Mike Winkelmann and the Pets of Capital

Robot dogs with human heads. It could have been just another exercise in artistic anthropomorphization, were it not for the faces perched atop those canine bodies: figures admired by some, despised by many.

Text by Felipe Rodríguez-Mattern

C'est Mgazine 2025

Fotografía: Liliana Mora

Musk, Warhol, Zuckerberg, Bezos… Picasso. Animatronic effigies standing in for the people they evoke. This grotesque fusion—born of desire, fame, greed, narcissism, and a hunger for power—culminates in a literal defecation of digital art expelled from the mechanical anus of these quadrupeds who, needing neither eight hours of sleep nor a morning coffee, wander across the floors of Art Basel Miami as if it were the lawn of any suburban home, searching for the ideal spot to dump a piece of AI-generated “art,” subsequently “secured” through the minting of its NFT.

Ladies and gentlemen (and every identity rightfully included in between), behold… the very best and worst the modern world has to offer—encased in plastic, cables, and a battery that surely won’t last longer than that of an iPhone 17 Pro Max.

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Mike Winkelmann is the artist—likely laughing his ass off as he watches his creation produce visual excrement that spills into the already overflowing ocean of contemporary imagery. An ocean that grows every day, and instead of adding, subtracts.

In this era in which people now possess the attention span of a Goldfish (thanks to you, Zuck), beauty dissolves, replaced by the immediate, repetitive, incessant need to release dopamine. “So what?” some may say (while scrolling TikTok), convinced that what matters is feeding the ego—and ego is expensive. Truth is, today it’s far cheaper to nourish it with mediocrity.

What Winkelmann accomplished with this installation is, in fact, remarkable: he distilled society into a single gesture. He places a mirror squarely before us all, though of course, few manage to see their reflection—not out of stupidity (or is it?), but rather because their eyes are already fixed on the next Instagram Reel.

F.R.M.