Written by: Cookie, Lüdong
beeple, the man who sold one NFT for a staggering $69 million, has long been seen as a symbol of the golden age of NFTs that once was.
Although the glory of NFTs has faded, beeple and his team have remained active in the NFT space. At this year's Art Basel, he brought another "golden dog" to the currently quiet NFT market—Regular Animals.
Yesterday, multiple Regular Animals were sold on OpenSea for over 10 ETH (approximately $35,000) each. These artworks were given away for free at Art Basel, with a total of 256 pieces. At this price, beeple essentially gave away nearly ten million dollars worth of NFTs at Art Basel.
The project that beeple and his team brought to Art Basel is Regular Animals. These are robotic dogs, as shown in the image below. They look somewhat eerie because these robotic dogs have human faces, and they are faces of well-known figures such as Musk, Andy Warhol, Zuckerberg, Picasso, and even beeple himself.
Of course, it's not just about the eerie visual effect. These robotic dogs use the cameras on their heads to observe their surroundings and employ an evolving visual algorithm to create artworks.
The selection of these famous figures is not arbitrary. The reason for choosing the aforementioned celebrities is that they have influenced how we view the world, whether through algorithms, art, or politics. As humans, we observe the world through these perspectives, and so do these robotic dogs. At Art Basel, these robotic dogs and humans observed each other, and each moment of observation became an artwork created by the robotic dogs. These artworks are also like autobiographies of these robotic dogs.
Interestingly, Regular Animals also has a physical series, with a total of 1,024 pieces. On eBay, someone has already listed one for a fixed price of $6,500. The market's valuation is that NFTs are far more valuable than physical paintings, reminiscent of Damien Hirst's "The Currency" series years ago, which forced owners to choose between physical and NFT versions.
Before achieving great success in the NFT field, beeple had been creating art every day since 2007 but had never sold anything for more than $100. After gaining fame and fortune, beeple did not squander it like some artists or crypto project teams. Instead, he acquired a studio/gallery of about 460 square meters, built a team of dozens of 3D artists, engineers, and researchers (even including a former Boeing engineer), invited Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the former director of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, as an advisor, and continuously exhibited at art shows around the world while creating new artworks.
This exhibition of beeple's robotic dogs has not only gained attention in the crypto circle due to its price but has also been covered by traditional media outlets like WSJ.
