Beeple On Digital Art’s Growing Cachet in the Traditional Art World

When people are still discussing an artwork weeks after a gallery exhibition or fair, it becomes clear that the piece has done more than simply go viral. Something about it has opened the door for critical debate, inspiring timely reflection on where art is and where it might be heading next. Consider, too, that many much-discussed works that ultimately reshaped the course of contemporary art history—Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain being the most obvious example—were initially rejected by the art world’s gatekeepers.

The latest work to generate this kind of sustained buzz was arguably Beeple’s robotic performance, Regular Animals, which stole the show at the most recent edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. In the process, it pulled the art world’s focus toward Zero 10, the fair’s inaugural sector dedicated to digital art, and to how these practices currently operate within the contemporary art ecosystem.

Beeple—a.k.a. Mike Winkelmann—had suspected the performance might go viral. When we spoke to him just after the fair, he said that when he’d shown different versions of the robotic dogs at studio events, audiences always responded strongly. Earlier this year, someone recorded one of those presentations, posted it online and the video quickly racked up views. Still, presenting the work at Art Basel Miami Beach propelled it far beyond the digital art community Beeple is a part of. “We knew it was getting traction, but we had no idea it was about to blow up to the point where it would be on global news and literally live on CNBC the next day,” he told Observer. “Every outlet picked it up—Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, everyone. We had no way of expecting that. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh yeah, today’s the day this is going to explode.’”

At the time of our conversation, the videos had already amassed nearly 100 million views, according to Beeple’s team. “Making noise means bringing people in, especially during a week when there’s so much happening, and everyone’s trying to be at the center of the conversation,” he reflected, suggesting that while the scale of the reaction was unexpected, it made sense within the broader cultural moment.

“Honestly, the reason is that a lot of the works in the fair are not talking about things people actually care about. It’s full of conversations that don’t apply to anyone’s daily life,” he said. “Technology—and the impact it has on your life every single day—is an insanely relevant topic. I’m genuinely bewildered that more people in the art world aren’t talking about it. To me, this is the conversation of our time. The impact of technology is massive, and there are so many layers and nuances to it. It permeates everything.”

While ArtNews editor in chief Sarah Douglas brutally described Zero 10 as a wake-up call that “the barbarians are inside” in a recent ArtTactic podcast, the fair’s fledgling digital art sector felt less like an invasion than an acknowledgement of new media’s relevancy. Technology is now so deeply embedded in how we perceive, process and represent the world, and the artists who showed in Zero 10 interrogate and challenge it.

Many of the presentations in Zero 10 operated in a hybrid space between physical and digital forms, raising the question of whether it still makes sense to treat these practices as a separate category. That hybridity may also help explain why traditional collectors are becoming more receptive. Faced with unfamiliar technologies, audiences often look for points of recognition, and as digital art intersects with established visual languages, it becomes easier to situate it within existing cultural (and collecting) frameworks.

Beeple is convinced that, over time, digital artwork will become part of the broader structure of the fair. “Right now it still gets its own section, and that’ll probably continue for a while, but eventually Gagosian is going to have a roster of digital artists, as well as all the other art galleries,” he argued. “It’ll just become another medium—photography, sculpture, painting, digital. There’s zero doubt in my mind that it will eventually be seen that way.”

If that integration has been slow, it’s still just a matter of time. “Digital art has obviously existed for decades, but for most of that time it got lumped into ‘mixed media,’ which never felt right,” he said, noting that what he is doing in 2025 bears little resemblance to Nam June Paik working with VCRs in the 1970s. “That’s video art—nothing against it, but it’s a different medium than me sitting down with A.I. today and producing something completely different.”

Our understanding of digital art as a distinct medium is relatively new. “It really crystallized with NFTs, when a consensus emerged around a natively digital way to collect the work,” Beeple explained. “That brought a huge community along with it—something digital art never had when it was buried under ‘mixed media.’” At the same time, digital art has historically circulated outside the traditional market, developing community-driven systems of exchange with different expectations around authorship and value, particularly in peer-to-peer economies that operate very differently from gallery-based structures.

But he’s less interested in debates about whether decentralized marketplaces will replace galleries. For him, those platforms are simply another option. “Gagosian could sell digital art tomorrow—nothing is stopping any gallery from doing it. They simply haven’t thrown their weight behind digital artists yet. But if a major gallery suddenly decided, ‘This matters, we’re going to represent this artist and put their work in our next booth,’ people would immediately understand digital art as part of the gallery ecosystem.”

That said, in Zero 10, most of the participating artists were represented by galleries; Jack Butcher and Beeple were the exceptions. “The reality is that many artists don’t want to handle the things we handle,” he said. “They want to focus on the work and have a gallery represent them, contextualize it, manage logistics, and provide infrastructure. That’s completely valid.”

