In a puppy pen in the Art Basel Miami Beach, you can watch Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos make a mess—as if we don’t get enough of that in the real world. The latest work of the artist Beeple, best known for selling a piece of NFT artwork to some poor schmuck for $69 million at the height of that craze, has attached the heads of the billionaires and some other notable figures to the bodies of robot dogs who aimlessly walk around and take pictures that are pooped out of their machine back ends. It is a comment on…something, for sure.
The robo-dogs sport realistic likenesses of the billionaire brood, designed by famed mask maker Landon Meier, according to Page Six. Those freaky faces are attached to robot dog bodies that resemble the work of Boston Dynamics and are equipped with cameras that can take pictures of the world from a four-legged perspective. In addition to the billionaires, there are also dog bots bearing the likeness of Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Beeple himself. Humble guy.
The machines “poop” out the pictures they take with stylized filters. Zuckerberg’s poop has a “metaverse” aesthetic, Musk’s drops are black and white, Picasso’s are cubist, and Warhol’s have a pop art style. Bezos’ bot doesn’t poop, for reasons that seem unexplained, but Beeple told Page Six, “He’s another person who shapes how we see the world, so he needed to be in the piece.” The publication also reported that other bots were roaming the show floor, including ones with the heads of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Starwood Capital billionaire Barry Sternlicht, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, Pure Vida founders Omer and Jennifer Horev, Shop.com CEO Loren Ridinger, Miami club owner David Grutman, and Miami Design District developer Craig Robins. You may be wondering how they fit into the theme, and you would be right to, but it’s not really clear that there’s an answer.
So like, what exactly does this piece say, you may be asking? “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,” Beeple told 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.” He also said, “You’re increasingly seeing the world through the eyes of AI and robotics,” and “I think that will happen more and more.”
Is it a warning about that, just an observation, or participation in that very trend? It’s up to your interpretation, I guess, because it frankly doesn’t feel like Beeple has given it that much thought. No matter, though, because he’s already apparently sold the bots for $100,000 a pop to private collectors—though they have to let the dogs go “on tour,” per Page Six.
As for anyone else who wants a memento of the piece, the dogs will shit out a total of 1,028 prints that can be taken home in an “Excrement Sample” bag that includes a warning label noting the piece may be “disgusting to most patrons of the arts,” and could cause “uncontrollable erections in degenerate art collectors.” A total of 256 of those prints will include a barcode that people can scan to claim the work as an NFT. It seems that after securing that $69 million bag, even Beeple agrees that there’s no difference between NFTs and dog shit.