The Untold Story Behind Beeple's Historic NFT Sale: 'Token Supremacy' Excerpt

Author Zachary Small details the behind-the-scenes events that brought the digital artist and Christie's auction house together in the first chapter of their book.
Mike Winkelmann sank into the sofa as three cameras recorded his meltdown. The dueling identities that had once structured his life were coming into conflict as his fortunes increased by the second. Unseen crypto billionaires were bidding for his soul, or at least it felt that way. His entire artistic career was being auctioned as a compilation of five thousand digital artworks, packaged by the Christie’s auctioneers as a single non-fungible token (NFT). The winner would receive this NFT as an online certificate of ownership, a deed to 14 years inside Winkelmann’s mind. It was surreal watching his own coronation from the couch. The new crypto king was slack jawed as his net worth continued to rise by the millions on the computer screen, reckoning with the transformation of his art into an ultimate use-case for blockchain technology, bringing the metaverse into the mainstream. Two documentary crews captured his euphoric stupor, memorializing the tight choreography of this historic moment.
Zachary Small, a New York Times reporter writing about the art world's relationship to money, politics and technology, is the author of "Token Supremacy: THE ART OF FINANCE, THE FINANCE OF ART, AND THE GREAT CRYPTO CRASH OF 2022," published by Penguin Random House.
The artist had become a multimillionaire at that moment. It was too much to bear, and suddenly he was bolting for the out door patio, away from the living room, where his family had gathered to celebrate his success. Winkelmann needed some air.
Once upon a time, the promise of a divided life held some appeal. Mike owned a lucrative business turning digital graphics and animations into branded visuals for clients like Louis Vuitton, Apple and Justin Bieber. The money he earned from those productions allowed him to live in the McMansion suburbs outside of Charleston, South Carolina. He fit comfortably there into the patterns of home, work, and hobby. He was popular with the neighbors, a plucky midwestern transplant with a wide smile, a sailor’s mouth, and a heart of gold. He would sometimes rant about politics, but otherwise focused on family, sitting pretty in a large home overlooking the palmetto trees. Mike understood the value of compartmentalization, because his parents taught him midwestern manners and the importance of staying reserved in the middle-class Wisconsin village where he was born. So he kept his more libidinal thoughts inside a computer running so hot that it needed to be stored in the bathroom on a wood platform over the tub, near a jury-rigged industrial A/C unit that vented its heat into the attic.
The computer expended its vast amounts of energy trying to contain Beeple, the internet crap monster responsible for Winkelmann’s cult online following. He adopted the name in 2003, after a 1980s toy that looked like the abandoned love child of Sasquatch and Chewbacca, with light sensors that triggered its blinking nose and squeaky voice whenever its eyes were covered by a hand. Winkelmann had just graduated with a computer-science degree from Purdue University in Indiana, but he found programming “boring as sh*t.” The 22-year-old was more interested in shooting narrative short films through a webcam than working for a software...
https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2024/05/24/the-untold-story-behind-beeples-historic-nft-sale-token-supremacy-excerpt/
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