Back in Shoreditch. Sunburnt.
What. A. Week. I’ve just sold a piece for multi-millions!
We’ve just returned from our “reconnection sabbatical” in the Maldives — my wife Arabella’s idea. She said I needed to “log off and look at something that wasn’t a screen or a bottle of Dom Pérignon.” Rude, but not inaccurate.
I spent ten days trying to digitally sketch the feeling of a coconut falling in slow motion. It was trickier than I expected, though eventually it made a wonderful series of thirty-five pieces filled with movement. Arabella spent ten days drinking rum out of a pineapple.
Anyway, glorious news: I’ve sold yet another piece. Yes. Sold. For millions, of actual money, not crypto. My piece Existential Surge Pricing — a looping 5-minute animation of a Tube map projected on the face of an actor dressed as Mozart playing Fat Boy Slim bass lines on a harpsichord — was bought by a hedge fund art collective in Berlin for £3,212,000.
I almost wept. Arabella did weep. Our Airbnb host also wept, mostly because I was celebrating by repeatedly yelling “ART WINS” into a conch shell at 3 a.m. I promised not to do it again, it was just the emotion.
Naturally, I spent the proceeds wisely and with great maturity. Specifically, the next day I purchased a 1996 Formula 1 car once driven by Jean Alesi — my childhood hero and the only man to ever make a moustache look aerodynamic. It’s dangerous what the internet allows us to buy at the snap of a finger or a press of a RETURN button.
The car now sits in our Shoreditch loft, between my VR headset shrine and a deconstructed beanbag I call Post-Comfort. Arabella says it’s “utterly pointless and smells like petrol,” but I told her it’s heritage on wheels.
Do I have a driver’s licence? Yes. Do I have any intention of driving it? No. I just sit in it with a glass of wine and whisper, “Jean, we did it.”
My next project is already underway. It’s called Late Stage Rebranding. It features a live feed of the Bank of England’s homepage slowly being taken over by a rainfall of animated avocado toast. It’ll be priced at £4,305,000 – I imagine the governor will snap it up.
Life is good. Until next time…
#Bemorecreative
Hedge Fund (digital artist, retired finance deity, F1 car sitter-in-er)