You couldn’t possibly have thought that you’d seen the last of Beeple’s grotesque robot dogs? Last appearing in Art Basel Miami Beach’s new Zero10 digital art section in December, Regular Animals is now on the loose in San Francisco.
So, if you’ll permit me, who let the dogs out?
The answer to that age-old question is none other than Palo Alto’s Node Foundation, a digital arts nonprofit and exhibition space that will open a mid-career survey for Beeple, a.k.a. Mike Winkelmann, on April 18. Among the works on the checklist for “INFINITE_LOOP” are Human One, Beeple’s first “kinetic sculpture”—purchased by ARTnews Top 200 collector Ryan Zurrer for $29 million in 2021 for his 1OF1 collection—Regular Animals, and a comprehensive presentation of “Everydays,” his ongoing series of daily drawings. (The NFT Everydays: The First 5,000 Days sold for a record $69 million in 2021 to crypto fund Metapurse, and largely is credited with setting off that year’s NFT craze.)
While Regular Animals as presented at Art Basel featured robot dogs bearing the likeness of Beeple, Mark Zuckerberg, Pablo Picasso, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol, and Elon Musk, on Wednesday, it was only the Musk-dog that made an appearance at the San Francisco waterfront outside Oracle Park, where the Giants baseball team play.
As at the art fair, passersby were transfixed by the strutting dog, stopping to take pictures, and, when the dog did its business, pausing to pick up its droppings—printed images based on what its front camera takes in of the surroundings, transmuted through an algorithm based on its visage, in this case Musk.
“NODE is a home for artists defining digital culture today. Beeple’s Regular Animals are a physical embodiment of that culture, and we’re proud to bring a piece of it here to Silicon Valley,” a NODE representative told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Sending Elon into the streets is a way to bring that energy into public life ahead of the exhibition opening next week, and the reaction has been exactly what Beeple’s work does so well: it stops people in their tracks and gets them talking.”
