Robot dogs with billionaire faces? Welcome to the new worldview
Dog-like robots whose heads look like tech billionaires – and whose backsides poop out prints – are the viral must-see artworks at Art Basel Miami Beach this week.
Dog-like robots whose heads look like tech billionaires – and whose backsides poop out prints – are the viral must-see artworks at Art Basel Miami Beach this week.
Regular Animals is a pack of $US100,000 ($150,000) robotic dogs with metal bodies painted fleshy pink and outfitted with rubbery, realistic heads that look like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, as well as Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and the artist who created them, Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple.
Beeple kicked off the NFT art boom four years ago after his digital collage, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, sold at Christie’s for $US69.3m – smashing the record for any work of digital art and ranking him among the priciest artists alive.
The sale launched an NFT fever that swept through the art world’s upper ranks, as blue-chip art collectors competed with cryptocurrency investors for images that looked like mere JPEGs but whose ownership details were logged permanently on the online ledger known as the blockchain.
The NFT art boom has since largely fizzled, but Beeple has survived in part by weaving digital elements into pieces that exist in real life.
On Friday, people crowded around a plexiglas pen to watch the dogs stroll around and try not to bump into each other. Camera lenses on the creatures’ chests took photos of their surroundings, which were then churned through an artificial-intelligence filter before eventually shooting out from printers embedded in their hindquarters on to the fair floor.
About 256 of the prints also carry a QR code offering people a chance to own the image as a non-fungible token, or a digital receipt known as an NFT. (Workers collect the prints and distribute them after putting them into doggy bags marked “Excrement Sample.”)
Each robotic animal comes in an edition of two, which have sold out, but the artist plans to hang on to a third version of each dog, called an artist’s proof in art-market parlance.
On Friday, an anonymous collector who goes by Cozomo de’ Medici announced on X that he’d bought two of the dogs, Picasso and Warhol, and former Sotheby’s chief executive Tad Smith bought an Elon.
Beeple, 44, said he was always trying to make something that at least made him chuckle.
“Basically, the concept is these characters walk around this pen and they take pictures, and everything they’re seeing they poop out.
“The Picasso one is pooping out Picasso-style prints, and the Warhol one is pooping out Warhol-style pictures. The analogy here is that in the past, our worldview has been influenced by artists – like Picasso and Warhol.
“Now, increasingly our worldview is being reshaped by tech giants, specifically Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who control powerful algorithms. They decide what we see and what we don’t see – that we are increasingly seeing the world through the lens of AI.”
The Wall Street Journal
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