He doesn’t see digital art as a threat to the gallery model. “Galleries still have a purpose: they educate, contextualize, support production, and handle the operational side that most artists don’t have the resources or desire to manage,” he said. “I can do more in-house because of my situation, but that’s not the norm.” What he was most proud of at Zero 10, he said, was the level of experimentation around how work could be presented at a fair. Several artists explored new forms of interaction. “I loved what Jack did with allowing anyone to get a piece of art for any amount of money.” In Beeple’s booth, more than one thousand artworks were given away. “I’m excited to see where that experimentation takes us in the future, and I think this will be a massive differentiating factor for digital art at art fairs.”

Beeple rejects the idea of a rigid divide between digital and traditional art worlds. “I don’t see any of this as being ‘against’ the traditional art world: it’s one community and another community, and both will exist in the future. For me, the real focus is on what it means to engage with technology at this stage of civilization—that conversation is more interesting than the mechanics of distribution.”

How the work gets sold is, in fact, the least interesting part for him. He notes that they did accept payment in crypto from one buyer, but downplays the significance. “It really isn’t very complicated and can, of course, be converted to fiat immediately,” he said. “I really am, honestly, a bit surprised that this has not been adopted more generally.”

He calls himself a “digital artist exploring a technology and a medium and what it can express,” adding that “the work will get sold or it won’t. If something is genuinely compelling, it will eventually find its way into people’s hands.” Distribution models, he suggested, will evolve naturally around what proves most effective.

He acknowledged that this position contrasts sharply with the speculative frenzy of the NFT boom, when crypto wealth drove demand for digital objects not always positioned as art. What matters now, he argues, is the broader cultural discourse. “I think a lot has changed since 2021, but overall I think everyone had a bit of time to chill out and maybe get a bit more used to the idea of virtual objects having value,” Beeple said. “When you stop for a second and evaluate the actual artwork divorced from the hype, you see a lot of really smart, interesting works that have craft, intention, and true artistic merit.”

And it’s worth reiterating that digital art is not just crypto art. “The crypto component is just one slice of a broader digital practice,” he emphasized, noting that he had only learned about NFTs four months before his landmark sale, despite having worked digitally for two decades. “My focus is on what digital art can do across social media, A.I. imagery, immersive environments, video games and all the other forms the medium now touches. Crypto art is just one piece of that ecosystem.”

Beeple sees Zero 10 as a continuation of the momentum that began building in 2021, but he also acknowledged that there’s plenty more to do. “One of the things that makes it both exciting and challenging versus other media is that it is changing very rapidly,” he said. “What is possible, the tools, etc., are moving at an insanely rapid pace relative to other mediums.”

That speed complicates institutionalization. Unlike painting and sculpture, which evolve incrementally, digital art is shaped by accelerating technologies. “In just the past three years, the capabilities introduced by A.I. alone have dramatically altered what is possible,” Beeple pointed out. “This constant acceleration is both energizing and challenging: it makes the medium fertile and dynamic but also makes it difficult for curators, collectors and institutions to keep pace.”

Still, he sees growing momentum toward integration. Institutional exhibitions—such as the Toledo Museum of Art’s recent show, “Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms”—have brought together artists working across digital and traditional practices, signaling a shift in perception. In contrast to photography, which took nearly a century to gain full artistic legitimacy, digital art may achieve this integration much faster. “I don’t think digital art will need 100 years,” Beeple asserted. “What also feels different now is a clearer distinction between artistic practices and commercially driven NFT projects. That distinction is becoming easier to recognize.”

At its core, blockchain technology enables ownership of a virtual object, but what that object can be remains an open question. Digital art, he suggested, is still in its nascent stages, comparable to the early days of the web, and the medium continues to expand in form and possibility.

Asked about the role of A.I., Beeple sees it as a tool that expands creative potential rather than a threat to human intelligence. “I think A.I. is both inspiring and, honestly, a little scary. I’m not firmly on one side or the other. It’s going to be extremely disruptive,” he said, acknowledging that certain crafts and jobs will disappear. But critics who dismiss A.I. as mere “remixing,” he added, misunderstand creativity itself. “That’s exactly what humans have always done. Creativity has always been recombination: taking what exists and transforming it. The idea that anything has ever emerged fully formed, untouched by influence, is a fantasy.”

Rather than ending creativity, Beeple believes A.I. will accelerate it. “We’re heading toward a kind of golden age for content, film, and storytelling, because the barriers to participation are collapsing.” As production becomes easier, expectations rise, and “as the volume of content explodes, only work that’s novel and compelling will rise to the top.”

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