"In March last year I was sectioned and went to a psychiatric ward for six weeks, I had been diagnosed with suffering from a Psychotic episode...."

"It’s basically like an overspill of your brain’s 'stress bucket,' when your mind can’t handle it any more. In my case I went through a wave of hallucinations and delusions from thinking that I was speaking to God to being hired to doodle all over Donald Trump’s wall to believing that I had become the video game character Crash Bandicoot. In the psychiatric ward I believed I had met and become friends with Banksy and Kanye West and that we were destined to doodle the world together, in reality these were nurses and patients. It was amazing how convinced I was that these things were all true, it was as if I was living in an alternate reality dream world and I just couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what wasn’t.... I was under a lot of pressure mainly from the administrative side of my work, the contracts and legal stuff got on top of me and there were too many things to deal with at once. I am much better now... and I am able to doodle better than ever before!"

Writes Mr. Doodle on Facebook. You can see a lot of his work there too — here. Instagram — here. Sample:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mr Doodle (@mrdoodle)

Here's an Artnet article about him from 3 weeks ago: "How an Artist Named Mr. Doodle Became a Multimillion-Dollar Auction Sensation With a Bunch of Squiggles and ‘Like’-able Branding/Powered by towering sales results in Asia and millions of social followers, Mr. Doodle has quietly taken the auction market by storm." 

In his private moments, Mr. Doodle (AKA the Doodle Man) is a British-born 26-year-old named Sam Cox.... [A]ny public appearance by Mr. Doodle finds Cox draped in clothing covered in his own signature imagery—the intricately interwoven pandemonium of cartoon creatures the artist sometimes refers to as “graffiti spaghetti.” (Imagine if Keith Haring adapted the Where’s Waldo? books, and you’ll start to get the picture.)...

[I]n spring 2017, when Mr. Doodle became a social media sensation thanks to an enthusiastically shared Facebook video of the 60-plus hours he spent doodling the full interior of a vacant shop next to London’s Old Street Underground station.... By early March 2021, Mr. Doodle’s steady stream of videos and lighthearted meme fodder (such as a walk in the park with his paper mâché pet, Doodle Dog) has won him a jaw-dropping 2.7 million followers on Instagram, more than 736,000 Facebook friends, and about 82,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. For context, Damien Hirst currently has 739,000 followers on Instagram; Jeff Koons has even fewer....

Mr. Doodle has been deliberately diving into this broader commercial infinity pool for some time now. “Yes, I am aware of Mr. Doodle as a brand,” he said. “Being aware that each artist is actually a brand too is useful, because then you’re aware of your worth, your audience, your own branding, and how that needs attention when working with others.”

"'It will one day be worth $1 billion'... Many people really, really wanted the Beeple sale to succeed. In fact, the high price [$69.3 million] smacked of market manipulation."

"NFTs rely on blockchain, a database technology based on decentralized, collective control of blocks of data that have been chained together in a way that makes the data immutable. Metapurse — the company founded and financed by Metakovan, the buyer of 'Everydays' — says it 'identifies early-stage projects across blockchain infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estate.' According to the Art Newspaper, Metapurse 'is also a production studio for NFTs and a major funder of the digital art form, reportedly owning the largest known collection of NFTs in the world.'... Making the whole spectacle look even more egregiously engineered, the underbidder was Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, another blockchain company.... The irony is that the driving force behind conceptual art... was a desire to resist commodification.... Conceptualists... thought that if you dematerialized art — if you took away the object and our urge to fetishize it — it would be an act of resistance against the art market and the whole capitalist system. How naive that turned out to be. Of course you can commodify artworks that exist only as ideas! It’s really easy.... You need only relationships, differentials, future projections and other ideas, all of which can be bought and sold.... As for the actual work that was purchased? Yawn. Beeple’s technique — collaging lots of colorful images in grid format — is a soporific cliche. Images like this, sometimes coalescing into other images, are ubiquitous. Metakovan’s claim — that 'it represents 13 years of everyday work' — is weak tea.... [But] I like it when the connection between functionality (or even aesthetic merit) and monetary worth is stretched. It can make us question conventional ideas of what has value and what doesn’t. That can be salutary...."

Writes Sebastian Smee in "Beeple’s digital ‘artwork’ sold for more than any painting by Titian or Raphael. But as art, it’s a great big zero" (WaPo).

This blog represents 17 years of everyday work. Where's my $90.6 million? 

Anyway... what do I care if rich people shift their money around according to the rules of some wacky game and get nothing tangible? It's the same thing that occurs in gambling. Is anyone defrauded at any point? Are they paying their sales taxes and income tax properly? Other than that, how can it matter? Is there a philosophical question to contemplate? 

I forget whether Metakovan is a person or a company. Let's see: "the buyer, the Singapore-based founder and financer of the cryptofund Metapurse who goes by the name Metakovan." 

So it's a person, some cryptic figure in Singapore. The prefix "meta-" denotes "change, transformation, permutation, or substitution" (OED). So "Metapurse," I get. But what is Metakovan? Kovan is a geographical location in Singapore. Is there really a person here?

Considering the complexity of the concepts, I wonder: Is the real artist Metakovan or Beeple? Or is there really anything at all — other than the market, a concept to be admired and cavorted in or scorned by each of us, as we see fit. 

And, again: Where's my $90.6 million?