Beeple at Jack Hanley 2022

 Ben Davis, just wrote, at artnet.com about Beeple (about a work not in this current show):

Here’s what I found. Essentially, there are four different Beeples at play in “Everydays”. None is likely to age well.

Ben, if Raymond Pettibon and Candy Ass and Joel Otterson and Richard Estes and Lynda Benglis and Jenny Hozler and Heidi Fasnacht and Mark Tansey (both did illustrative explosions), and Sue Coe and George Grosz and Alexis Rockman are artists, then so is Beeple. 

Did you go see the show? Did anyone who thinks they can see the show by knowing what a Beeple jpeg looks like, actually GO SEE the show? 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/arts/design/beeple-jack-hanley-gallery.html

Guess who didn’t print the master work in the gallery? Yeah. Those guys. 

Beeple’s endless labyrinth of imagery, graffiti, abstraction, semi-fictional technological hodge-podge is dizzying. Sometimes 3D printed (presumably on giclée) sometimes painted and sometimes drawn by colored pencil, these works each have an uncannily traditional palette: Dutch landscape, or by contrast, Goya’s macabre tenebroso. This is not to make a flippant contrast for argument’s sake. The works are grounded in traditional illustration in a way that allows a meditative gaze onto all the slowly-revealing elements. Where’s Waldo like inside jokes MUST be hiding there. I was only in the gallery for 15 minutes. I’ve looked at art for 40 years. I know there was more hiding there.

I’m certain that the critique of Beeple as “bro-ey” culture poking only semi-fun at Bezos or Zuckerberg, when he himself uses the tools of digitized industry (3D/CGI software and printing) will be out there. There’s little discussion of race. There’s little discussion of gender roles. But that belies the truly… WILD… paintings that these are. Certainly with Bezos’ heads behind a zoned off technological waste-field with the sign “Jeffery B. Bezos Excess Testosterone Dump” points to some level of class critique. But these are hardly protest signs.

These are foremost, his ruminations. Sometimes sardonic, sometimes playful, but always complex and multi-layered. Just the “bathroom wall” graffiti on the side of a warehoused container is enough to decipher in one work. I’ve seen things similar to this show. HR Geiger has drawings up down the street. I’ve seen things more banal than this show. I’ve seen things more graphically “obscene” than this show. But I’ve never seen anything quite like this show.