Beeple is the working name of Mike Winkelmann, an American digital artist born on 20 June 1981 in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. He has posted a new image every day since 1 May 2007. On 11 March 2021 Christie's sold a collage of the first 5,000 of them, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, for 69,346,250 dollars, the first NFT ever sold by a major auction house.
That price is the part everyone remembers. The part that explains it is a small sketch of his uncle Jim.
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On 1 May 2007 Winkelmann was a web designer with a computer science degree from Purdue and a plan to get better at drawing. He drew his uncle Jim and posted the sketch. The next day he posted another, and the day after that. By his own account he was bad at drawing, and the first year of pictures shows it. He left them online anyway.
Fourteen years later the sale looked like luck. Bidding opened at 100 dollars on 25 February 2021. In the first eight minutes about twenty bidders pushed it past a million. In the last ten minutes it climbed from 22 million to 60 million before fees. Until the autumn of 2020, Winkelmann had not sold a single one of his own digital works.
Then came the part nobody expected from the winner of the biggest digital art sale in history. In March 2021 he called NFTs an "irrational exuberance bubble." He told an interviewer he thought it was a bubble "to be honest," and compared it to the early internet. Then he went back to making the next day's image.
What You'll Discover
Why he started with a sketch.
Where you already saw his work.
What the buyer really got.
What hangs opposite Francis Bacon.
What the robot dogs print out.