On Saturday, I went to Pepe Fest, a festival honoring one of the most infamous memes, thrown by Beeple at his studio in Charleston, SC. Now if you know what all of those words mean, you can skip the next five paragraphs because I am gonna drop a Pepe/Beeple for Dummies, given that most of my readers will have no fucking idea what is going on.
Okay, let’s start with Pepe The Frog. Pepe was a character created by an artist named Matt Furie for a comic book called Boy’s Club. Boy’s Club was about a bunch of animals living together and partying just being dudes (look, I have never actually read the comic, I hope that is a fair description). In one strip Pepe is caught peeing with his pants pulled all the way down and when confronted about why he did that he said “Feels Good Man”. Those three words spurned a meme that would eventually spiral out of control, used by 4chan trolls to express the worst possible views and became a symbol of the alt right and the rise of Trumpism in 2016.
Matt Furie was pretty pissed about this, and there’s a good documentary about the lengths he took to get the good name of Pepe back. It’s appropriately titled Feels Good Man and is a good dive into the alt right and the rise of Trump meme culture, incells and 4chan in general. I do think Furie’s efforts paid off, because these days Pepe is almost entirely used in a positive, or at least harmless ways. I don’t think I saw any memes all weekend that I thought were too fucked up.
One thing the documentary barely touches on is the very early days of digital art on the block chain. There is one scene where a crypto bro in a Lambo buys a jpg for $39k which seemed absolutely crazy in 2019. That same jpg sold in 2021 for nearly 10x that. But the documentary doesn’t go deep into “Rare Pepes”. Despite listening to people talk about Rare Pepe’s for three days straight I don’t know enough about the history not to just quote Wikipedia, so just read that.
Quickly though, the first Rare Pepe’s were minted in 2016 on the Bitcoin blockchain, which predated Ethereum NFTs by about a year. You could create your own, and sell them for Pepe Cash and then use that to buy other Rare Pepes. Eventually there was a Fake Rares collection and now there are Notable Pepes on Ethereum and a billion other Pepe NFTs that little the internet. There is also a $PEPE coin that I bought $20 of for the meme and then sold for like a grand after I forgot about it for a year. I’d say I wish I bought more, but if I had I probably would have sold it way before it 50xed.
Now that Pepe has been explained, we also have to talk about Beeple. Beeple is the alias of Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist who started uploading one artwork every day and has been doing that every day since 2007. In 2020 he started selling his Everydays as NFTs and sold an image of his first 5000 Everydays for $69 million dollars in 2021 at the peak of the NFT bubble. He has used that money to buy a massive art space in Charleston, SC which we will get to in a minute.
Okay, this is where you can jump back in if you want to just know about the party and not the very basic explanation about what the hell is going on. So when I moved to Wilmington, NC the first thing I did was find out what actual cities were in driving distance. Raleigh was close, only two hours away. Charlotte was a little farther, but still an easy drive and finally Charleston, SC, the one city of the three that I had never been to. I was immediately looking for an excuse to get down there, so when I saw Beeple was throwing a party at his insane studios I had to go.
You had to own some Pepe stuff to get in, and I didn’t really qualify for a ticket. I bought back a little of the $PEPE I sold so I could RSVP, but there as also a Pepe art submission. Despite going to art school, I am trash at drawing, so I knew I wasn’t getting in that way, but if AI is good for anything, it’s good for making low effort art. One day I had the phrase “Be the meme you want to see in the world” suck in my head and I had MidJourney shit out a photo of a vaguely Pepe looking frog looking in the mirror and I had made a meme. I made it before AI got good at Pepe, and I just made it to post on Twitter or something, but when I saw the Pepe contest, I just dug around my computer until I found it and sent it in, not expecting to get picked but I did.
Side note, I minted it as a free NFT just so I could give it to people at the festival, but I forgot about it, so if you want to mint one for some reason, it’s still open for a few days.
