What’s the story behind Madonna’s nude NFTs?

What happens when you mix the Queen of Pop and a controversial artist whose daily sketches heralded today’s crypto art goldrush? It’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves at one point or another… right? Well, whether you like it or not, this week we got an answer, when Madonna and Beeple (real name Mike Winkelmann) unexpectedly unveiled a collaborative series of NFTs, and the internet recoiled in horror.

Titled “Mother of Creation”, the series includes three digital artworks, each depicting a fully-nude, eerily-smooth Madonna in the middle of giving birth to various non-human organisms. In Mother of Evolution, a swarm of orange butterflies pours out of her vagina against a post-apocalyptic landscape. In Mother of Technology, it’s blood-covered robot centipedes in a lush forest. In Mother of Nature, the musician’s dead-eyed avatar gazes around a cold laboratory, as a vibrant tree grows from inside her.

Madonna and NFT enthusiasts alike – but particularly the latter, wonder why? – have since taken to Twitter to air their shocked reactions about Madonna’s entry into the metaverse. “Woke up to porn on my timeline,” tweets one NFT enthusiast. “Then realised it was just Madonna and Beeple making NFTs even more cringe than we already look out here.” Another tweet jokingly suggests that the drop is single-handedly responsible for a $1 trillion crypto crash. 

Admittedly, Madonna’s 3D-scanned body looks like a poorly-modded character from The Sims in many shots from the minute-long videos. Teaming up with the third most expensive living artist for the collaboration – which was a year in the making, apparently – has also raised suspicions that Madonna simply wants to cash in on the surging popularity of NFTs. 

Despite all the criticism, though, part of me is pleasantly surprised by how unapologetically explicit and unhinged the artworks are (Madonna’s Twitter profile pic is a $560,000 Bored Ape, after all – expectations weren’t very high). Watching centipedes crawl out of Madonna’s vagina – to the poetry of Rumi, no less – is genuinely quite disturbing, while the clinical tree NFT is definitely fertile ground for interpretation.

Ok, so let’s give “Mother of Creation” the benefit of the doubt for a moment, then, and try to look beyond the outrage it’s provoked in the art world. What is the collection even supposed to mean? Is there actually a poignant message hiding behind Beeple’s polarising art style? Is the whole project just a Web3-tinged middle finger to social media tycoons who won’t let the pop star post nudes?

Thankfully, Madonna has left some signposts to help interpret her digital artworks, via the descriptions on NFT marketplace SuperRare, where they’re currently up for auction (ending May 14). From these descriptions, we can learn that the butterflies in Mother of Evolution signify hope amid the end of the world, while the centipedes in Mother of Technology represent technological progress and its dangerous and/or utopian potential. The tree symbolism is left slightly more vague, though Madonna’s accompanying poetry – “My journey through life as a women is like that of a tree” – suggests a more autobiographical meaning.

Meanwhile, Madonna explains the broader, overarching sentiments of the collection in a conversation with Beeple posted to her Twitter this week. “We set out to create something that is absolutely and utterly connected to the idea of creation and motherhood,” she says. No surprise, then, that the artworks also echo Frida Kahlo’s My Birth, a prized work in the Queen of Pop’s personal art collection. 

Perhaps anticipating the claims that she’s just out to shock with the collection, Madonna also adds: “I think it’s really important that people know that a lot of thought and conversation went into creating these videos.” So maybe her detractors are just dismissing the deep and serious message of her bizarre digital nudes.

Unfortunately, most people’s issues don’t lie with Madonna’s artistic intentions for “Mother of Creation”, at the end of the day. Instead, criticism tends to (rightly) focus on Beeple’s instrumental role in the NFT project, which he says he’s “insanely honoured” to be part of.

In case you’re out of the loop, the artwork that introduced most of us to the digital artist in 2021, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, contains many images branded racist, homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic. Unfortunately, no one seemed to look that closely at it until someone paid $69 million at auction, pretty much making him the poster child for everything that’s wrong with NFTs.

Does Beeple’s involvement in “Mother of Creation” explain why Madonna looks so cold and robotic as she births a tree? Who’s to say. But it does feel pretty weird – and not in the good, robot centipede way – that she’d lend Beeple the legitimacy of collaborating with one of history’s biggest pop stars, when there’s countless other interesting digital artists out there to choose from.

The obvious draws of collaborating with Beeple, on the other hand, are the insane prices that his works have drawn in the past (with just over a day to go, the series’ current highest bid is 15 ETH, or around $30,000). Proceeds from the SuperRare auction will support women and children through three charities picked by Madonna and Beeple, and then hopefully we can all forget this happened and go back to our little lives.