A Strange, Slightly Hilarious Moment in Modern Art
Just when you think you’ve seen everything in the world of high-end art, South Florida delivers something so bizarre, so wonderfully unhinged, that it forces you to stop, blink twice, and ask, “Is that… Jeff Bezos’ face on a robot dog?”
Yes. Yes, it is.
At this year’s Art Basel festivities, an installation popped up that instantly became the talk of Miami. The piece features actual robot dogs — the kind usually seen opening doors in viral tech videos — but instead of a sleek metallic design, these have been gifted lifelike masks of some of Earth’s most recognizable billionaires. We’re talking Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and even the faces of legendary artists like Picasso and Warhol.
It’s a truly incredible sight: a pack of pink, fleshy robot canines with hyper-realistic billionaire heads, wandering around a plexiglass pen like the world’s richest dog park.
And that’s just the beginning.
The installation, created by digital-art superstar Beeple, is called Regular Animals, though nothing about it is even vaguely regular. Each robot dog is outfitted with a chest-mounted camera that snaps photos of the crowd. Then, in what might be the greatest combination of performance art and bathroom humor in the history of modern culture, the dogs “poop” out printed artworks inspired by the billionaire or artist whose face they’re wearing.
Yes, the Musk-dog dumps out schematic-looking prints. The Zuckerberg-dog ejects metaverse-themed cubes of paper. The Picasso-dog produces abstract, cubist nuggets. Think of it like an extremely strange printer with four legs and a head worth over 100 billion dollars.
According to Beeple, the installation is meant to comment on how technology moguls have replaced traditional artists as the people who shape how we see the world. Instead of paintbrushes or cameras, they use platforms, algorithms, and AI — powerful tools that filter our reality long before we even know it’s happening.
That’s the serious message.
The not-so-serious message is: this is absolutely hilarious to watch.
Picture a crowd of very sophisticated art collectors standing in a circle, solemnly observing while a Bezos-headed robot dog awkwardly clatters around, squats mechanically, and spits out a little piece of paper that some attendee will later brag about collecting for five figures. It’s performance art meets pet shop meets Silicon Valley fever dream.
The robot dogs themselves are a spectacle. They walk in that stiff, careful way robotic dogs often do, like they’re still not entirely convinced gravity works. They bump into each other. They stare blankly into the distance. They appear to have no idea they are wearing the faces of billionaires. Honestly, that may be the most relatable part.
And the public reaction has been priceless. Some people think it’s genius. Others think it’s disturbing. Many are unsure, which might be the closest thing to universal agreement that modern art has accomplished in years.
There’s even talk of the dogs being available for collectors to purchase — for a price that would make even a billionaire-dog raise an eyebrow.
Whether you walk away contemplating the future of AI, the nature of influence, or just laughing at the idea of Mark Zuckerberg’s face slowly rotating atop a robot canine chassis, the installation succeeds at what all good art strives to do: it gets people talking. And taking pictures. And nervously laughing. And questioning their own reality just a little bit.
Because if you had “billionaire robot dogs pooping art” on your 2025 bingo card, congratulations. You win.
For the rest of us, it’s simply nice to know that no matter how strange the world gets, artists will always find a way to make it just a little stranger — and a lot more entertaining.
