Can Brainrot Be Art? Beeple Thinks So

20:39100 % there's a line. And there's things where I'm like, nah, I'm not going to say that. I think when people think I just say whatever, it's like, absolutely not. To me, it's like, okay, is this punching down on somebody? Is this trying to make fun of somebody who's kind of in a sort of weak response? It's the same with any sort of comedy. That's the kind of stuff where it's just not funny or whatever. I think there's a lot of things where people are trolling. They're making content to like piss people off. I'm 100 % not making content to piss people off. I would absolutely love it if everybody liked all the things that I posted and was like, this is great.

21:17This is hilarious. This is blah, blah, blah. I get, obviously, that's not going to be the case. And I make fun of both sides. And one day I'm being called a libtard. And the other day I'm being called a mega fucking blah, blah, blah. And so it's like I equally piss off both sides. And so I get it, but I'm not trying to piss anybody off. I'm trying to make you smile and laugh and think a little bit and like that's it. I think the other thing that's like maybe missed in these is, again, these are done in like one hour. These are sketches. They might look like something that took longer because of the nature of these tools.

21:56But this wasn't something that I spent three weeks thinking about. It was something that I spent an hour thinking about, maybe, and then also had to produce it. And so it's sort of like they're, again, they're very small sort of like things that over time sort of like give us a sense of what happened and where the state of politics and culture and XYZ is at, technology. but they're not necessarily meant to be super fully formed kind of like thoughts each.

22:32The Art Angle Hosts:Well, that's something I did take away from your thinking about your work and wrote about it a little later is I think the everyday's form is very important that people, particularly when NFTs burst on the scene, were really using the analogy of like owning a sculpture. And then more and more as I thought about what was going on, these are more like performances or events that are happening, that there has to be like new flows of attention constantly happening every day, at least in terms of that pure NFT form, which you kind of immediately, well, you're shaking your head. Well, I think to me, I look at it more like that's just one aesthetic and that's my aesthetic was sort of like NFTs.

23:14But I think NFTs in general are a virtual object that can be like anything. There's many people who make NFTs that are not like that at all. I mean, most people's NFTs are not like mine. And so I think there's a lot of different interesting sort of like different types of interactions with dynamic NFTs that we barely scratch the surface of. And so I really see it as like a much more blank canvas than certain aesthetics that people have latched on to and trying to be like, this is what NFTs are. Again, you can look at Bored Apes or XYZ sort of like PFP things and be like, this is what it is. And it's like, it's kind of like attaching to one type of artwork that you might not like painting wise and being like, this is what paintings are.

24:00And it's like, I think it's pretty early in the idea of a virtual object having value to sort of like lump all of it together as having one type of aesthetic or one type of like conceptual, I don't know. Idea. Sort of like, yeah.

24:22The Art Angle Hosts:So you pretty quickly, though, later that year in 2021, moved into making a physical sculpture in the form of Human One. So why? Even before that, we had made smaller sculptures, even before the Christie's auction, even. And that was one of the things that also kind of like set my work apart than what other people were doing in the NFT space, is we had made these little screens that we had sold with the like work. I think you're going to continue to see this blurring of the line between digital and like physical world. You see that now. The things that happen online don't happen in a vacuum. Those things have real consequences in the physical world and that will continue to sort of like be the case and vice versa.

25:06And so Human One was really just a very natural kind of like, oh, now we can do this. It was just one of these things where it's like, Like my brother is a engineer and a couple months before the Christie sale, he quit his job and I was like, oh, let's build things basically like human one. And so he assembled a team and, you know, he's still here and the team's still here mostly. And so it was just a very natural kind of like progression of like, oh, now I actually have capital to be able to build this thing that probably cost half a million dollars to make. Obviously, I could not do before.

25:41The Art Angle Hosts:I had read it as sort of almost a reaction to the NFT sense that there was an NFT bubble, that a lot of the things that people promised for that purely immaterial art and art didn't have to take place in a space exactly anymore. I feel like you kind of immediately laid a claim to exactly those things, you know, in opening a space yourself and starting to make these physical sculptures. It wasn't a reaction against NFTs. It was much more just like, I don't see these rigid sort of like digital or not digital. And some people do. Some people in the space are very against any kind of physical thing.

26:21And they think it's more pure conceptually to have things that are just digital. But Human One has an NFT component. All the sculptures that we make have NFT components. The robot dogs have NFTs. And so I really don't see it as being like this or that. I personally still think we're very early in what NFTs could be. And I still think, even with all the ups and downs, that in the future, all paintings will have an NFT component. Because at the end of the day, I still think if there was an infrastructure around it, it's a better certificate of authenticity. You could have the entire provenance of everybody who's owned it right there.

