Preeminent Digital Artist Beeple Recaps His Career, The Recent NFT Craze And His Historic $69 Million Crypto Art Sale With Christie’s Auction House

efore the end of last year, most people had never even heard of NFTs or crypto art, but when Mike Winkelmann sold an NFT collection for $3.5 million in December, suddenly everyone began paying attention to the emerging space. Better known by his pseudonym Beeple, Winkelmann has been active as a digital artist for many years and is renowned for his Everydays series consisting of an original artwork created each day.

From pop culture references to even the occasional internet culture or meme reference, Beeple’s work has been used by artists such as Katy Perry, Wiz Khalifa and more, as well as recently becoming the first-ever NFT art to be sold at a major auction house like Christie’s. Earlier today, that historic auction ended with a final bid of $69 million, making it not only the highest-selling NFT to date (by a long shot), but also the third-highest auction by a living artist in history. To dig deeper into the mind of Winkelmann, retrace his career and see what he makes of this recent NFT hypetrain, we sat down with him earlier this week for an exclusive interview.

Q: Hey, Mike. Thanks for sitting down with us, I’m sure things have been quite busy lately for you. To kick things off, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re known for.

A: My name is Mike Winkleman and I am a digital artist who releases work under the name “Beeple.” I've done a picture every day for the last 13 years, and they're known as “Everydays.” I've also released some weird videos and stuff [laughs].

Q: Can you take us back to your earliest days as an artist and how you first got started? What were some of your earliest works like?

A: I actually got started well before the Everydays, as soon as I got to college. I went to school for computer science and kind of realized pretty quickly that I was spending all my time screwing around making weird video stuff and weird design stuff. I'm 39, so I've been making this stuff since like 1999, really. After college, I got the computer science degree and got a job doing web design and then kind of really started doing the Beeple stuff on the side and putting more of my true energy into that.

Q: Today, some of your art revolves around internet culture and memes from time to time. What were some significant experiences online that shaped your interest in creating art about the subject?

A: I vividly remember the first time I went on the internet. Before that, we were going to like bulletin board systems, which is well past most of your readers’ age. But I still remember being like, “Oh my God, you can just download an image automatically and it shows up, like WTF?” But yeah, I think some of the first things [I remember] were definitely like eBaum’s World. I feel like eBaum’s was really the first sort of “meme stuff” [I used]. There were some others, a few video sites before YouTube, that you'd get clips on where you were just kind of passing around actual files like, “Oh, I got a Real Player file!”

Q: How closely do you follow and keep up with internet culture these days?

A: I’m very much on the internet like all fucking day and feel very connected — not as much as my nephew Arianne though. He's actually much more of the like “meme guru.” He's constantly explaining stuff to me and showing me stuff that I have no idea what it means. “Okay, well, do you know this meme?” And then it's like six memes built on top of this one and it takes him 45 minutes to explain this picture because it's so dense. But, to me, I really find that stuff interesting because there's such a huge amount of thought into some of these things and they're so dense. It's actually kind of funny how long it takes to unpack some of the things he shows me that are so far down the rabbit hole it’s insane.

Q: Do you recall your first meme- or internet-inspired work? What was it and why did you choose to focus on that particular subject?

A: I think I kinda started more tiptoeing into it before it became super literal. I tiptoed into stuff like Shrek and things that were a little meme-ish before going just straight frickin’ “stonks” and stuff like that. It's something that I like because you're sort of piggybacking off this visual language in this culture, just like a lot of the other [pop culture] characters or whatever. It's another layer that people immediately connect with.

Q: Of all your internet-related works, which ones are you particularly fond of and why? Are there any other memes you want to create art for soon?

A: That's a good question. It's very hard for me to keep up with some of these memes, to be quite honest. A lot of them are sort of more current events I think, and more pop culture. I don't know that I've done that many that are just very clearly meme stuff. There will be more of that, but I feel like by the time I know of the meme, it's already wildly uncool [laughs]. So it's kind of like, “Should I use this?” Or is everyone gonna be like, “Lame. OK Boomer [laughs].

Q: So way back in 2007, you launched your Everydays project where you create an original artwork daily and share it online. How’d you learn about this type of thing and what inspired you to take on such a commitment?

A: A few years after college and starting the Beeple stuff, I started doing the Everydays. I wanted to get better at drawing initially, and so I started doing a drawing a day. I saw an illustrator in the UK named Tom Judd, who did a sketch a day, so I started doing that. Then, after that first year, I learned a lot about drawing – still very, very bad – but I learned a lot. So I was like, “Okay, well what if I did a render every day using a 3D program?” I knew nothing about 3D programs, but I thought maybe this would be a way to teach myself. So I started doing that, and that brings us to where we are now. I just kind of kept doing it. Obviously, I did not think I was going to do it for so long but, yeah. Along the way, I started releasing VJ clips [video jockey, like a DJ but for visualizations] and short films and stuff like that. So, it's really just been like a slow, steady progression of people noticing my work.

