FTX BOARD MEETING, DAY #5676 11.13.2022
Beeple’s work FTX BOARD MEETING, DAY #5676 11.13.2022, 2023 (Cinema 4D, Octane Render, Photoshop, NFT, oil on canvas 147.3 x 182.9 cm) constitutes an important donation that updates our permanent collection with a work in a 21st-century medium that combines the digital with the physical. I am grateful to Mike Winkelmann for his generosity and respect for museums and our museum in particular.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
The subject of this work is the thirty-one-year old entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, one of the youngest billionaires in the tech industry in early 2022, and the founder and former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX. The work is a satirical reflection on recent events involving Bankman-Fried, arrested in December 2022 for wire fraud and money laundering. Allusions to Effective Altruism – a concept of philosopher William MacAskill preached by Bankman-Fried and often adopted by tech entrepreneurs – can be seen in the background of Beeple’s image. These contrast with the alleged conduct of the FTX exchange platform, accused of having used billions of dollars from the exchange to finance risky operations of Bankman-Fried’s currency company, Alameda Research, leading to the inevitable collapse of cryptocurrencies. Some news, leaked in the days following his arrest, alleged he also engaged in frequent orgies in the office. In this work, Beeple makes fun of Bankman-Fried in a cathartic way, through the representation of an orgy between computers where the image of the entrepreneur is kaleidoscopically multiplied and blurs gender, to the point of representing onanism and the pure solipsism of some parts of the new digital world. The recurrence of the same figure in the picture can also be read as an allusion to the close circle of collaborators with whom Bankman-Fried worked and lived in a resort in the Bahamas.