Whipped Cream Difficulties

Actual headline in the NYPost:

Art Basel show by Beeple has realistic Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg robot dogs pooping NFTs

“Realistic”. As Mike the Musicologist put it to me:

Famed artist Beeple’s…

Who?

Famed artist Beeple’s latest spectacle, “Regular Animals,” has billionaire-tech-titan robot dogs pooping out NFTs, and stopping onlookers at Art Basel Miami Beach in their tracks at the fair’s VIP preview.
The animatronic canines sport nightmarishly realistic masks of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg — plus famed artists Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol, plus two Beeple (aka Mike Winkelmann) lookalikes — all crafted by famed mask-maker Landon Meier.
As the robo-mutts trot around, they continuously snap photos, squatting to take a digital dump of an art print in accordance with its corresponding style.
Zuckerberg’s for example, looks like the Metaverse, Musk’s is a black and white robot take, while Picasso is cubist and Warhol is pop art.

“Beeple” has some sort of incoherent point about how Musk and Zuckerberg influence “how we see the world” “because they control these very powerful algorithms”.

We hear all of the robot dogs have already been snapped up by private collectors — for $100,000 each — but the owners have let them “go on tour.”
However, fairgoers still have a chance to take home a piece of the chaos: The dogs will “eliminate” 1,028 prints, each stamped “Excrement Sample,” along with a warning label noting that the item may be “disgusting to most patrons of the arts,” and could cause, “uncontrollable erections in degenerate art collectors.”

Of those prints, 256 include a “scan to claim” barcode in the corner, marking them as actual NFTs.

This is the part that bothers me the most:

Given that Beeple’s blockbuster NFT, “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days,” sold for $69.3 million at Christie’s in 2021, the latest drops might end up as yet another gold mine.

That was 2021. I wonder what his NFT would go for in today’s market. If it went up for auction, I would bid a batch of homemade Chex Mix. If I needed to up my bid, I’d throw in a batch of homemade onion dip. Beyond that, I’d have to pass, much like the robot dogs do.

(Thank you. I’ll be here all week.)

The art market is collapsing.

At least, according to the NYT. “Young Artists Rode a $712 Million Boom. Then Came the Bust.”

Subhead: “Artists saw six-figure sales and heard promises of stardom. But with the calamitous downturn in the art market, many collectors bolted — and prices plummeted.”

The paper of record gives examples such as Amani Lewis:

First came the meteoric rise. A haunting painting Lewis made in 2020 sold at auction just a year later for $107,100, more than double its estimate. Two other works had recently tripled expectations, and a collector offered $150,000 in cash for new pieces fresh from the studio. There were shows in Paris and Miami — Lewis had seemingly conquered the market at age 26, upgrading to a new art studio and a Tesla.
But when the original painting re-emerged at auction in June and its price plunged to $10,080 — losing 90 percent of its value — the party was over. By then, Lewis had stopped renting a $7,000-a-month luxury apartment in Miami and temporarily moved in with their brother.
“It was such a nice high and then it drops,” the artist, now 29, said. “It feels like, ‘We’re done with Amani Lewis.’”

More:

The Ghanaian artist Emmanuel Taku had a painting sell in 2021 for $189,000 only to watch its price drop in March to $10,160 at auction. Cubist-style portraits by Isshaq Ismail, which sold for as much as $367,000 two years ago, have failed to rise beyond $20,000. Allison Zuckerman, a Brooklyn artist, also felt the market’s contractions; her riotous painting “Woman With Her Pet” sold for $212,500 three years ago, but mustered only $20,160 at auction in June.

…

Mercier said that he and Taku were organizing a comeback and “cleaning up the mess,” and that Taku’s paintings should go for $25,000 to $50,000 (compared with previous heights closer to $189,000).

“…should go for $25,000 to $50,000”? Seems to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work.

The comments on this article are now closed, but from my review of the ones already posted, there’s one recurring theme (which may also explain why the NYT closed the comments): these emperors have no clothes.

Or to put it another way: “The art shown in the article is awful — not something I would like to see in 10 years let alone 100.” And: “I’m not interested in looking at any of these paintings for months or years. No offence intended, but what’s the point of collecting paintings unless you enjoy looking at them.”