No, I didn’t just have a stroke. Despite the long hours I’ve put in these past few weeks in the run-up to Black Friday, I’m not yet at the point of just babbling techy, trending keywords like somebody turned over a bowl of alphabet soup.
This is an actual art exhibit at Art Basel Miami Beach, and it stole the show this year. The extraordinarily realistic heads of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, plopped atop the bodies of robot dogs, were wandering about an enclosure, periodically squatting to relieve themselves by s—ting out AI-generated art, some of which are NFTs.
It’s f—king terrifying, and I love it. Have a look-see…
what in the world is going on?
The exhibit is titled Regular Animals. Executed by Mike Winkelmann, who goes by the artist’s name Beeple, Regular Animals was described as “part satire, part dystopia, part slapstick theater” by ARTnews on Thursday, December 4, when the world took notice and videos of the NFT-s—ting doggies spread far beyond Miami Beach.
Winkelmann’s studio, Beeple Studios, pitches itself to the public with the tagline, “a place for weirdness,” which is the kind of refreshingly straightforward advertising I wish the companies of these billionaires would adopt.
Not all of the six robot dogs are tech bro billionaires. Beeple himself put his own head on one robot dog, and the heads of Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol on two others. I almost feel sorry for them being penned up in the same NFT-feces-strewn enclosure with those other creatures.
Then one of them shat out an NFT, and my sympathy muted itself a little.