The secret behind the screen: what does Beeple’s first museum solo reveal about the future of digital art?

Backed by big names and budget from Deji Art Museum in China, Beeple's retrospective features digital art, kinetic sculptures ... and paintings?
'Beeple: Tales From a Synthetic Future', installation view at Deji Art Museum, Nanjing China. A gallery space surrounded by mirrors and digital screens showing a kaleidoscopic selection of digital artworks.

Recently, US digital artist Mike Winkelmann, more widely known as Beeple, opened his first museum solo exhibition – in Nanjing, China, no less, a city with which he has no particular affiliation.

Some may remember Beeple from the US$69 million sale of his digital series, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, purchased as a non-fungible token (NFT) in 2021. That sale launched his work into being the third most expensive from a living artist at the time and sent shock waves across art insiders and the public alike.

Since then, galleries, art institutions, academics and curators have picked up on the hype, adding exhibition after exhibition to Beeple’s official art world CV, including M+ Hong Kong, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art.

Prior to catching the attention of the ‘traditional’ art world, Beeple already boasted a solid profile in graphic design, working with big player clients such as Louis Vuitton, Samsung, Eminem (who is also a NFT collector and enthusiast) and Nike.

Within the digital art community, Beeple’s popularity nears idolisation, in part due to his generosity in releasing a large proportion of his video and design work free of charge under Creative Commons, open for both commercial and non-commercial use by other creatives.

So with this context in mind, I found myself rather perplexed after seeing Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future at Deji Art Museum, the newest shiny enterprise that seeks to theorise, and no doubt at some point in the near future, monetise, the potential of a historically undervalued medium. It’s an exhibition of a digital artist, but is it really about digital art?

Alice in Beepleverse

Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future is undeniably dazzling as an exhibition – with a floor-to-ceiling scrolling display of works from the Everydays series (2007-ongoing) and high-tech kinetic sculptures with dystopian-cities and humanoids. It hits all the buzzwords of the contemporary experience economy. The show is the perfect addition to Deji Art Museum, housed in one of Nanjing’s largest luxury shopping malls targeted at a youthful demographic who are quick to splurge on trends.

It’s not hard to see the private museum’s appetite for becoming a forerunner in contemporary art, from its mega-collection of household names to its rumoured eye-watering acquisition budget.

Members of the press are treated to a five-star hotel stay with a panoramic view of the city, and stocked with Beeple merch that rounds out an Alice in Wonderland-esque experience – Beeple cookies (eat me!), Beeple wine (drink me!), Beeple bath bombs and the like.

Inside the exhibition, everywhere you turn heralds a new era of artistic creation. Here, technology is a tool to realise human ambition, and well-established curators (Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Sunny Cheung and Xuxa Rodriguez) talk about the ‘synthetic/natural binary’, ‘living artworks’, and ‘social sculptures’.

But look … paintings! In a show dedicated to the globally renowned pioneer of digital art, these gold-framed, large-scale replicas of their digital prototype are contextualised in the exhibition as offering viewers an alternative access point for engagement, one that encourages more observation and reflection than looking at them in their natural habitat, i.e. on a screen.

Beeple’s digital works from the ‘Everydays’ (2007-ongoing) series recreated as paintings in ‘Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future’, installation view at Deji Art Museum, Nanjing China. Photo: ArtsHub.

The amount of favouritism that painting has received as an art form throughout history, from theory to market, renders this explanation disappointing and insufficient. These digital imaginaries, when translated onto canvas, are ‘perfect’, flat and auraless. “It looks like a print!”, one sector colleague exclaims, while trying to dig into who ‘created’ them (“Not sure”, “Not Beeple”). In fact, the artworks selected to undergo this alchemical transformation (pixels into $$$) were selected by the Museum, not the artist himself.

One can be almost certain that the paintings will hit the auction block in the next five years. It doesn’t matter whether they are good paintings or not – they are Beeple paintings.

Beeple is not the only digital or technology-focused artist playing to the demands of the conventional art market, where the ultra-rich have as much agency in artistic production as their makers. Refik Anadol, who was commissioned by Turkish Airlines to create ‘portraits’ for Art Basel this year, said, “Through this project, we convey another message: although I am an AI artist producing works in the digital and virtual realms, I realise that the physical world still holds a lot of value.”

Categories like ‘portrait’, ‘sculpture’, ‘collage’ etc are used to tie down digital creations should they drift too far from the physical.

Money, money, money

In an interview with Ocula, Beeple was optimistic that we will see more digital natives investing their wealth in digital art, which can in turn shift the canon of art in general – one that can do away with cultural gate-keeping, geographic favouritism and institutional validation.

But if the recent turn of events surrounding the multimillion-dollar banana artwork purchased, then eaten, by crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun is any indication, these digital tycoons still prefer to make a splash by enraging the mainstream art industry than staying in their own lane.

Read: ‘Banana-taped-to-wall’ artwork no longer a joke after sale turns it into jarring symbol of societal inequity

What makes a museum exhibition of digital art radical or special, that doesn’t continue to place the institution (and the people behind it) on a pedestal of power, influence and authority?

Tales from a Synthetic Future ends on a display of works by emerging digital artists from China and beyond, who submitted their pieces via an open call in hopes of the opportunity for exposure and recognition. They are solid pieces showcasing skill and creativity; a handful may be lucky enough to garner a solid fan base and group show opportunities, but few will even get close to hitting another $69 million jackpot.

The future, as it seems, for digital art is far from the democratic utopia that many have held on to believe. Until collectors can gain status and prestige through the metaverse, they may sooner want a Beeple painting as their mantlepiece than a digital NFT with a hefty price tag as their screensaver.

Whichever version of the Beepleverse they may see themselves in, it’s still a rich man’s world.

Celina Lei is ArtsHub's Content Manager. She has previously worked across global art hubs in Beijing, Hong Kong and New York in both the commercial art sector and art criticism. She took part in drafting NAVA’s revised Code of Practice - Art Fairs and was the project manager of ArtsHub’s diverse writers initiative, Amplify Collective. Celina is based in Naarm/Melbourne. Instagram @lleizy_