So because I got my art into the show I got invited to an artist dinner on Friday night and an artist brunch on Sunday. I felt super out of place on Friday. I knew one person and am not invested in Pepe culture so I was just sort of standing around for a bit of it and I ended up leaving early, but it was still a really cool thing and I met a bunch of people which made me slightly less awkward the next day at the actual Fest. It’s really funny that I have spent my entire life in an incredibly social field and was never uncomfortable in any space, but shit like this gets me.
On Saturday I went over to Beeple Studios and it was fucking incredible. The museum section was closed but the event space was absolutely insane. You will see the pictures, but imagine a room the size of a basketball gym but three of the four walls are covered in massive digital screens. The support beams are covered in screens and even the tables had screens. It was really amazing.
I brought my camera but it was so dark in there and I left my flash in the car. I wasn’t trying to take the shuttle bus back to my car to grab it so I made due and took a few photos of the space, and some of the speakers and stuff. A woman named Pepelangelo was doing a live painting and had a whole wall of her images of Pepe as masterpieces. The Venus Devouring Pepe Goya homage was my favorite. There was some other physical art as well and that room was will lit so I got photos there. Inside the space they had Pepes on the walls, including mine, but there were so many I only saw mine twice. They also had speakers talking about Pepe and Rare Pepe’s and memes and all sorts of stuff. There was also a Pepe art contest and the four winners got to draw live later that night.
There was a four hour break in between events. I tried to go to a museum but I got there 20 min before closing so I just walked around downtown Charleston for almost two hours. It was 99% humidity and like 95 degrees out so not the most enjoyable time, but it was cool to see the city. I got some food and cleaned up at my hotel room before heading back out.
The night event was infinitely cooler than the day time one and I was really impressed by the day time. First of all the gallery/museum section was open and it was awesome to see Beeple’s art in real life. He does a lot of pop culture stuff, but like, with dicks, so you might not think it would work in a museum setting, but it really does. Seeing the 5000 Everyday’s across a massive wall was amazing. His collection of old computers was pretty great as well.
There was a Pepe costume contest so a ton of people were dressed up, but Beeple also had a bunch of people walking around with incredibly realistic masks on making them look like celebrities but because you have to wear the masks over your head they are slightly too big which ads to the uncanny valley aspect and just made them look so cursed. There were also Pepe’s walking Boston Dynamics robot Pepe dogs and three people in Beeple masks. It was also super unsettling in the best possible way.
There was a scavenger hunt for Pepe swag (I ended up with a pretty sick frog hat that my girlfriend told me she will leave me if I wear in public), an outdoor patio with a giant inflatable Pepe, and a Cyber Truck for some reason. OG Pepe artist Rare Scrilla DJd Pepe themed music. The live drawing contest had the tablets projected on the screens so you could see people work from anywhere and the winner won $5000, I think, it’s possible they just won an oversized check and some shoes, I didn’t look into it. The costume contest happened super quick, for $1000, but it gave us some of the best photos of the night.
Beeple also made Everyday #6311 live from the event. He has a terminal set up in the middle of the room and you can watch him work on a screen on the other side of the terminal, but then it was also projected on the walls. He gave himself a 30 min timer and then it was uploaded to the internets almost immediately.
At the end of the night, after the costume contest, printers in the ceiling shot out prints of the four art contest entries as well as Everyday #66311 and a few other Pepe themed Beeple Everydays that were numbered to just 7. People crawled all over each other to grab them. I grabbed one and it was the artist who won the contest. He was standing right in front of me and I asked him if he wanted it and he did so I gave it away. The karma paid off later when the one person I knew at the event gave me one of the Beeple prints. He was signing them, but the line was crazy so I just went back to my hotel room.
I did bring it to the brunch though and he ended up signing it there. The brunch felt so different to the dinner. I didn’t feel awkward anymore and had a great time. I met some rad people and talked to Beeple for a bit. Plus I had several biscuits. Look, I don’t know why I am talking about Biscuits when this thing is nearly 2000 words already and I have a 6am flight to go to the Gathering of the Juggalos, but here we are. Let’s just get to some pictures.
Click here to see all my photos from 2024 Pepe Fest at Beeple Studios in Charleston, SC.