26:57You could have the exhibition history of it right there. It's better than a piece of paper that's just like, don't lose your little piece of paper that says you own the thing. It's like, of course, it's better than that. Everybody could search it and search like, OK, I want a blue painting that's this size, blah, blah, blah. And again, does any of that infrastructure exist? Absolutely not. And in that case, an NFT would be purely a certificate of authenticity for a physical object. It's really, to me, akin to like a website. What is a website? We're 25 years into 30 years into the internet and we're still figuring out what a website could be, what it could sort of like do.

27:37And so I think there's many sort of like use cases. And so the physical work that I did wasn't necessarily like a rejection of the NFT stuff. It's and not or.

27:47The Art Angle Hosts:In that high NFT bubble times when I would go to NFT NYC and report on it, that was always really disorienting to me is that on one hand, you'd have artists or art advocates, art investors talking about, wow, this is the future of art. It's like the new cubism. And then the next conference room, someone will be saying like, what if your Whirlpool dishwasher had an NFT? And it was like, I don't know. I guess that's exciting. I don't know. It seems more akin to like having a website for Whirlpool than then. Although I know I think you can do dynamic things with NFTs and maybe that's how the medium is most interestingly explored.

28:21Well, I think there will be much more things in the future. again, when you just pare it down to a virtual object that you have ownership to. We need the infrastructure, which has not been built. And I think we'll take time because I think one of the biggest things that is a huge hurdle is just the social consensus of this. We've all grown up with for the last, again, sort of like 30 years that a lot of people have had computers. A file is a copy of a copy of a copy, and there's no like owning a file. It's like, what do you even mean? I don't even understand. That's a very new idea. And so it will take time for there to be social consensus around the fact that you could sort of like own something and sort of like have much more kind of like control over it.

29:06again, I think about things like medical records. Like, how the hell is your medical record on NFT that you have can control over and you can like say who has access to this? It's just a file in a database. You don't even know who has access to it. You have no idea what it is. You have no control over it. To me, those are the type of things. And again, are they interesting or speculative? No. It's a boring thing with this technology. Exactly. Yeah.

29:32The Art Angle Hosts:You have the experience of coming into the art world relatively recently are the art industry, the museum world, what people would classically call the art world, sort of as an outsider. I'm sure you had exposure to it before. I just want to know what your impression - Not much. Not really? Really? I mean, I just want to know what your impression was and what's your impression now? Has it changed? A hundred percent. It's changed quite a lot. It was a very separate world. I knew nothing of museums. I did not know the difference between a gallery and a museum. Like I thought when you say gallery, you just mean like, I don't know, like maybe that's like a museum.

30:09I did not understand galleries sell art and museums exhibit art. That's how little I knew. Because again, I didn't go to art school. I went to school for computer science. And I was also very sort of against learning anything about art history because I was very worried that if I knew art history, that it would somehow like warp my pure sensibility of things. And that if I knew the rules, I'd like subconsciously just start following the rules. And now it's like the complete opposite that I want to know art history because I want to not do things that have already been done before inadvertently and think I'm doing this crazy new thing.

30:52And it's like, eh, kind of conceptually somebody did that in the seventies. It's not that knew my guy. And so I've learned a ton. I still have a lot to learn. I naturally kind of gravitated more towards this world, to be quite honest, than a lot of the sort of like crypto world because, well, I have many differences with the traditional art world. I saw people in the traditional art world who had thought deeply and devoted their lives to art and thinking about what art could be, what art could say the same way that I had. Versus in the crypto world, to be quite honest, I saw a lot of people who like just started giving a shit about art as soon as there was money attached to it.

31:33And they were much more interested in pushing sort of like crypto ethos than sort of like art. Again, I'm a digital artist first. And NFTs are an interesting medium, I think, in terms of selling, collecting, you know, digital art. But I had been making digital art for 20 years before I'd ever heard of NFTs.

31:52The Art Angle Hosts:I feel like people are very charmed or confused by your friendship with the curator, Carolyn Christoph Bakargiev, who is a very famous curator, maybe one of the most famous curators, and very early on was touring you around the Venice Biennale and so on. What have those conversations been like? People want to know. Yeah, it's been great. She reached out very sort of like early on after the Christie sale. and we've talked a ton ever since. And so I think I dragged her out to the United States three times last year for different things. You know, she came to the studio a couple of times and came out to see the dogs and stuff.

