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Zero 10 Part 1: Beeple Casts a Spell

Kevin Buist attended Art Basel Miami Beach’s Zero 10 to observe digital art's shape and vibe post-NFT boom. Along the way, he found himself unexpectedly captivated by Beeple’s Regular Animals. This is part one from Buist in a two-part series about Zero 10, the new initiative at Art Basel Miami Beach focused on digital art.

“Did you get an NFT?” a young boy asked me, gesturing at the small plastic bag I was holding with the words “EXCREMENT SAMPLE” printed on it in large white letters. It was nearly six pm on Sunday, and Art Basel Miami Beach was about to conclude its 2025 edition. I had spent the last few days in Zero 10, a new section of the fair dedicated to digital art.‍

‍“No,” I said, noticing that the boy held two similar bags, each containing postcard-sized prints. “What about you? Do those ones have NFTs?”‍

‍”Not these,” he said, “but I got one earlier.” The boy had apparently gotten one of only 256 NFTs given away as a part of Regular Animals, an installation and performance by Beeple featured in Zero 10. There were 1,000 prints in total. If you got one of those, it meant you had about a one in four chance of getting an NFT. It’s not entirely surprising that this child managed to get three prints and one NFT, as Beeple and his team handed the plastic bags out to children first each time they did a giveaway.
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‍The free NFTs immediately began to sell on the secondary market in the range of $13,000 to $25,000 each. As of this writing, only 198 of the 256 NFTs have been claimed, even though all the prints and claim codes were given out.
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At least a few of the NFT claim codes are likely sitting in the messy bedrooms of children who are completely unaware of what they have.

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‍The installation consisted of a low-walled glass pen containing eight or so flesh-colored robot dogs, each with ultra-realistic rubber heads of famous—or infamous—men: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Jong-Un, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and the artist himself, Beeple (real name Mike Winkleman). Their simulated flesh and realistic hair bounced and jiggled as the quadrupedal robots sauntered around the pen. They took photos and “pooped” out prints of AI-altered images, each exhibiting the style of their character: quasi-cubist for Picasso, metaverse-inspired Tron-like glowing lines for Zuckerberg, etc.
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‍By the metrics of both attention and sales, Regular Animals was a smashing success. All of the robo dogs sold for $100,000 each. Major media outlets covered it, videos went viral on social media as soon as the VIP preview began, and the exhibition was mobbed with onlookers struggling to get close enough for a picture, a free print, or even a selfie with the artist.
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I came to Art Basel Miami suspecting I would dislike Regular Animals but it stuck with me in a way that’s hard to discount. Beeple is operating on a different frequency than the rest of the art world in a way that is simultaneously irritating, inspiring and above all, fascinating.

Regular Animals, and Beeple’s practice more broadly, cracks open well-worn categories of what we think art and artists should be. My first reaction to Regular Animals was an overwhelming sense of resentment at having to look at—and think about—the smug face of Elon Musk. Beyond this exhibition, just in life in general, I resent that Musk demands so much of our attention. I think he’s a dull, reactionary, small-minded person with a narrow skill set who is constantly demanding to be taken seriously in matters that are far beyond his capabilities. Our media and political systems are structured to reward his dreadful behavior and it seemed like Beeple was rewarding it, too.
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But as I spent time with Regular Animals, I realized that while the work capitalizes on Musk and others’ iron grip on the attention economy, this was not a fault of the work; in fact, it might be the entire point. 

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‍This is an installation that repeats, amplifies and revels in the nauseating current reality that everything—money, power, time—is downstream of attention. Bezos and Zuck are also lords of attention, whether they’re attracting or controlling it. And like Musk, their wealth and power far outpaces their creativity or integrity.
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The other figures waddling around as dogs also speak to the corrosive effects of attention.

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‍Warhol and Picasso have dominated art history discourse, museum collections and auction sales for decades. While I would argue that they are both more deserving of their prominence than Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg, they’re still avatars for the scourge of attention inequality. Warhol and Picasso receive orders of magnitude more attention than contemporaneous artists who deserve just as much, if not more, admiration.

The most unusual character in the installation was North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Neither a tech mogul nor an artist, his silly grin and bouncy hair at first seemed like an incongruous addition. But the inclusion of Kim Jong Un actually broadens the exploration into the nature of attention. Like the others, Kim is someone we’re forced to pay attention to whether we like it or not. Instead of controlling industries or dominating art historical narratives, he’s developing a nuclear arsenal that could set off World War III in an instant. (Of course, the missing character in Regular Animals is the world’s other clownish strongman, Donald Trump. His absence in the installation made me wonder if the mask got lost in the mail.)‍

‍The final rubber head bobbing around on a mechanical dog body was that of the artist himself, Beeple.
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It’s a profound act of hubris for Beeple to put himself in the company of Warhol and Picasso, even if his own auction record is impressive. 

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‍The realistic mask of Beeple’s head would have easily been the least recognizable of all the figures if it weren’t for the artist’s presence at the installation, interacting with viewers, answering questions, and posing for selfies.‍

‍During an interview with Peter Bauman, Le Random’s editor in chief, Beeple was asked whether placing artists like Picasso and Warhol alongside tech moguls like Musk and Bezos was an attempt to get the viewer to rethink what an artist is in the present moment. Beeple explained that he and his studio had owned the masks for several years and used them for various stunts and performances previously. To Bauman’s question about the intent of the juxtaposition, Beeple said, “I'd honestly not really thought about the relationship of those people: the tech people with the art people.” This is an incredible admission! I’ve just spent over a thousand words trying to work out what this combination of attention-hungry robot dogs could mean and Beeple apparently hadn’t even thought about it at all until Bauman asked him.‍

‍I’m convinced that the work is about oppressive attention but I’m not convinced that Beeple thinks that’s what the work is about. He’s just channeling the insanity of the current moment into objects and images at breakneck speed. Even if he’s not thinking much about it, he’s still very good at it.‍

‍Beeple is a machine that turns the repulsive excesses of the 2020s into a stream of images to be gawked at, pumped and dumped, retweeted, and maybe—if there’s time—thought about. But there’s almost never time. There’s always a new joke, a new absurdity, a new dank meme.
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Beeple reflects the current moment better than maybe any other living artist but the catch is that the current moment is a grotesque, frantic churn of absurdities that demand more attention than we have to give.

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‍It’s like someone wished on a cursed monkey’s paw for an artist who could reflect the truth of this moment, and in Beeple that wish came true, for better or worse.‍

‍It’s difficult to assess what Beeple is doing and his skill as an artist. People love him and hate him. I think to answer the question of whether Beeple is a good artist, you first have to answer a much more fundamental question about what you hope an artist is and how they operate in the world. I can’t answer that for you but I can give you a rubric. Artists are in the business of conjuring magical effects and there are two types: wizards and sorcerers. Wizards are scholars whose deep study of magic allows them to manifest incredible things. Sorcerers are intuitive, naturally gifted magic users who wield power unmediated by history, theory or thought. Beeple is a sorcerer in an art world full of wizards.



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‍Kevin Buist is an independent critic and curator based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.