SELECT START - Glimpse Into the Future of Art
My First Visit to Beeple Studios
On March 29th, I walked into Beeple Studios in Charleston, South Carolina, for the first time. The event was called SELECT START, a title lifted straight from the DNA of early video games, and fittingly so — because what I witnessed wasn’t just an art show or a tech expo. It felt like the beginning of something. A checkpoint on the creative timeline where art, gaming, and digital culture finally collided in full resolution.
It was loud, it was packed, it was pixelated — and it was deeply inspiring.
More Than an Art Show — It Was a Digital Cathedral
I’ve attended hundreds of conferences, exhibits, and media installations over the years. But Beeple Studios is something else entirely. It’s not just a venue; it’s a cathedral for the digitally native generation. A place where creative expression is measured not in oil paints or marble but in GPUs, screen refresh rates, and data visualizations.
From the minute I entered the building, I was immersed in a multi-sensory storm: walls of generative art, live gaming tournaments, real-time “Everydays” from Beeple himself, and rooms pulsing with retro gaming nostalgia and futuristic projections. It was as if MoMA met Comic-Con, and both got reprogrammed through Unreal Engine and Adobe After Effects.
What Would the Great Masters Think?
As I wandered through the crowd — a wildly diverse mix of artists, technologists, collectors, and curious onlookers — a question kept echoing in my mind:
What would van Gogh think if he stepped into this space? What would Da Vinci say, or Duchamp, or Warhol, or Haring? What if they saw their creative legacy not preserved in glass but reanimated in code?
Would they scoff? Or would they light up with wonder?
I think they’d be absolutely captivated.
These artists were experimenters at heart. They broke their own mediums, redefined boundaries, and saw the world not as it was — but as it could be. And in that sense, Beeple Studios isn’t a break from that legacy. It’s a continuation of it — except now the canvas is infinite, the audience is global, and the brushstrokes are made of light and logic.
How I Got Here
I first discovered Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) during the NFT explosion of 2020–2021. Back then, I didn’t consider myself an artist — but I’ve been fluent in the Adobe Suite since the ‘90s. I’ve made things. I’ve layered timelines and adjusted bezier curves long before digital creativity was cool.
Maybe I wasn’t making “art” — but I was expressing myself in pixels, which feels like a valid definition today.
Seeing Beeple at NFT NYC a few years back, and then again here, reminded me how far this world has come in such a short time. NFTs might’ve been the spark, but now the fire has spread. We’re no longer just buying digital art — we’re living inside it.
What SELECT START Showed Me
That art is now a playable experience, not just a static image
That a video game console is as legitimate a medium as canvas or clay
That community is the new gallery — and the crowd is part of the creation
That the line between creator and collector, player and artist, is being joyfully blurred
And that the next great art movement may be coded by someone who grew up on Nintendo
Reflections from a Digitally-Native Soul
I’m not 25. I didn’t grow up in the metaverse. But I’ve spent a lifetime embracing change, mastering tools, and staying curious. And that night in Charleston, I felt something familiar yet brand new: the electric sense that a creative revolution is underway.
The analog-to-digital shift isn’t about replacing the old. It’s about building on it. And in Beeple Studios, you can feel the lineage. You can almost hear Da Vinci whispering behind the LED panels: “This is where I’d be painting if I were alive today.”
Final Thought: SELECT START Isn’t a Title — It’s an Invitation
We’re entering a new era where every medium is malleable, every image interactive, every story nonlinear. Beeple Studios is a living laboratory for that evolution.
And for those of us who’ve been creating, coding, designing, and dreaming for decades — it’s a reminder that we were always artists. Even if we didn’t know it.
So yeah, SELECT START.
Because the game — the real game — is just beginning.