Digital Dialogues | Art Basel in Miami 2025, December 4

Conversations | Meme lords and market gods: The absurdities of digital culture 

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Beeple, Artist, Charleston Amanda Schmitt, Art Advisor, New York Benny Gross, Rare Pokémon and art patron, New York Moderator: Natalie Stone, Founder, StoneWork
 

From crypto memes to pixel punks, digital imagery has become both art form and asset class. Featuring a unique live demonstration by groundbreaking digital artist Beeple, who created a new ‘Everyday’ work on stage, this panel examined how humor, virality, and speculation intersect in the online economy of attention. Beeple – best known for his momentous NFT sales, which redefined the market for digital art – unpacked how internet aesthetics have migrated into institutional and financial systems with art patron&nbsp;Benny Gross and art advisor Amanda Schmitt. In this conversation moderated by Natalie Stone, they traced how memes and blockchain-native artworks are collected, valued, and canonized.
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Beeple is a digital artist whose boundary-pushing work blends technology, satire, and surreal world-building at massive scale. He creates daily images, large-scale immersive installations, and kinetic video sculptures that explore how rapidly advancing tech is reshaping culture. His work has helped define the modern digital art movement, appearing in major museums and global exhibitions.
Amanda Schmitt is a curator, writer, and art advisor based in New York. She is the founder of Amanda Schmitt Art (ASA), an advisory focused on Modern, contemporary, and digital art with services spanning access, institutional engagement, strategic philanthropy, and exhibition production. Schmitt also cofounded CHAOS Agency to support artists working at the intersection of art and technology. She has curated over 60 exhibitions and publishes regularly, including in Texte zur Kunst. 
Benny Gross is a multifaceted figure in the Web3 and digital art communities, known for his early involvement in cryptocurrency, his passion for digital fine art, and his contributions to education. 
Natalie Stone is a strategist and executive producer working across art, music, and technology. For more than 15 years, she has developed award-winning programs and collaborations that help artists, institutions, and brands imagine new ways of creating and connecting. Her experience spans from shaping artistic experiments in VR, AR, and AI at Google to stewarding one of the most influential digital art collections of the 21st century as general manager of CryptoPunks.

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Digital Dialogues | Art Basel in Miami 2025, December 4

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