Beeple is an artist.
He makes digital art pixels on screens depicting bizarre, hilarious, disturbing, and sometimes grotesque images. He smashes together pop culture, technology, and postapocalyptic terror into blistering commentaries on the way we live. A recent frame depicted Donald Trump wearing a leather mask and stripper’s pasties, taking a whip to the coronavirus bug (title: “Trump Dominating Covid”). On the day Jeff Bezos announced he was kicking himself upstairs, Beeple imagined the Amazon founder as a massive, threatening octopus emerging from the ocean as military helicopters circled above (“Release the Bezos”).
Beeple has 1.8 million Instagram followers. His work has been shown at two Super Bowl halftime shows and at least one Justin Bieber concert, but he has no gallery representation or foothold in the traditional art world.
The Gray Market: Why Bob Dylan’s $300 Million Windfall Debunks the Myth of the Sellout Artist (and Other Insights)
Our columnist uses the sale of Dylan’s songwriting catalog to show artists have little to fear from aggressively monetizing their practice.
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This week, separating fact from fiction…
CATALOG MODEL
Last Monday, Bob Dylan capitalized on nearly 60 years of indelible songwriting by selling the rights to his musical catalog to the Universal Music Publishing Group for an amount estimated to be upwards of $300 million. According to Ben Sisario of the
New York Times, the deal “may be the biggest acquisition ever of the music publishing rights of a single songwriter.” What it is without a doubt, though, is another cannonball blasting through the myth that artists will be locked out of their discipline’s pantheon unless they abstain from actively commercializing their work.