Beeple's robot dogs channel Musk, Zuckerberg in Berlin gallery show

Artist Beeple has installed six robot dogs fitted with hyper-realistic silicone heads modeled after tech billionaires and art icons at Berlin's New National Gallery, where the machines roam freely and output AI-transformed prints of their surroundings.

The installation, titled "Regular Animals," is a pointed commentary on how tech-platform algorithms have supplanted artists as the primary force shaping how society perceives reality — a debate intensifying across legislatures and courts worldwide.

The six dogs on display wear silicone heads cast from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso and Beeple himself. Each unit carries an integrated camera that records the gallery environment; an AI algorithm then reprocesses those images to match the stylistic signature of whoever's likeness the dog wears — Cubist planes for the Picasso unit, flat pop-art color for the Warhol. The dogs dispense the resulting prints from their hindquarters.

Beeple told the Associated Press that the work is a deliberate provocation about whose vision now filters reality. "In the past, our view of the world was shaped in part by how artists saw the world," he said. "How Picasso painted changed how we saw the world, how Warhol talked about consumerism, pop culture, that changed how he saw those things."

That cultural authority has since migrated to a different class of power, Beeple argued. "Now our view of the world is shaped by tech billionaires who own powerful algorithms that decide what we see and what we don't see," he told the AP. He continued: "That's an immense amount of power that I don't think we've fully understood, especially because when they want to make a change, they don't need to lobby the U.N. They don't need to get something through Congress or the EU, they just wake up and change these algorithms."

"Regular Animals" debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, where Beeple distributed prints to audience members with certificates describing the output as "100% organic GMO-free dog shit." Some prints included QR codes providing free NFT access.

The Berlin outing underscores Beeple's standing in the mainstream art world. His digital collage "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" sold for $69 million at Christie's in 2021 — the first digital-only artwork sold by a major auction house with NFT authentication — ranking him as the third most expensive living artist at auction, behind David Hockney and Jeff Koons.

Curator Lisa Botti said artificial intelligence is "one of the phenomena most impacting our lives today," adding that "museums are the places where society can reflect on such transformations."

The Berlin showing is the latest chapter in Beeple's two-decade practice of daily digital art creation — a discipline that elevated a graphic designer from South Carolina into one of the most prominent and provocative figures in contemporary art.