Actual headline in the NYPost:
Art Basel show by Beeple has realistic Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg robot dogs pooping NFTs
“Realistic”. As Mike the Musicologist put it to me:
Who?
Famed artist Beeple’s latest spectacle, “Regular Animals,” has billionaire-tech-titan robot dogs pooping out NFTs, and stopping onlookers at Art Basel Miami Beach in their tracks at the fair’s VIP preview.
The animatronic canines sport nightmarishly realistic masks of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg — plus famed artists Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol, plus two Beeple (aka Mike Winkelmann) lookalikes — all crafted by famed mask-maker Landon Meier.
As the robo-mutts trot around, they continuously snap photos, squatting to take a digital dump of an art print in accordance with its corresponding style.
Zuckerberg’s for example, looks like the Metaverse, Musk’s is a black and white robot take, while Picasso is cubist and Warhol is pop art.
“Beeple” has some sort of incoherent point about how Musk and Zuckerberg influence “how we see the world” “because they control these very powerful algorithms”.
We hear all of the robot dogs have already been snapped up by private collectors — for $100,000 each — but the owners have let them “go on tour.”
However, fairgoers still have a chance to take home a piece of the chaos: The dogs will “eliminate” 1,028 prints, each stamped “Excrement Sample,” along with a warning label noting that the item may be “disgusting to most patrons of the arts,” and could cause, “uncontrollable erections in degenerate art collectors.”
Of those prints, 256 include a “scan to claim” barcode in the corner, marking them as actual NFTs.
This is the part that bothers me the most:
That was 2021. I wonder what his NFT would go for in today’s market. If it went up for auction, I would bid a batch of homemade Chex Mix. If I needed to up my bid, I’d throw in a batch of homemade onion dip. Beyond that, I’d have to pass, much like the robot dogs do.
(Thank you. I’ll be here all week.)