A pack of robotic dogs with heads modeled after tech elites Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos will roam the foyer of the Neue Nationalgalerie this spring, defecating A.I.-generated prints for visitors to take home.
An invention from the mind of the digital artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, the sensational sculptures, called (2025), debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach last December and became a viral crowd-pleaser at the fair. The satirical human–canine hybrids are making the unlikely leap from art fair spectacle to institutional display, jumping straight from the fair floor to the Mies van der Rohe-designed museum, one of the city’s most iconic landmarks.
Opening as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin, it marks the artist’s first presentation in Germany. The installation will be on view for just 11 days and is expected to draw large crowds and long lines, much like the museum’s recent presentation of Christian Marclay’s The Clock.
Among the pack are dogs modeled after tech elites, as well as artists Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso—both represented in the museum’s collection—and the artist himself, whose work the German institution does not yet own.
Regular Animals © Beeple Studios
From Market to Museum
Lisa Botti, curator at the museum and organizer of the presentation, said the display of the works stems from an urgency for museums to engage meaningfully with conversations around tech and A.I.
“Technology is currently one of the most powerful forces shaping our lives, our economies, our politics, and even our sense of identity and reality,” she said, adding that it still “feels strangely absent” from many traditional cultural conversations. “Cultural institutions cannot remain outside of that conversation. If museums are places where society reflects on itself, then they must engage with the technologies that are actively transforming it.”
Beeple first made his name through spectacle and record-breaking prices on the art market before gaining widespread institutional recognition—effectively rewriting the typical trajectory of an art career. His sold at Christie’s in 2021 for a whopping $69 million, making it one of the most defining moments in the last decade of the art market. A year later, a single-work presentation of (April–November 2022) was placed in dialogue with a Francis Bacon painting at the Castello di Rivoli, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev; she will appear alongside Botti in conversation with the artist at the opening on April 28.
In November 2024, Hans Ulrich Obrist curated a survey of his work at Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China.
The pack of 10 dogs at ABMB, each an edition of two, sold out for $100,000 during the VIP preview hours. The museum said that all the works on view at the Neue National Galerie are loans from Beeple’s studio.
Beeple with Hans Ulrich Obrist inside the ring where Regular Animals was staged as part of Art Basel’s new digital art initiative, “Zero 10.” Photo by Eileen Kinsella.
All-in-One
The dogs will be in conversation with another loan, Nam June Paik‘s (1994), a human-like figure assembled from television screen, film cameras, a Brillo box, featuring moving images of Warhol’s work embedded in its body. The iconic piece is in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany. What Paik and Beeple both see in Warhol is an artist who understood that art, media, and mechanical reproduction were a single entity; Beeple adds A.I. to the fold.
What do celebrated artists and tech moguls have in common? The pack of dogs is an unlikely crew at first sight, but Beeple told press during their fair debut in 2025 that the reason they come together is that they each have shaped and are shaping the world with their unique view.
To wit: the dogs each process what they see through an A.I. filter styled to each figure’s visual signature. That means that Picasso’s output arrives in cubist planes and Musk’s in stark patent-drawing black and white. The results are printed and ejected, free of charge, from the dogs’ rear ends. That such an image should land on the polished granite floor of a Mies building may be the most Beeple juxtaposition of them all.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
