Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, shocked the art world in 2021. The American artist, who was virtually unknown, rose to the top three most expensive living artists. Perhaps it was the pandemic, perhaps a market hungry for new formats, but Beeple’s work “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” achieved a record at Christie’s auction house and marked several firsts. The collage of five thousand images (which Beeple had created and posted daily on Tumblr since 2007) was the first purely digital artwork that Christie’s offered as an NFT. Payment at the auction house could, for the first time, be made in cryptocurrency. Had Beeple been asked before the auction whether he saw himself as an artist, he would likely have said no. Today, five years later, the trained computer scientist and self-taught artist has arrived in the museum world. The Neue Nationalgalerie is presenting his first exhibition in Germany for Gallery Weekend. Instead of digital images, Beeple is working in an installation format for Regular Animals. But his use of technology as a space of experience remains.
His robotic dogs have hyperrealistic faces of well-known personalities, from Pablo Picasso to Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, and even Andy Warhol and Beeple himself. As they awkwardly move through the exhibition space, they don’t just scan their surroundings; they respond directly to the audience. Everything they perceive is processed by AI, transformed into an artwork in the style of their “face donors”, and — quite literally — excreted on the spot. Visitors can take the prints, dropped by the dogs from their backside, home for free as souvenirs. What initially comes across as meme-like humor is intended by Beeple as a commentary on an algorithm-driven economy of exploitation. The ultra-wealthy tech bros have found ways to turn shit into gold — so successfully that many users can no longer distinguish whether digital worlds are creative playgrounds or polluted wastelands. Escaping the endless stream of images online is almost impossible. And just as it is difficult to detach from our feeds, it is equally impossible to look away from Beeple’s absurd experimental setup. His critique of platform capitalism may not directly engage with the most sophisticated art-historical theories in visual terms, but Beeple understands the sneaky strategies of the tech giants like few others.
Text: Laura Storfner / Credits: Beeple, Regular Animals; Neue Nationalgalerie
Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Str.50, 10785 Berlin–Tiergarten; map
Beeple: Regular Animals until 10.05.2026. Free admission.
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