Before Beeple: A Field Report from the Early Days

In July 2019 I minted a digital work called NYC Neon on SuperRare, and it sold within days. There was no market to speak of, no headlines, no institutions paying attention. Just a small, stubborn community of artists — and, contrary to how it gets remembered, plenty of women among them — who believed a thing most of the world found faintly ridiculous: that a digital image could be an original, owned and traded like any other work of art.

A year and a half later, Beeple sold a JPEG at Christie’s for sixty-nine million dollars, and suddenly everyone had always believed it.

Early is lonely

Being early is romanticised in hindsight and lonely in practice. Early means building with no audience, pricing with no comparables, and defending your medium at every dinner table. It means your work is legible to a few hundred people worldwide and invisible to everyone else. The Washington Post, writing about that period in 2021, put it plainly:

“A year and a half before Beeple’s $69 million Christie’s sale would push digital art into the spotlight, a 47-year-old Scottish artist named Anna Louise Simpson made her own quiet but life-changing digital art sale.”

What early actually teaches you

Conviction, before consensus, is a skill you can only learn by needing it. I minted through the silence, then through the mania, then through the crash, and I am still minting. The works from 2019 are not juvenilia to me. They are the proof — timestamped, on-chain, impossible to backdate — that I was there before it was safe to be.

That is the part the frontier stories leave out. The reward for being early is not being right in front of a crowd. It is having built the thing before there was a crowd to build it for — and still being standing when the crowd arrives, and leaves, and the work remains.

I have made more than fourteen thousand works since that first sale. But the ones I return to are the earliest: small, certain, made when certainty cost the most.