Beeple

Beeple is the working name of Mike Winkelmann (born 1981), the Wisconsin graphic designer who posted a new digital artwork every single day from 2007 onward — and in March 2021 sold the first 5,000 of them, stitched into the NFT Everydays: The First 5000 Days, for $69.3 million at Christie’s, instantly becoming one of the most expensive works by a living artist.

Remix all the way down

When image generators arrived, Beeple folded them straight into the daily grind, posting Midjourney-assisted renders and defending the tools against the art community’s backlash. In a June 2022 post he called dismissing the technology “extremely premature and naïve,” and he has since argued that AI takes over tedious detail work, freeing him to think conceptually. Asked about the claim that AI art is cultural theft, he told CCN he thinks that is “ridiculous” — most creativity, he argues, is bits and pieces rearranged into new combinations, and even the best visionaries borrow and remix.

His stance is not uncritical boosterism: his satirical daily renders skewer tech billionaires and AI hype as often as they use the tools, and his Art Basel installations have poked at our machine-mediated future. But as a working digital artist with perhaps the largest audience of any, his verdict is unambiguous — the tool is powerful, the theft framing is wrong, and artists should explore rather than boycott.