Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, is literally at the center of the pack with his latest viral installation at Art Basel Miami Beach, and you still have time to see it until Sunday.
His “Regular Animals” project features a $100,000 robot dog with hyper-realistic heads resembling Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, as well as art legends Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. According to WSJ, the robot dog will walk around inside a plexiglass pen and take images through a camera attached to its chest, which will then be processed by AI and then essentially poop. Of the prints created, 256 include a QR code that provides collectors with a free NFT, which will be distributed in a bag labeled “Excrement Sample.”
Beeple himself is included in this special group, a move the Charleston-based artist himself called “whimsical.” His self-portrait of a dog was the first to sell, surprising even Beeple, he told the Journal.
This project marks at least the second time Winckelmann has become a major figure in the art world. Four years ago, his digital collage sold for $69 million at Christie's, fueling an NFT boom that peaked a year later and then nearly collapsed.