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Lot Essay
Let’s begin with an understatement: so far, this year has been a hectic one. Not even a week into January, insurrectionists stormed the American capitol as the pandemic raged on silently in the background, setting a uniquely chaotic tone for the months to follow. It was right around this time—honestly, possibly on this exact day?—that I learned about a new piece of tech which would soon upend my entire world. By now, I’ve told the story enough times that the entire experience feels more like a dream than a memory, but I’ll try to quickly summarize and stay true to the facts. Essentially, Non-Fungible Tokens (henceforth, NFTs) are permanent entries in a virtual ledger known as a blockchain. One of the many utilities of NFTs is to give currency to ephemeral goods, particularly those of a digital origin. Towards the end of last year, just a few weeks before the hubbub at the capitol, an artist made headlines with the sale of a suite of NFT-based artworks for a handsome sum in the seven-figure region, a record net price for the nascent collecting category by leaps and bounds at the time. So when I said “yes” to the question “would you be open to placing an NFT in your sale?” I was hoping to realize a respectable but fairly modest (by blue chip art world standards) price. Needless to say, I severely underestimated Beeple.
HUMAN ONE is the triumphant follow-up to the artist’s notorious EVERYDAYS: The First 5000 Days, sold at Christie’s earlier this year to much fanfare, astonishment and, to some, terror, mostly due to the enormous price tag attached to it but also its curious format and unabashedly wild aesthetic. With HUMAN ONE, Beeple brings the highly polished, cartoon-dystopian hallucinations of his ongoing EVERYDAYS series boldly into the round via a towering, chromed-out monolith of slowly rotating LED screens. The hero of the work is a lone astronaut, forever striding through the wastes of a vaguely familiar world, one strewn with oversize Pop icons in various states of decay or perversion, punctuated by the occasional spray of flora, desolate stretches of sand dunes and a few nods to some of the titans of Art History. But any description I could write would necessarily be incomplete given the conceptual framework at play. For the rest of his artistic career, Beeple will be able to adjust the visual components of HUMAN ONE by editing or adding to its digital assets, allowing the artist to comment on world events as they unfold in real time. This radical technical flourish allows for a new paradigm of trust to exist between artist and collector.
When I first encountered HUMAN ONE not too long ago over Zoom, I told Beeple it reminded me of Alberto Giacometti’s famous L'Homme qui marche I from 1961. The affinity was so clear, I instinctively read the work as a kind of homage, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that, in fact, Beeple had never heard of Giacometti. I texted him a link to a reproduction of that haunting icon of postmodern existential angst; Beeple agreed, there was definitely something similar going on there… and then, the next time I saw HUMAN ONE, this time IRL at the artist’s sprawling South Carolina studio, I noticed there were newly added giant walking men—obviously Giacometti’s Walking Men—stomping through the landscape in the faraway background beyond the lonesome astronaut protagonist. So, too, were new burial mounds of Warholian soup cans and dead trees draped in Daliesque melting clocks. Seeing HUMAN ONE evolve in media res according to the artist’s inspiration is a truly thrilling thing, and completely unlike any experience I have had with a contemporary artwork, digital or otherwise. While many artists have experimented with adaptable media or challenged the notion of completion in a ‘finished’ work of art (in myriad ways), to my knowledge this is the first major artwork of the 21st century where the artist will have enduring creative remote control over its content forever.
Depending on where on planet Earth HUMAN ONE is installed and what the local time is there, the displayed visuals will be drawn from one of three caches: morning, noon and night. Throughout the day, the 24 hour loop cycles through the various possible landscapes in each of these caches, but each day the output is randomized, i.e. there is very little chance that 10:01am Tuesday morning is going to look exactly like 10:01am Wednesday morning, and so on and so forth. In this, I’m reminded of the relentless rhythm at play in various works by Samuel Beckett but especially En attendant Godot, where the heroes Vladimir and Estragon whittle away an endless string of days waiting under a tree for a mysterious savior who never arrives. Indeed, Giacometti, too, was inspired by Beckett’s weird, laconic work when he created L'Homme. The pioneering 19th century psychoanalyst Carl Jung coined the term “collective unconscious” to describe the phenomenon of instinctive and archetypal shared mental concepts which somehow proliferate throughout humanity and across space and time. I sincerely regard HUMAN ONE as highly attuned to our contemporary collective unconscious; a weirdly enchanting echo of Giacometti, Beckett and, more recently, Damien Hirst, whose infamous 1991 sculpture The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living presents the viewer with the artificially preserved corpse of a tiger shark in a great formaldehyde tank. Just as Beeple’s Human rhymes with Giacometti’s Homme, it does so, too, with Hirst’s dead shark.
