A pack of tan, four-legged robots wandered the Zero 10 section at Art Basel Miami Beach, heads tilted, lenses blinking. Their faces weren’t canine — they were hyperrealistic masks of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso and two versions of the artist himself, Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple. Every so often one would tip backward and expel a sheet of paper: an image of the fair, processed through an AI filter meant to mimic the worldview of the head it wore. The crowd called it creepy, brilliant, disgusting — sometimes all three.
What was on the floor
Titled Regular Animals (2025), Beeple’s installation marries robotics, generative AI and the spectacle of the crypto-era art market. The dog-bodies are kinetic sculptures that walk, sit and occasionally perform the choreographed act that quickly became the work’s shorthand: they "poop" certificates of authenticity and printed images. A QR code on many of those sheets links to a freely mintable NFT; the robots are constantly photographing their surroundings and then reimagining those pictures in styles associated with each head — Picasso-distorted frames, Warhol-esque repeats, or techno-algorithmic abstractions for the tech moguls.
According to Beeple and accounts at the fair, each sculptural edition is priced around $100,000 (sold in editions of two plus an artist’s proof), with collectors snapping them up during the VIP preview. One piece — the Bezos edition — was reportedly withheld from sale. Beeple also told visitors the robots’ archival function (recording and storing pictures on the blockchain) will stop after three years, while their physical motors will persist longer as inert machines.
The idea — and the discomfort
Beeple has framed Regular Animals as a comment on how we increasingly see the world through mediated lenses: algorithms, platforms and powerful figures who shape attention. The robots make that literal. A Musk-headed dog refracts the fair through a particular visual logic; a Warhol one flattens and repeats. There’s a performative cruelty to the setup — the creatures take pictures of visitors and dispense those images back into the room, sometimes with a cheeky wall text describing the output as "memories" destined for blockchain training sets.
Not everyone loved the joke. Critics at the fair called the piece carnivalesque and pointed out a deeper irony: the installation both critiques and profits from the systems it seems to interrogate. Voices on the left of the art world have argued that works like this naturalize crypto monetization — receipts, QR-linked NFTs and spectacle become part of a fundraising apparatus rather than a purely critical exercise. Hyperallergic, for example, described this strain of work as replicating the very market mechanisms artists claim to subvert.
Where this fits in the wider tech-art moment
Regular Animals didn't arrive in a vacuum. The last two years have seen a rapid rollout of more powerful image and multimodal models, more accessible tools for generating likenesses, and growing debates about deepfakes, copyright and the training data that underpins these systems. That context makes Beeple’s choice to give recognizable faces to robotic bodies feel especially pointed — and sometimes unnerving.
If you want to map the thread from bespoke gallery spectacle to the broader AI rollout, look at how major tech players are launching their own image and avatar tools. Microsoft’s recent push into foundational image models is part of a wider trend that democratizes visual synthesis, for better and worse Microsoft's MAI-Image-1. And as companies push generative systems into consumer apps — for example, conversational and avatar tools landing on Android and other platforms — the ethical and copyright questions only multiply OpenAI’s Sora landing on Android.
The market and the performance
Art-market details are as much part of the story as the robots themselves. Reports say every robot in Beeple’s pack sold quickly, and each dispenses a physical certificate that doubles as a performative souvenir. Some of those certificates include QR codes that let viewers claim an associated NFT for free — a neat inversion of Beeple’s 2021 Christie’s moment, when a digital collage sold for $69.3 million and vaulted him into the rarified ranks of the market’s most expensive living artists.
That memory hangs over the show. For supporters, Regular Animals is an evolution: a long-form generative sculpture that folds printing, photography and on-the-ground interaction into one output. For skeptics, it’s spectacle cloaked in critical language — a way to funnel attention (and money) into Web3 channels at a moment when the market is hunting for viable business models after the boom-and-bust of earlier NFT mania.
Reactions on the floor
Observers’ reactions ranged from laughter to unease. One onlooker called it "disturbing," another declared it "brilliant." Someone brought their small real dog into the pen; it barked, sniffed, and then wandered off, unimpressed. Beeple himself roamed among the machines during the opening, picking up the printed sheets and handing them to viewers. The piece is theatrical, and Beeple leans into that — the robots are recharged in ritualized handovers, their movements timed for effect.
There’s also a tacit timeline built into the work: the blockchain-linked images and data streams are presented as resources for future AI, and collectors buy a living object that will gradually lose parts of its original function. That temporality — art that degrades into less autonomy as platforms and code evolve — is uncanny in a way that makes some people laugh and others squirm.
The spectacle at Art Basel felt like a question posed aloud: are we watching a clever allegory for algorithmic control, or a savvy piece of market theater dressed up as critique? Both answers can be true at once. The robot dogs walk, take pictures, and then give the world back to you — filtered, owned and occasionally sold.