32:29She's been such a like insane wealth of knowledge that I've learned so, so much for. And she's just so open to like learning and wanting to understand this kind of like space and this sort of like movement in general that it's been super sort of like inspiring to see. And so, yeah, she's been a huge, huge supporter and just taught me in an insane amount.

32:50The Art Angle Hosts:So I want to ask you a little bit about Beeple Studios then, which maybe reflects the kind of art scene you want to build. You constructed this space. It's a very impressive, very large space for digital art. We've got to have you down here. Sure. It's meant as a place that is just up worth the whole digital art scene as I understand it. Digital artists speak very highly of it. I was talking to somebody who had nothing but good things to say about Select Start, your project about video games. And you just did this event called Synthetic Theater that I think kind of might reflect this crossing of scenes that you're talking about.

33:29The Art Angle Hosts:because it both had Holly Herndon, who's a very famous art world artist who experiments with AI in different ways, but also Danny McBride from Southbound and Down and was just some sort of, as I understand it, art and technology spectacle. What are you trying to build? What are you trying to get at with something like that? Yeah, so basically just kind of like high level. The space has a bunch of studios with woodworking and 3D printers and metal and server rooms. Like a maker space? Yeah, kind of. It's like a makerspace, but it's just for like our team. And so that's like half of the building.

34:05And then the other half of the building, there's like a white wall gallery that's like 12 ,000 square feet. And then there's an experiential space that's like 12 ,000 square feet. And so when we have events, that's where people are. And each of the events that we've done is very different and themed. And so the synthetic theater one was the first one where we did more of like a performance. Usually they're kind of like parties in a way where there's a bunch of different things going on throughout the night. There's drawing contests and sometimes I'm doing my everyday live. We've got people painting live.

34:37We're showing a bunch of different work that we've curated from people all over the world. There's a bunch of different things. There was a video game tournament for the Select Start one. And so the synthetic theater one was more of like a theatrical performance around AI. And so we had different people using AI in sort of like live performances. We had people doing dance and then we were kind of like using AI to project them and transform them in real time. Holly was showing what can be done with sort of like AI and music. And then we had people doing comedy and AI and sort of we had AI that we had made.

35:16And that was also kind of like a character in the space that we would talk to. And again, it was basically using chat GPT. And so we didn't know what it was going to say too. So it was kind of like a live performer that we would also talk to. And then in the end, we built this short film throughout the course of the night. And then things went off the rails and robots came out and killed us and kind of the AI sort of took over.

35:40The Art Angle Hosts:Good to know, that's where, that's how a party, that's how the night ends at People's Street. That's how the night ends. The night began actually, I haven't said this publicly, with a bunch of people protesting outside. And so we hired 50 extras and made signs for them and shirts for them and had them protesting to kind of like - They were paid protesters? They were paid protesters, but they fooled everybody coming to the space. Like they had to drive through this like giant crowd of people and they were good. They were yelling at the people and stuff and everybody 100 % believe this. We also had people interrupting the show as like protesters, like protesting because we wanted to show that side of AI.

36:20And like, there is this angst around it and there is this like fear of it. And it's like, that's real. And that's real to me too, because again, working in commercials, I know a bunch of friends who like works drying up because it's like, this stuff is so fast and it's so powerful. And so it's like, we wanted to reflect

36:34The Art Angle Hosts:that aspect of AI as well. But yeah, so that was more of a theatrical performance, but we're really just trying to do different sort of like experimental things in this space that's very sort of like digital that normally in an immersive space, it looks a certain way. You walk in and you look at it for 10 minutes and like that's how it looks for two months, three months, two years, whatever. Like a TeamLab place. It's a Japanese digital art group. TeamLab hasn't really changed in years, honestly. And so we were trying to like, what if we did something that's much more kind of like experimental?

37:08You know, there's no tickets. All the events are free. Everything's free. Just can be kind of like an incubator for ideas that other people could use?

37:16The Art Angle Hosts:Well, we've talked a long time, and I haven't even really gotten to projects that got so much attention in the last couple months. You have this AI sculpture at LACMA, Diffuse Control, and also in the Toledo Museum of Art. And you got a lot of attention for these dogs at Art Basel Miami Beach, regular animals. These are robotic dogs with some sort of AI component and the heads of artists, including Picasso and yourself, and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. What's the idea of that work? So that is a new work that we first publicly showed at our Basel. And the idea behind it is basically there's these dogs that are moving around autonomously.

