Famed artist Beeple’s latest spectacle, “Regular Animals,” has billionaire-tech-titan robot dogs pooping out NFTs, and stopping onlookers at Art Basel Miami Beach in their tracks at the fair’s VIP preview.
The animatronic canines sport nightmarishly realistic masks of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg — plus famed artists Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol, plus two Beeple (aka Mike Winkelmann) lookalikes — all crafted by famed mask-maker Landon Meier.
As the robo-mutts trot around, they continuously snap photos, squatting to take a digital dump of an art print in accordance with its corresponding style.
Zuckerberg’s for example, looks like the Metaverse, Musk’s is a black and white robot take, while Picasso is cubist and Warhol is pop art.
“It’s so creepy,” said a number of onlookers. “It’s so freaky!” proclaimed another.
But Beeple’s point, he told us, was about how we see the world now.
“It used to be that we saw the world interpreted through the eyes of artists, but now Mark Zuckerberg and Elon, in particular, control a huge amount of how we see the world,” he explained to Page Six. “We see the world through their eyes because they control these very powerful algorithms that decide what we see. And so we wanted to kind of play with that idea.”
Bezos’ robot doesn’t make prints at all, but, “He’s another person who shapes how we see the world,” Beeple explained. “So he needed to be in the piece.”
“You’re increasingly seeing the world through the eyes of AI and robotics,” he told us. “I think that will happen more and more.”
We hear all of the robot dogs have already been snapped up by private collectors — for $100,000 each — but the owners have let them “go on tour.”
However, fairgoers still have a chance to take home a piece of the chaos: The dogs will “eliminate” 1,028 prints, each stamped “Excrement Sample,” along with a warning label noting that the item may be “disgusting to most patrons of the arts,” and could cause, “uncontrollable erections in degenerate art collectors.”
Of those prints, 256 include a “scan to claim” barcode in the corner, marking them as actual NFTs.
Given that Beeple’s blockbuster NFT, “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days,” sold for $69.3 million at Christie’s in 2021, the latest drops might end up as yet another gold mine.
Billionaires weren’t just depicted in the work — some were roaming the fair.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin was spotted browsing the booths, though it’s unclear whether he visited Beeple’s installation.
There was a report in 2022 that Brin’s now ex-wife, Nicole Shanahan, had an affair with Musk, which she and Musk both shot down. Shannahan denied the WSJ report, saying “Did Elon and I have sex, like it was a moment of passion, and then it was over? No. Did we have a romantic relationship? No. We didn’t have an affair.”
Also spotted at the fair was Starwood Capital billionaire Sternlicht, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, Pure Vida founders Omer and Jennifer Horev, Shop.com CEO Loren Ridinger, Miami club king David Grutman and Miami Design District developer Craig Robins.
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