Some of the world’s most powerful faces made an appearance at Art Basel Miami Beach this year—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos—just not on the actual billionaires. Instead, they were grafted onto a pack of robot dogs.
Regular Animals (2025) is Beeple’s new installation in the fair’s debut Zero10 digital art section. It delivers the kind of spectacle Miami crowds crave. In a transparent pen, peach-toned robotic quadrupeds roam, each wearing a hyper-realistic head: Musk, Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and even Beeple himself. Periodically, the dogs enter “poop mode,” as their LED screens read, where they tip backward and eject printed images taken by a front-facing camera. According to The Art Newspaper, every edition of the work sold at $100,000 per creature on Wednesday.
Beeple (a.k.a. Mike Winkelmann) is a provocateur artist best known for his record-breaking $69 million NFT sale at Christie’s in 2021 and his daily internet-native visual mash-ups of tech culture and capitalism.
It’s no surprise this became one of the most talked-about moments at Basel. Regular Animals is one of a handful of works at the fair that highlight digital art. Zero10, located near the East entrances of the fair, is the newly launched section dedicated to showcasing cutting-edge digital art and technology-driven installations.
“There’s such a huge tech boom,” fair director Bridget Finn told Artsy ahead of the fair. “There’s something to start a conversation around….A lot of times, curiosity is just as powerful, if not more so, than knowledge. It’s an entry point for a further conversation. ”
Art Basel Miami Beach kicked off on December 3rd at the Miami Beach Convention Center, where opening-day sales were strong. The fair, part of a packed schedule at Miami Art Week, remains on view through December 7th.