These days, the art world and popular culture at large seem very preoccupied with the question of where exactly NFTs are taking us. Some are convinced the end is nigh—whatever that means—while others believe that NFTs will lead to greater transparency, accountability and improved efficiency in the art ecosystem, if not enhanced aesthetic values and artistic content; still others remain on the fence, leery of a potential Emperor’s New Clothes-style denouement or skeptical about the environmental costs of blockchain technology. All of these are valid intellectual and emotional responses to something as radical as the cultural moment we are currently living through, where the supremacy of objecthood and lived experience is under threat. The age of intangible possessions, automation, play-to-earn gaming and increasingly augmented (or entirely virtual) reality may at last be upon us. We are no doubt at the crossroads of either a very bright or very bleak future. And perhaps just like the hero of Beeple’s latest magnum opus, our best bet is to simply keep moving forward, wherever the path may lead.
-Noah Davis, Specialist, Head of Digital Sales
HUMAN ONE is the triumphant follow-up to the artist’s notorious EVERYDAYS: The First 5000 Days, sold at Christie’s earlier this year to much fanfare, astonishment and, to some, terror, mostly due to the enormous price tag attached to it but also its curious format and unabashedly wild aesthetic. With HUMAN ONE, Beeple brings the highly polished, cartoon-dystopian hallucinations of his ongoing EVERYDAYS series boldly into the round via a towering, chromed-out monolith of slowly rotating LED screens. The hero of the work is a lone astronaut, forever striding through the wastes of a vaguely familiar world, one strewn with oversize Pop icons in various states of decay or perversion, punctuated by the occasional spray of flora, desolate stretches of sand dunes and a few nods to some of the titans of Art History. But any description I could write would necessarily be incomplete given the conceptual framework at play. For the rest of his artistic career, Beeple will be able to adjust the visual components of HUMAN ONE by editing or adding to its digital assets, allowing the artist to comment on world events as they unfold in real time. This radical technical flourish allows for a new paradigm of trust to exist between artist and collector.
When I first encountered HUMAN ONE not too long ago over Zoom, I told Beeple it reminded me of Alberto Giacometti’s famous L'Homme qui marche I from 1961. The affinity was so clear, I instinctively read the work as a kind of homage, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that, in fact, Beeple had never heard of Giacometti. I texted him a link to a reproduction of that haunting icon of postmodern existential angst; Beeple agreed, there was definitely something similar going on there… and then, the next time I saw HUMAN ONE, this time IRL at the artist’s sprawling South Carolina studio, I noticed there were newly added giant walking men—obviously Giacometti’s Walking Men—stomping through the landscape in the faraway background beyond the lonesome astronaut protagonist. So, too, were new burial mounds of Warholian soup cans and dead trees draped in Daliesque melting clocks. Seeing HUMAN ONE evolve in media res according to the artist’s inspiration is a truly thrilling thing, and completely unlike any experience I have had with a contemporary artwork, digital or otherwise. While many artists have experimented with adaptable media or challenged the notion of completion in a ‘finished’ work of art (in myriad ways), to my knowledge this is the first major artwork of the 21st century where the artist will have enduring creative remote control over its content forever.
Depending on where on planet Earth HUMAN ONE is installed and what the local time is there, the displayed visuals will be drawn from one of three caches: morning, noon and night. Throughout the day, the 24 hour loop cycles through the various possible landscapes in each of these caches, but each day the output is randomized, i.e. there is very little chance that 10:01am Tuesday morning is going to look exactly like 10:01am Wednesday morning, and so on and so forth. In this, I’m reminded of the relentless rhythm at play in various works by Samuel Beckett but especially En attendant Godot, where the heroes Vladimir and Estragon whittle away an endless string of days waiting under a tree for a mysterious savior who never arrives. Indeed, Giacometti, too, was inspired by Beckett’s weird, laconic work when he created L'Homme. The pioneering 19th century psychoanalyst Carl Jung coined the term “collective unconscious” to describe the phenomenon of instinctive and archetypal shared mental concepts which somehow proliferate throughout humanity and across space and time. I sincerely regard HUMAN ONE as highly attuned to our contemporary collective unconscious; a weirdly enchanting echo of Giacometti, Beckett and, more recently, Damien Hirst, whose infamous 1991 sculpture The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living presents the viewer with the artificially preserved corpse of a tiger shark in a great formaldehyde tank. Just as Beeple’s Human rhymes with Giacometti’s Homme, it does so, too, with Hirst’s dead shark.
These days, the art world and popular culture at large seem very preoccupied with the question of where exactly NFTs are taking us. Some are convinced the end is nigh—whatever that means—while others believe that NFTs will lead to greater transparency, accountability and improved efficiency in the art ecosystem, if not enhanced aesthetic values and artistic content; still others remain on the fence, leery of a potential Emperor’s New Clothes-style denouement or skeptical about the environmental costs of blockchain technology. All of these are valid intellectual and emotional responses to something as radical as the cultural moment we are currently living through, where the supremacy of objecthood and lived experience is under threat. The age of intangible possessions, automation, play-to-earn gaming and increasingly augmented (or entirely virtual) reality may at last be upon us. We are no doubt at the crossroads of either a very bright or very bleak future. And perhaps just like the hero of Beeple’s latest magnum opus, our best bet is to simply keep moving forward, wherever the path may lead.
-Noah Davis, Specialist, Head of Digital Sales