Q: All these years later, you’re now over 5,000 consecutive days keeping the project going. How long do you plan to do it going forward, and how do you keep it from becoming a chore?

A: Right now, I plan to just keep going till I die. We're going to keep rolling with it. Who the hell knows? If it just became wildly unfun then I would not do it. In a way, it does feel like a chore, to be quite honest. It's kind of like working out — nobody wants to do it. Why would you want to feel like shit? But then you feel better after you do it, and so that's what it's a lot like. The way it's not a chore and I still have fun with it is just by doing whatever the fuck I want — really sort of trying to think, “What is the picture I would be most excited about making today?” And then making exactly that. Sometimes that means it’s very fucking weird, but if that’s the thing I'm most excited about making, that's what I'm going to put a bunch of time into and be most excited with. So I think getting good at listening to that voice and then trusting it because when you're making the picture that you're most excited about making, you put the most time and effort into it, and I think people connect with that too.

Q: Can you give us some insight into your inspiration and creative process for these? Where do you source topics, such as memes or internet culture, to come up with fresh ideas?

A: Usually from Twitter is where I'll see stuff like that, but I also watch a lot of stupid TikTok shit. Instagram not as much. I don't see as much weird stuff on Instagram. So I would say that it’s probably those two places. I'll see what's trending on Twitter, what people are talking about, so those are the main sources of inspiration for internet stuff. But I'll also just kind of look around usually and see different videos or artwork from people and kind of take a lot of inspiration there. I would say 90 percent of the time I do not have any idea. I just kind of sit down and come up with something in the course of 10 or 15 minutes Usually it's at the end of the night and my picture has to be posted somewhere before midnight, so it's very much something where I can spend two hours on a concept.

Q: When did you first hear about NFTs and how’d you get started in the crypto art scene?

A: So in the fall of last year, people kept hitting me up and being like, “You gotta check out NFTs.” I kind of blew it off at first just because I didn't understand it at all. I was also looking at DeFi [decentralized finance] stuff too. If you think NFTs are hard to wrap your head around, DeFi is like, “don't even start.” But so it clicked for me and I thought, “Holy shit, people are spending loads of money on this shit that I didn't even think you could sell at all.” It never even occurred to me that I could sell a video or a JPEG.

So from there, I just freaking headed fully down the rabbit hole trying to talk to anybody, jumping on a million Zoom calls to understand who was buying this stuff, why they were paying so much, what are the drawbacks — anybody who would talk to me I jumped on a call with and tried to wrap my head around it.

Q: It's funny because the auction you had in December for the NFTs that sold for $3.5 million really kind of kick-started this whole recent craze. When people saw that impressive number, they were like, “Maybe I should pay attention to this?”

A: Yeah. At the time, that obviously destroyed all of the fricking records for the [crypto art] space. There was a pretty steep curve up after that where you immediately saw people starting to do like million-dollar drops, which was obviously not the case before that. I personally attribute a lot of this to COVID. I think this is something that eventually would have happened, but this is one of those classic trends where COVID accelerated or kick-started this whole thing. It would’ve happened eventually, but maybe taken another five years or something.

Q: Many have criticized NFTs during this recent trend by claiming they have a significant carbon footprint due to the energy consumption of the cryptocurrencies and blockchains used to purchase them. What do you make of these claims?

A: So there was a guy, unfortunately, that wrote an article and the figures were wildly off. It's one of these things where it's not great, it's definitely a concern, but his factors were just like ape shit wrong. Moving forward, all my stuff is going to be carbon positive because, monetarily, it's just very little money with how much these things are selling for to make it carbon positive. So I think you're really going to see a lot more artists doing that. Then the “proof of work” vs, “proof of stake.” ETH2 [Ethereum 2.0] has been in the works for a million years, and I'm not going to say it's right around the corner, but at the same time, it sounds like there's more that the platforms themselves can do to make it so these transaction costs are not writing quite as much to the blockchain. I think you're going to see a lot of that moving forward too.

It's like anything else. We're going to make progress and that's just one piece of this. You're looking at just one thing of this whole technology cause you could make the same argument about the internet. “Well it uses a shit ton of electricity, let's not have the internet.” I'm very confident that this is a solvable problem and that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. There's no free lunch, and this is one of the drawbacks with NFTs, and I think people are going to do everything they can to mitigate them.

