Miami, December — Walk into Zero 10 at Art Basel and you’re met by a small, unnerving zoo: tan, four‑legged robots shuffling in a pen, each topped with a hyperreal human head. Elon Musk paces. Andy Warhol tilts his head. Two of them wear Mike Winkelmann’s — Beeple’s — haircut and glasses like a pair of studio assistants gone uncanny.
They do what dogs do: trot, lie down, circumnavigate one another. But every so often they tip their heads back and eject a strip of paper — a printed image of what the robot saw, filtered through the style associated with the face it bears. The paper carries a certificate stamped with a QR code that links to an NFT. The certificates themselves come with a jokey line announcing “100% pure GMO‑free, organic dogshit” as part of the performance.
A pack that’s both spectacle and commodity
Called Regular Animals, Beeple’s installation fuses kinetic sculpture, machine vision and AI reinterpretation. Each robot is constantly photographing its surroundings; those photos are then reimagined in different visual languages — a Picasso view, a Warhol pop, a Zuckerberg‑filtered feed. Many visitors film the creatures on their phones. Reactions range from “creepy” to “brilliant.” Two real dogs even barked at them on opening day.
The robots aren’t cheap. According to the gallery run of the project, individual pieces are priced around $100,000 (editions of two plus an artist’s proof) and — in a wink at exclusivity — the Bezos model was not for sale. By the VIP preview most of the editioned pieces had been claimed. Buyers get the physical automaton, the certificates it produces, and the option to buy associated NFTs via the QR codes printed on the expelled papers.
Beeple (real name Mike Winkelmann) needs little introduction: he exploded into wider public view in 2021 with a Christie’s sale that turned an NFT collage into a multimillion‑dollar headline. Regular Animals feels like a sequel to that moment — same language (blockchain, collectible scarcity), different execution: mechanical puppetry rather than a single enormous JPEG.
Performance, provocation, or pitch?
The installation leans into shock and satire. Beeple has framed it as a provocation: “We are not ready for the future,” he has said, sketching a world where algorithms and tech leaders shape how we see reality. The work literally shows that idea — the robots reinterpret what they capture through named cultural lenses, and then deposit those reinterpretations into the fair as both paper and a blockchain record.
Not everyone is impressed. Some critics see the piece as the art world dressed as its own critique — an offering that replicates the crypto‑market mechanics it purports to interrogate. Detractors argue it converts spectators into participants in a system that monetizes attention and data. Others point out a more immediate discomfort: the robots are photographing fairgoers, and those images feed an output that can travel onto the blockchain and into datasets that inform future AI — an explicit feedback loop that turns viewers into raw material.
That loop intersects with broader debates about the technology powering Beeple’s outputs. From machine vision in mobile apps to commercial text‑to‑image systems, the industry is racing ahead — and with it comes renewed fights over consent, likeness and brand rights. The controversy over smartphone AI and synthetic media is part of the same conversation; recent product launches and platform rollouts have amplified questions about how images are generated and who controls them, as seen in discussions around OpenAI’s Sora and the debate over deepfakes and brand rights and the rise of new text‑to‑image backends like Microsoft’s MAI‑Image‑1.
Short life, long echoes
There’s another curious constraint: the robots’ role as blockchain recorders is engineered to be temporary. Beeple has said that the machines will stop producing and storing their blockchain‑backed “memories” after a set period (reported as roughly three years), although the sculptures themselves retain basic motor functions. That planned obsolescence undercuts the blockchain’s usual pitch of permanence and adds a layer of commentary — or product design — about planned lifespans for both machines and digital artifacts.
The certificates and free prints distributed by the dogs extend the work’s reach beyond buyers; each piece a spectator takes becomes a souvenir and a vector. For some visitors, collecting a printed “poop” is an inside joke. For critics, the exchange — paper for attention for potential NFT purchase — is thinly veiled commerce.
What the pack reveals
Beyond the spectacle, Regular Animals forces a knot of issues into one room: celebrity and likeness in art, the aesthetics of generative AI, privacy when machines record public bodies, and the ongoing commercialization of digital art through crypto markets. It also illustrates a cultural truth: we increasingly interpret the world through mediated lenses — platforms, algorithms and personalities — and artists are both reflecting and exploiting that condition.
Beeple’s robo‑dogs are funny and grotesque and absurdly Instagrammable, and that’s the point. They solicit delight and critique at once. Whether they’ll age as sharp commentary or settle into a gallery market anecdote depends on how we reckon with the technologies they deploy: who gets to make images, whose faces those images can wear, and who profits when we line up to take a picture of the picture‑making machine.
If anything, the show leaves you with an odd empathy for the machines: they look, they reinterpret, they release their products into the world. Humans, it seems, still do all the rest.