On the top of the crypto and blockchain frenzy, an NFT created by digital artist Beeple offered for a staggering $69.5 million. Years later, because the world shifts into the AI period, the artist has struck as soon as once more. On the Artwork Basel Miami Seaside, the artist — whose actual identify is Mike Winkelmann — put robotic canine on the present flooring. However these weren’t your common canine. They excreted printed copies of NFTs after capturing photographs by the chest-mounted cameras. And if that was not already unsettling sufficient, these robots substituted a robotic canine head with hyper-realistic heads depicting some well-known faces like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. Fittingly, Andy Warhol additionally discovered a spot, and so did portray maestro Pablo Picasso. The identify of this assortment — Common Animals — can also be tastefully ironic.
The concept sounds bizarre, however you really notice the creep issue after seeing these robots with eerily real looking human faces shifting round in a glass enclosure. Curiously, these robotic canine had been up on the market. And surprisingly, the one bearing Beeple’s face was offered earlier than that of Elon Musk, the person who’s making the boldest bets about an incoming humanoid robotic revolution, using atop Tesla’s personal Optimus robotic. “I believed all people could be combating over the Elon one — however mine offered first, and I used to be very shocked. I believed mine was going to be the final canine. However yeah, to me it is sort of a self-portrait,” the artist was quoted as saying by The Wall Road Journal. Proper now, there’s nothing hotter within the tech phase than AI and robotics. And underneath the Trump administration, cryptocurrencies (constructed on the identical blockchain foundations as NFTs) are gaining traction as soon as once more. Beeple’s artwork exhibit primarily combines these scorching developments and offers them an totally disturbing spin.
Leaping a development, or a supremely nice satire
The theme of hybridizing man with machine, however on the physique of a beast, is just as provocative because it will get. And to high it off, mix that with the controversial artwork kind that’s NFTs, which proceed to be ridiculed as merely a respectable artwork kind’s digital duplicate. However this is the attention-grabbing half. Artwork is meant to be provocative, and Beeple’s unsettling human-faced robots checked that field nicely sufficient that they had been offered at $100,000.
“The concept behind the selection of those characters, that are a mixture of, kind of, like tech billionaires and artists, is that kind of the position of the artist is to reinterpret the world and, kind of, by their lens. However more and more, we see the world by the lens of tech billionaires who personal highly effective algorithms and management what we see and what we do not see,” Beeple informed AFP. Zuckerberg-led Meta and Musk-led Tesla are each deeply invested in robotics, in addition to operating the world’s greatest social platforms, resembling X, Instagram, and Fb.
The exhibit at Artwork Basel Miami Seaside is known as “Common Animals.” Created by digital designer and artist Mike Winkelmann, who goes by Beeple, it options robotic canine variations of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, in response to Storyful. pic.twitter.com/5JT4wouBS7
— The Wall Road Journal (@WSJ) December 6, 2025
One may see it as a satire, of kinds. Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg are among the many richest males on the planet. Furthermore, the respective corporations they constructed at the moment are racing in opposition to one another in a cutthroat AI race, the place AI expertise lose their jobs on the whim of leaders, and new heads are being employed with compensation packages value lots of of tens of millions of {dollars}. It is a merciless race in direction of changing into the highest canine within the subsequent massive avenue of tech, and it solely appears becoming that the competitors is artistically dropped at life in probably the most ridiculous manner doable. However the truth that it might find yourself wanting as creepy is kind of an imaginative feat in itself.
