Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, is 40 years old and is an American graphic designer, animator, and digital artist. His work has served super celebrities or companies like Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, SpaceX, Apple, and even appeared on the Super Bowl halftime show twice.
Beeple的真名是Mike Winkelmann，今年40岁，是一名美国的平面设计师、动画师和数字艺术家。他的作品曾经服务于贾斯汀比伯、Katy Perry、SpaceX、Apple等超级名人或公司，甚至两次在超级碗中场秀中出现。
But The real cause of his fame came in March when his digital painting work Everyday: The First 5000 Days was sold as NFT at Christie’s for a hefty $69.3 million. Christie’s claimed the sale placed Beeple “among the top three most valuable living artists”.
但令他名声大噪的真正原因发生在今年3月份，他的数字作品《每一天：前5000天》在佳士得以NFT的形式被售卖，价格高达6930万美元。佳士得声称此次拍卖使Beeple跻身“前三位最有价值的在世艺术家之列”。
Beeple is just one in the new wave of wealth-making in the art world that has emerged since the NFT digital art market. In simple terms, NFT stands for “non-fungible token,” which is essentially a digital signature powered by blockchain technology that proves ownership of something. Technically, it can contain any digital work, even a Twitter post. The digital art market has become very hot and even crazy recently, as the NFT has solved the problem of the lack of appreciation in the art market due to the easy reproducibility of digital works.
NFT市场自出现开始，就在艺术界掀起了新的一波造富运动，Beeple仅仅是其中一位。简单来说，NFT本质上是一种由区块链技术支持的数字签名，可证明某物的所有权。从技术上讲，它可以包含任何数字作品，甚至是一条推特。数字艺术作品曾经因为便捷的可复制性而缺少在艺术市场上的升值空间，而NFT的出现则解决了这一问题，这使得数字艺术市场最近变得异常火热甚至疯狂。
A collage of Beeple’s works. Part of Everydays: The First 5000 Days
Beeple 的作品拼贴。《每一天：前5000天》一部分
Of course, the reason why Beeple’s digital artwork Everydays: The First 5000 Days can fetch such a high price is not only because the NFT market exploded, but also because the work itself is good enough. As The title suggests, Beeple has been producing one digital creation a day for more than 5,000 days, starting on 1 May 2007. In 2011, he talked about why he started the project:
当然，Beeple的作品之所以能拍得上如此高价，除了有乘上了NFT市场爆发这艘快船的原因之外，其作品本身也足够优秀。《每一天：前5000天》作品正如其名，是Beeple每天完成一张数字作品并坚持五千多天的结果，这项工作始于2007年5月1日。在2011年，他曾经谈到为什么要开始这个项目：
“I saw another artist named Tom Judd who did this a few years back. I thought that was a really great idea and I figured it would be a great way to get better at drawing myself. Since then I’ve used this as a tool to learn about photography and 3D animation as well.”
“我看到另一位艺术家Tom Judd几年前做过这个。我认为这是一个非常棒的想法，这将是一个让自己不断画地更好的方法。从那时起，我就把它作为学习摄影和3D动画的方式。”
– Beeple
The themes of Everydays: The First 5000 Days are very diverse, including graphic commentary on American politics, technology worship, cosmic totem, environmental issues, social wealth distribution, etc., and the style is mostly abstract, fantasy, and absurd. But there is no doubt that these whimsical paintings satisfy certain imaginations that are not answered in traditional painting.
《每一天：前5000天》作品内容的主题十分多多元，包括以图像形式对美国政治的评论，技术崇拜，宇宙图腾，环境问题，社会财富分配等等，风格也以抽象、奇幻和荒诞居多。但毫无疑问，这些光怪陆离的画作满足了人们在传统绘画中无法得到回应的某些想象。
Thanks to his masterpieces, Beeple was already a social media sensation with millions of followers before Christie’s auctioned them off. It can be said that the hot NFT market and his own superflow, jointly contributed to this sky-high auction, and there will be more super-rich artists to be born in the NFT digital art market.
凭借这些优秀的画作，在佳士得拍卖之前，Beeple就已经在社交媒体上颇受追捧，吸引了超过数百万的粉丝。可以说NFT市场的火热和他自带的超级流量，共同促成了这场天价拍卖。可以预见，在NFT数字艺术品市场，将会有更多的超级富豪诞生。
Of course, controversies have been around NFT since the day it emerged, such as the speculative nature of NFT and its huge carbon consumption as a cryptocurrency. But Beeple donated 6 million of his NFT market revenue to the Open Earth Foundation (A nonprofit environmental organization) in 2019 and plans to buy carbon offsets for all NFT transactions. Beeple’s approach can be said to set an example for the art nouveau rich artists created by the NFT movement.
当然，争议从NFT出现的那一天起就伴随其左右，比如NFT的投机性和作为加密货币的巨量碳消耗。但是Beeple在2019年就将通过NFT市场收入的600万美元捐入开放地球基金（一个非盈利环保组织），并计划为所有的NFT交易购买碳抵消。可以说，Beeple的做法可以说为NFT造富运动产生的艺术新贵们树立了榜样。
For more information on the artist, please click here
欲了解更多她的作品，请点击这里
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