I think it's also been slightly overstated – like super overstated – due to that guy's wildly inaccurate article. It's not nothing, but I personally think crypto artists are going to lead the way into making this more [environmentally] conscious, just because artists are much more conscious about that stuff. The other thing that makes me very confident that this is going to be solved is because nobody benefits from these things taking more electricity. Everybody's incentivized to solve this, so that's why I'm confident it will get drastically better quite quickly.

Q: Yeah. I just hope the miners chill out so I can get a graphics card.

A: Well, that's the thing that's funny too. The NFTs take electricity, but how the hell do you think these things are getting rendered? People render videos. Do you think a Pixar movie just magically computes itself? This is literally thousands upon thousands of video cards just cranking for days, years, weeks, whatever. I do find it a little silly that they’re like, “We're going to focus on this one thing.”

Q: So more recently, Christie’s auction house announced its first-ever fully digital NFT-based artwork with your Everydays: The First 5000 Days collection. What do you think this move means for your own career and digital artists like yourself in the future?

A: It is a massive validation for the NFT space, and I really do think this is going to be kind of the next chapter of art history, which will be digital art. Digital art didn't start three years ago with NFTs and certainly didn't start right now [with the current trend]. It is something that's been made over the last 20 years. When I say digital art, I mean art that is made on a computer and distributed through the internet. So you're going to see people sort of looking back at who the major players were over the last 20 years and what were the major trends and themes — piecing this together and retroactively going back like, “Okay, wait a second, this stuff does have just as much craft and intent as any other art form, it was just made on a computer.” So I have found it funny to see some of the arguments being like, “This is not art.” Photoshop literally mimics a canvas with paint, brushes, everything, so this is clearly art to me.

Being in this position with Christie's, it's something that I take really seriously because I know how much work, blood, sweat and tears have gone into making this artwork over the last 20 years. I really want to do everything I can to sort of represent that community as best I can.

Q: Fresh off the $600,000 sale of Chris Torres’ Nyan Cat NFT at the end of February, do you think this event will have a major effect on the future of memes? How should meme creators approach this new movement?

A: I’m gonna be honest. When I saw that, I was like [facepalm] cause I feel like it's worth more than $600,000. I think he sold it too soon. I bet you're going to see that thing flip and it's going to be like, “Fuck.” If you're somebody who has a meme that you're thinking about selling, I would try and think of a way to kind of fractionalize it a little bit instead of just selling it as one of one. Figure out a way to break it into chunks or make it so that multiple people could own it and you can squeeze a little more juice out of that lemon. That's what I would do, and that's what I suggest to people who own these. Think about how you could sort of capitalize on it a little more.

This is going to be around for a while. I think it's a bubble, to be honest, but I use the internet as an analogy. There was a bubble there and it burst, but people didn't stop using the internet. Everybody kept using the internet even though the bubble burst, so that's what I think will happen. It's going to wipe out all the junk. Just because we can make an NFT of something, that doesn't automatically give it value. So I would look at this as something that's going to be around for a long time and try and focus on doing things that can create value, connect with people and add utility in terms of building NFTs.

Q: With the new year still just getting started, can you tell us what else you’ve got going on or coming up with your artwork? Any big plans for 2021?

A: So obviously Christie’s sale will be ending in a couple of days here. That will be interesting. Then the next big release that I have will be the spring collection. That's something I honestly started working on immediately when the last drop ended. So I'm super, super excited about it and I think will be really fun. That's going to be at the end of April, beginning of March. Beyond that, 2021's already been like, “WTF is going on?!” So I can't even imagine. At this rate, I'll most likely be president of the U.S. by the end of this year. I don't even know WTF is going on [laughs]. I can't even think what this will be like three months out or six months out. The NFT space moves so fast, it's been a bit of a trip.

Q: So to end things here, what would you say your all-time favorite meme is if you had to choose?

A: I'm not going to pick one. What makes it hard to pick one is because they all have their separate times where they make sense. You know what I mean? It's like, “Well, what's your favorite sentence?” I don't know. They all have their own time and their own thing, and I think that is what's cool about them too. They have an arc and a history, especially like the whole Pepe thing. It started, then it got kind of co-opted by the “white boy bullshit,” and then the Hong Kong protesters started using it. It's like, “Okay, I think it's cool again” [laughs].

Watch our interview with Beeple below for the video version of our discussion.

Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, is a digital artist based out of Charleston, South Carolina. To see more of his work, you can follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube, as well as his website at Beeple-Crap.com.