guy get $69 million dollars?

That was _before_ the article. Obviously you can't cancel people before you know about them.

> It is not, in any way, calling for the artist to be canceled.

Not explicitly, no. But it seems to me to follow the well known pattern of "hey, look, I've found something damning buried among X's old stuff".

Yes, art can be racist, it's just not the metre you use to judge it.

> look, I've found something damning buried among X's old stuff

Since this is specifically an auction of "old stuff" looking through it makes sense. And while the author is very critical of the work, the most significant criticism isn't that it's not PC. The article mostly complains that most of the art is shallow and won't age well.

Please re-read:

"We’ve passed through a racial uprising and a reckoning with sexism, and the cultural project of the moment is… innovating new ways to worship decade-old, BroBible-level brain farts? During a time of immiseration, investors are competing to throw tens of millions of dollars… at this?

These are the questions that go through my head. But that’s probably just “fancy-dancy elite art homo” thinking, right?"

How is this "cancelling" the artist?

It's just mocking people for paying millions for bad art.

People make fun of other people paying too much for art all the time.

And what does the politics fashionable at the moment ("We’ve passed through a racial uprising and a reckoning with sexism") has to do with art?

Are you actually being serious?

You think that art should not be political? You must have missed centuries of art as propoganda then.

What does the "fashionability" of politics mean? That people have political opinions that you dislike?

Especially when one of Beeple's pieces being critiqued is a drawing of a naked Hilary Clinton with a penis.

Do you want it both ways where there can be political artwork but people aren't allowed to criticise it?

> Trump-is-a-Poopy-Head/Cheeto Mussolini genre of art

This and other comments would seem to blow past the fact that the critique also pans the “pc” political commentary (see also the comment on the George Floyd piece).

Ironically it is people in this thread decrying cancel culture that are refusing to engage with anything that might possibly contradict their politics.

> "it’s fun to draw black people" - what is it an example for?

The author is oblivious to the fact that he can't think his way around his pangs of identity guilt. He doesn't realize the mere mention of black people isn't a taboo for most people.

>He doesn't realize the mere mention of black people isn't a taboo for most people.

I'd guess he realizes it and that's the point. A lot of his stuff has taboos.

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