The Untold Story Behind Beeple’s Historic NFT Sale: ‘Token Supremacy’ Excerpt

In 2007, Beeple started a project that would eventually make him famous. The “Everydays” series began as a daily drawing habit of crude little doodles that seemed to betray his more corporate, Bill Gates appearance. The drawings were the crass products of a mind feeding on internet bile (racist caricatures, nude women, penis jokes, political satire) and tutored by magical realism (family portraits, animal studies, Jesus smoking cigarettes, Hillary Clinton wearing gold teeth). A year later, Beeple switched to Cinema4D, an animation software that allowed him to manipulate three-dimensional space. For the kid who spent hours at Toys “R” Us playing a demo of Super Mario 64 on the new Nintendo console, it was a dream come true to create realistic worlds on a computer. But it wasn’t until around 2011 that he started fully utilizing the program to experiment with bright colors and blurry shapes with names like Synthetic Bubblegum Tittufux. Around the same time, Beeple started releasing music videos made with Cinema4D as free source material for creative professionals; the artist understood how popular his creations had become only when, on a family vacation to Hong Kong, he saw one of his works projected outside a Hard Rock Cafe.