BEEPLE - EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS (2007–2021)

About The Artwork

EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS is a digital work of art created by Mike Winkelmann (b. 1981), better known as Beeple, an American digital artist, graphic designer, and animator known for selling NFTs. The work is a collage of 5000 digital images created by Beeple for his EVERYDAYS series from start to finish, every single day from May 1st, 2007 to January 7th, 2021. Its associated non-fungible token (NFT) was sold for $69.3 million at Christie’s in 2021 to Singapore-based programmer Vignesh Sundaresan, known online by his pseudonym MetaKovan, making it the first of the most expensive non-fungible tokens (NFT). Beeple used Cinema 4D and Octane in most of the images for this project.

Visual & Formal Qualities

Through careful observation of the artwork, I realized that the top left artwork represents the beginning of the project in 2007, so the EVERYDAYS series consisted of basic drawings, but once Beeple started working in 3D and focused on one skill or medium per year, as he did with Cinema 4D in 2015, they took on abstract themes, color, shape, composition, value, and repetition. In the last five years, however, his digital images have become increasingly timely, often reacting to current events. Beeple has stitched together recurring themes and color schemes to create an aesthetic whole. Organized in loose chronological order, zooming in on individual pieces reveals abstract, fantastical, grotesque, and absurd pictures, alongside current events and deeply personal moments. Society’s obsession with and fear of technology; the desire for and resentment of wealth; and America’s recent political turbulence appear frequently throughout the work.

Associations & Connotations

This project reminds me of British artist Tom Judd, who did a drawing every day for a year. Some of the 5,000 images involve figures from pop culture, including Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump, and are arranged chronologically. And some of the earlier images are hand drawn and not computer produced using design programs like Adobe Illustrator and Cinema 4D. Once you thought Beeple had been creating new artwork and posting it online for the world to enjoy without missing a single day for the past 5,000 straight days, you realized the value of this artwork. That is why it sold for an incredible price of $69.3 million. Beeple has taken us on an evolutionary journey, not only of his immense evolution and development as an artist, but of our community as a whole.

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