The year before, Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann made headlines when he sold a piece of NFT art for a record-breaking $69.3 million at a Christie’s auction. He then got on the cover of Time magazine and went on “The Tonight Show.” Now, he intends to bring the NFT world to even more people by opening a real-world studio that will hold exhibitions.
Today, Beeple posted a video that shows how his large new studio is being built in Charleston, South Carolina. It looks like the studio is in a renovated warehouse. In the video, we see the first steps as workers tear down walls and build up the space that will become Beeple Studios.
In a tweet thread, Beeple wrote that the space will be an “outlet for not just my artwork, but the entire digital art/NFT community.”He also said that the space will host exhibitions and find creative ways to show NFT artwork so that people in the real world can see it there.
now is the time to BUILD.
— beeple (@beeple) October 13, 2022pic.twitter.com/4OuX4F25L8
“Coming together and experiencing digital artwork IRL is something that I think will help bring in the next wave of collectors,” he wrote, “and that is precisely what we need to move past this bear market.”
Beeple went on to say that developers of NFTs need to “find new ways” to attract customers who may be familiar with the concept of NFTs but aren’t entirely clear on how they function. An NFT is a blockchain token that represents ownership in a one-of-a-kind item. It can be used with things like digital artwork and collectibles, but it can also be used with things that exist in the real world.
“I believe by showing people that this artwork can absolutely be shared and appreciated in real life, not just on our tiny screens,” Beeple wrote, “they will see that this medium is just like any other with the ability to bring beauty, provoke thoughtful discussion, and truly move us.”
He didn’t say when the studio would open or when events would be held there, but he did say that the video shows the first half of construction and that the second half is almost done.
Beeple first became known as a digital artist who posted new work every day and as a graphic designer whose work was used by artists like Eminem, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber for their concert posters. Late in 2020, when the NFT market started to grow, Beeple started selling his art and quickly broke records while doing so.
Momentum grew quickly, and in March 2021, when “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days,” a collage of Beeple’s daily art posts, sold at auction for $69.3 million, it reached its peak. Beeple then sold “Human One,” a physical/digital hybrid sculpture with an NFT component, for $28.9 million in November 2017.
Since Beeple moved into the NFT space, Beeple has made sure that all of his digital sales have a real-world element. “Human One” takes place in a holographic terminal where the digital art changes in real time. He also worked with a new company called Infinite Objects to give buyers a video display for each piece of art they bought.
Dialectic and Vine Ventures founder Ryan Zurrer, who bought Beeple’s “Human One” last year, named the upcoming Beeple Studio “a weird mix of Warhol’s studio & Bell Labs in their respective primes. He composed a wild combination of engineers & creatives, building next-gen art with space-age tooling. It will change the way we think about digital art.”
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