Does Beeple Deserve a Museum Exhibition?

There’s something to be said about an artist committed to an everyday practice: On Kawara, for example, recording the date in white blocky letters and numbers over a black background, or Ann Craven painting the birds and moons in her tender canvases. Mike Winkelmann, the artist known to the world as Beeple, is also one of those artists. Since 2007, long before NFTs had entered the zeitgeist, Beeple created a new work daily, resulting in some 6,420 works—the majority of them digitally, aside from the first year when he did physical drawings—and counting. His NFT Everydays: The First 5000 Days, which sold at Christie’s in 2021 for a historic $69.3 million, was the first sampling of this. 

Beeple’s resulting fame led the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China, to acquire S.2122 (2023), a kinetic video sculpture consisting of a rectangular rotating steel-framed cube encasing four screens depicting an animated high-rise in a dystopian setting, for a reported $9 million at Art Basel Hong Kong shortly after it was created. It only made sense that the private museum would follow this purchase with a solo exhibition dedicated to the artist. The Nanjing institution didn’t want to execute just any show, but one for the history books. Earlier this month, the Deji opened “Beeple: Tales From a Synthetic Future,” the artist’s first institutional survey, slated to be on view for the next two years.

While Beeple continues to struggle for art world legitimacy—some artists resigned from Jack Hanley’s roster in protest after Beeple’s first solo gallery exhibition there in 2022—the artist has several art-world heavyweights behind him, most notably Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the former director of the Castello di Rivoli in Turin who showed Beeple’s related HUMAN ONE (2021) at the museum in 2022, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London and the Deji’s senior artistic adviser. This all brings up the question, Does Beeple deserve a museum exhibition? The short answer is yes. Digital artists like DRIFT and Refik Anadol have had institutional shows, at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 2018 and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2022, respectively. So why not Beeple, too?

Located on the eighth floor of Deji Plaza, an expansive luxury mall owned by the Deji Group, the Deji Art Museum was launched in 2017 by ARTnews Top 200 Collector Wu Tiejun with a mission to “to transcend state borders, cultures, histories, and media.” Upon reaching the entrance to Beeple’s exhibition, his voice booms from loudspeakers welcoming visitors. Those hesitant about entering the exhibition are teased with the institution’s prized acquisition, the ever-evolving S.2122, which can be updated by changing the water levels for example, displayed behind an exterior-facing window. The exhibition traces Beeple’s life from his chronology (born in 1981 to today) to his early, analog experiments, with a section full of illustrations resembling that of a high school art student; equipment like an Intel 386 DOS, his first computer, or his late ’90s–era iMac; and his early aughts short films shown with poster reproductions  of films that influenced him, like Donnie Darko, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Pulp Fiction, and Fight Club. (The actual posters didn’t make it through customs.)

Further along is a room featuring every work from Beeple’s “Everydays” series, mosaiced together on immersive digital walls. (The screens are updated daily, with each new entry into the series.) The works scroll by at a fast pace, refracted by with mirrors on the ceilings, surely an ideal setting for taking selfies. I couldn’t help but compare the room to some of the expansive—and to some insufferable—touring immersive exhibitions for the likes of Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh that have been popular on Instagram.

In the “Everydays” series, countless pop culture references abound, from the Off-White logo and a Campbell’s tomato soup can to Super Mario and Garfield, mixed with imagery or satire that only a tech bro would find amusing. It’s nothing that hasn’t been done before. Although it’s an impressive way to exhibit 17-years-worth of work together, it can be difficult to get more than a fleeting glance at the individual works as it moves and flashes by. In any case, the sum is worth more than its parts.

The next gallery offers nine of Beeple’s “Everydays” drawings, selected by Obrist, that have translated into large-scale paintings—but they weren’t created by Beeple himself. “I definitely made clear I don’t know how to paint,” Beeple told a group of journalists following the opening. “I honestly have no interest in painting myself because I painted it the first time on the computer. And so this is just a way to translate it into a medium in which, I think, makes it a little easier for you to stop and consider the image a bit more, versus when it’s on a computer screen—I think that’s somewhat harder.”

But displaying Beeple’s digital works in a traditional format like painting does not serve them well. While they allow for close examination of his work, they’re soulless facsimiles that further diminish their importance. I would have preferred to experience the nine works up close digitally, on say large OLED screens, mimicking how they were originally meant to be shown. (The thorough descriptions of these works alternate between English and Mandarin, making them frustrating to read.) The strongest of these oil paintings is Regenerate (2023), showing a man in 2089 who examines an enormous orchid sprouting out of the water. Block Zero (2022), an image of people walking to a giant Bitcoin structure, is an on-the-nose commentary on the current boom of digital currencies. Others—like Jabbas Coming from Every Hole (2021) of tiny Jabba the Hutts emerging from the facial cavities of a giant Jabba the Hutt, or Gar-field (2022), of a man wandering through a field of Garfield heads—however, evoke both a sense of nostalgia and disdain.

His other works on view by contrast, like S.2122, HUMAN ONE, or Exponential Growth, a 2023 kinetic sculpture of animated flowers that pays homage to the museum’s permanent collection show on still lifes, command presence in their own dedicated spaces, which make sense given that they were originally conceived as large-scale sculptures. 

If Beeple wants us to do anything while walking through the exhibition, it’s to think: about the impact of technology, overconsumption, the overabundance of images, the uncertainty of the world, and environmental degradation. If this exhibition prompts someone to change society for the better and reverse its current dystopian state, regardless of the quality of the art, then it’s done its job.

As indicated by its name, “Tales from a Synthetic Future” is also forward looking. The exhibition’s final room, called “Digiverse,” turns its gaze to the future of digital art, displaying work by young digital artists who are in their 20s, around the age when Beeple began making art. There’s a digital painting of an eerie glasshouse overgrown with red roses by Zhang Xiaotong; Too Rich City, a digital video depicting a surreal Chinese cityscape; and a humorous digital comic by Tang Xinrui where a human are the ones ogled by fish at an aquarium. Although this section wouldn’t necessarily be palatable to the art insiders, it certainly speaks to its audience, educating visitors about the current digital art landscape in China, while providing an exhibition platform to artists who could be the next generation’s Beeple.

But perhaps the most eye-opening experience of the opening bonanza for “Tales from a Synthetic Future” was the chance to witness Beeple’s live process as he created his 6,406th “Everydays” work on November 13. Working in Cinema 4D, Beeple pulled 3-D models from his library of things like a Gameboy, Yoda, Pikachu, and Pepe the Frog, collaging them beneath an image of his head. He then placed two cheeseburgers over his eyes and the Deji Art Museum logo to a soundtrack of Chinese hip-hop and indie rock, before completing it in Photoshop by placing a painterly filter over the digital illustration.

While Beeple hasn’t exactly been embraced by the art establishment so far, the future may prove otherwise. Just look at other artists who were initially refused entry. Monet was famously rejected by the French Salon, and van Gogh sold just one painting during his lifetime. It even took Andy Warhol a few years to break through; MoMA refused a shoe drawing he offered in 1956, and Leo Castelli Gallery rejected the Pop icon’s work in 1961, saying it was too similar to Roy Lichtenstein’s work. Although Beeple may not be an artist in the traditional sense, he’s still an artist in one sense of the word. “Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future” at the Deji Art Museum is certainly an entry point to art for future generations and it will go down in the annals of art history—whether you want it to or not.