Create your own million-dollar NFT art with Beeple Generator

If you spend any time on the internet, you’ve doubtless encountered the saga surrounding Beeple’s record-breaking NFT artwork. But why should a digital artist you may have only heard of a couple of weeks ago have all the fun? Why indeed. Enter the Beeple Generator, a website that assembles its own digitally rendered, randomly generated, visual political “commentary” in mere seconds.

SpongeBob’s Patrick Starfish twerking underneath a shower of Bitcoins, Joe Biden staring curiously at a massive Iron Man helmet, a gargantuan Doge dog dabbing behind its army of similarly posed Shreks — you’ll be scamming your way to crypto wealth in no time with your own hastily assembled, socio-political Mad Lib imagery.

Last month Christie’s Auction House announced it would accept cryptocurrency bids for the first time ever during the sale of digital artist Beeple’s piece, Everydays: The First 5000 Days. As the name suggests, the piece is really one giant collage of 5,000 pieces, made over more than a decade, one piece per day, by Beeple.

Christie’s pitched the move as a way to both jazz up the stereotypically stuffy auction world while also democratizing it so anyone could try their hand at buying major artwork. The non-fungible token (NFT) digital asset then sold for over $69 million to a briefly anonymous buyer, MetaKovan, who turned out to be a decidedly shady crypto investor named Vignesh Sundaresan. Oh, and Beeple’s Everydays also includes some pretty racist, transphobic, and sexist content. Which makes it less of an ad for Christie’s progressiveness than it might have hoped.

Coming from a place of love — Co-created by Sam Newell and Vince McKelvie, Beeple Generator somehow manages to succeed at satirizing the art world, pop culture, and gatekeeping far better than anything featured in Beeple’s Everydays. Conversing via Instagram DMs, McKelvie (an artist, creative coder, and game programmer) explained that Beeple Generator genuinely comes from a place of admiration for the digital artist’s work.

“I’m happy for him. he is an open sourced artist, gave a lot of his work away for free with no expectation of monetary gain. I do the same thing, and i think it’s cool that he was rewarded for that,” McKelvie says. “[H]is dailies aren’t my cup of tea but who cares. also if you post daily it’s basically impossible to do it without a somewhat formulaic aesthetic.”