38:03And they have, like you said, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Elon Musk, Warhol, Picasso, myself. And they are basically taking pictures continuously and then sort of like reimagining those pictures that they're taking in the style of each person. And then they have printers attached to them and they kind of like squat down and like poop out a print of that picture. And so the idea behind it is that we will increasingly be seeing the world through the lens of AI. And in that way, it's a generative work because I don't know what they're going to take a picture of. I don't know how the AI is going to interpret that picture.

38:48And so it's kind of like this mix of like sculpture and sort of like generative work. But I think with AI and robotics, sort of like higher level, you're going to see more works that feel alive. And the idea that sculptures are these sort of like static things, I think that's not going away, obviously. But I think you're also going to see things that interact with the world in ways that we can't predict. And I think we're just at the absolute beginnings of that. Another idea behind it that was a big impetus to it is that often when we talk about AI, people anthropomorphize it in a way that to me is very odd.

39:25And like people say, oh, it doesn't have a soul. It's like, what in the fuck are you talking about? Of course it doesn't have a soul. It's a fucking computer program. Like the fact that you would even say that is actually like crazy. You're talking about it like it's a person. And so these robots that have these like human faces, like I think increasingly we are going to anthropomorphize this technology and it's going to lead us into very weird places. When you say it's powered by AI, what does that mean actually? What AI? So a couple different models. So when the robots take a picture, it uses ChatGPT to basically look at that picture and determine, is it an interesting picture?

40:05And so it filters out, you know, if it's blurry or if it's just sort of like a picture of somebody's shoes or whatever. And so it's continually taking and scoring and ranking those pictures to sort of like decide which one's the most interesting when it comes time to poop. And then when it comes time to sort of like create the AI version of that, it uses a few different models there. Some of them use Seed Dream, which is a Chinese model. And then some of them use Google Nano Banana, which is crazy because as we were making it just in the last two weeks before this happened, there was an update to the model and it got way better.

40:46We didn't have to do anything. It just looked way more like visually coherent. The Warhol ones looked way more like Warhol prints than the model we were using before. It wasn't like we did a bunch of work. It just looked way better like that. To me, that's like really exciting and like fun to sort of like play with.

41:06The Art Angle Hosts:Do you know the artist Mario Klingemans, Artificially Intelligent Critical Canine? Because he also made a dog a couple of years ago. An art critic dog. Somebody showed me that afterwards. I didn't know that, but it's such a like cool thing. which I didn't even get a chance to talk to him about. He was at Zero Tin. He had a booth as well there. But yeah, he's great. He's definitely amazing. His Bado project is so cool. I think it's just a super, super interesting, very smart idea. And like, yeah, somebody had mentioned that afterwards. And I was like, oh, that's very cool. It obviously really captured people's attention in his talk of the show.

41:38The Art Angle Hosts:Seems to represent some sort of pivot in the tastemaker class in the art world towards technology. How do you think about the time scale of these things? Are you producing for the now? Or are you thinking about something that's going to be around in five years, in a hundred years? Now, I'm definitely trying to think far into the future of how these things will be perceived. And that was even the impetus for calling it regular animals. That right now, this seems very weird and like, oh, what is that? In the future, it will seem regular. that it will just be like, oh, yeah, there's like a fucking dog with like a robot head walking around.

42:19You'll just see it outside. And I'll just be like, okay, you'll just see it in the wild. Like, and so that's what I'm trying to anticipate. And it's, to be quite honest, very hard because things are moving so fast. I mean, there's so many times where I have ideas for some AI thing, and then we won't make it right away. And like a few months later, I'm just like, is this even like interesting? Like, it's like almost so easy. It's like not even like this like novel thing anymore because AI is advanced enough where it's just like, oh, yeah, that's just like a normal thing. And so I'm both, again, very inspired and a bit freaked out at the pace of things.

42:56The Art Angle Hosts:Well, people, thank you for talking to me. Thank you for revisiting all this stuff and see what you're up to next. Yeah. Thank you very much. Very much. Appreciate it. We're going to have you down to the studio here. Sure. I look forward to seeing it. That's it for this week's episode. If you like what you've heard, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Also, please take a moment to rate and review the show. I really mean that. It helps other listeners discover what we're doing. The Art Angle is produced by Sonia Manalili with contributions from Kate Brown, Ben Davis, Caroline Goldstein, and Naomi Rae.

43:33Thanks for listening, and see you next week.