The $70 Million JPEG

The American Purpose

There’s a certain phrase that is guaranteed to make an arts professional shake her head: My five-year old could do that. The art-world insider, upon hearing this, will think to herself, Pity the philistine. The guilty party, perhaps an uncle from flyover country, just doesn’t have the intellectual sensitivity to understand the art’s message.

Such condescension makes the events of March 10—when the sale of an artwork by computer illustrator Mike Winkelmann turned the art world’s sensibilities on its head—all the more interesting. When the hammer came down at Christie’s, the outcry from the art world was fast, furious, and nearly unanimous: But that’s not art!

Everydays: The First 5000 Days is a digital canvas of five thousand illustrations produced by Winkelmann over a thirteen-year period. It sold for $69.3 million, an act that automatically converted the art world into the scolds they normally deride. “Vulgar internet kitsch,” exclaimed The New Yorker. “Puerile amusements,” said a New York Times critic. A “soporific cliché,” noted the Washington Post writer. Over at Artnet, a critic warned that the work will have “the shelf life of Taco Bell leftovers.”

Those outside the professional art scene might revel in the delicious irony of the reaction. The art world has spent the last century proclaiming its open-mindedness and expansive sensibilities toward the definition of art. Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, or rather, Fountain, elevated plumbing to gallery status in 1917. Piero Manzoni packaged his own excrement in 1961, producing ninety cans in a work entitled Merda d’artista. The Tate is proud to have #4 in its collection.

Yet with the sale of Everydays and the burgeoning field of cryptocurrency-fueled art, the art world quickly dusted off its 19th-century sensibilities and retreated to a corner mostly occupied by today’s classicists. Questions of taste, beauty, decency, and morality not only returned, but became critical points demanding our full attention. The heroic gains of Signor Manzoni and his ninety cans of merda d’artista all but evaporated.

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This article originally appeared in The American Purpose, May 7, 2021.