One word: Beeple.
There’s a saying in the art world: see it in Venice, buy it in Basel. Except maybe now, it’s more like: buy it in Miami, see it in Berlin? At the Neue Nationalgalerie, Beeple’s Regular Animals has arrived: already pre-circulated—VIP-approved at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, sold in editions of $100,000, and now reinstalled as a public spectacle ahead of Gallery Weekend.
The premise is blunt to the point of parody: robotic dogs with hyperreal silicone heads of well known figures like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Pablo Picasso, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, and Beeple himself wander around inside a square “pen”. They “see” through cameras, process images via AI “in the style” of their assigned persona, and finally eject printed photos from their backends — “profoundly” literalising the cycle of observation, processing, and production into something closer to digestion. Artwork as defecation: groundbreaking.
While there are plenty of disconcerting features here, the most unsettling part is not the grotesque humour or the tech theatrics. It’s the caretaking. Invigilators hover constantly, stepping in to collect the printed “waste,” to reset limbs, to correct glitches. They wrap their arms around these creatures as though they were real, and the system never quite sustains itself. The illusion of autonomy collapses into a choreography of intervention. What you end up watching is not a self-regulating ecosystem, but a fragile apparatus propped up by human labour.
Like farm animals bred for output, these sculptures are entirely dependent on external maintenance. They require energy, attention, and constant adjustments. Whether this ongoing malfunction is meant as critique or simply a byproduct of technical ambition is unclear, but either way it feels less like insight and more like overreach. A device that can barely hold itself together dressed up as commentary on systems that supposedly control everything.
The robots move awkwardly, hesitantly — like Bambi learning to walk. They cycle through a short list of limited behaviours: walking, resting, defecating, photographing. They enter modes; STANDBY, WALK, and POOP, reducing life to a sequence of programmed states. It’s hard not to read this as an allegory for algorithmic existence, but the metaphor is so literal it becomes redundant.
There’s a familiar line: art should disturb the comfortable. Fine. But just because something is unsettling doesn’t mean it’s good. Yes, Regular Animals is creepy — but no more so than a visit to Madame Tussauds. The discomfort feels manufactured , gimmicky, and recreational. You’re meant to be impressed by the realism, amused by the vulgarity, slightly disturbed by the figures — but none of it lingers. Unlike a work of art that makes you want to go back again and again, you could see this once and basically be set for life.
Now, the relationships between the figures — these exaggerated stand-ins for power, culture, authorship — feel equally gratuitous. Tech moguls, art icons, the artist himself: a lineup that signals relevance more than it constructs meaning. It’s grabby. Pure hype disguised as critique. And with Beeple, to be fair, that’s not surprising. His practice has always thrived on scale, on spectacle, and on the ability of large budgets to make ideas appear more substantial than they are.
Upstairs, the contrast is almost too perfect. Works by Constantin Brâncuși hold space with quiet precision — objects that neither perform nor require maintenance to assert their presence. The juxtaposition of permanence with obsolescence, form and spectacle allows the museum to position itself as critically self-aware, staging a dialogue it ultimately controls. It doesn’t need to simulate life to comment on it. Beeple’s work, by contrast, insists on animation, realism, and output, yet struggles to move beyond its own mechanism.
The one thing I can say for it is that Regular Animals is free to view. The prints are free to take. Meanwhile, its market value circulates elsewhere, detached from the experience on the ground. The installation becomes a kind of public interface for a private economy: spectacle distributed, capital retained.
Beeple frames the work as a commentary on algorithmic control for how figures like Musk or Zuckerberg shape perception without democratic process. But the critique feels hollow when delivered through such an overdetermined system. The metaphor is obvious, the execution is excessive, and the maintenance not sexy.
In the end, Regular Animals loops endlessly and performs critique without ever delivering it. What remains is a spectacle of systems that can’t sustain themselves, propped up by the very structures they claim to expose. Not so much a reflection on power, but a demonstration of what happens when ambition outpaces coherence.
Beeple. Regular Animals
29.04.2026 to 10.05.2026
Neue Nationalgalerie
more info here
